Bali Nine pair worth saving not because they've reformed, but because they're human
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Version 0 of 1. Four years ago, an Indonesian housemaid working in Saudi Arabia was beheaded for killing her boss’s wife, allegedly after suffering abuse. The Indonesian people and government were horrified, particularly as Saudi Arabia didn’t bother to inform Indonesia before the execution happened. So furious was then-president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono that he imposed a moratorium on domestic workers going to Saudi Arabia to work. Today, the government is doing everything it can – including paying “blood money” – to save the life of 41-year old Satinah Binti Jumadi Ahmad, a maid sentenced to death for murdering her employer. Under the version of Sharia law practiced in the Gulf nation, the family can give money to the family of the deceased in return for a pardon – a form of medieval justice available to those who can afford it. Late last year, US$1.8m was paid, much of it by the Indonesian government that has “intensified efforts” to save the lives of 33 nationals on death row in Saudi Arabia. There’s a public campaign, a hashtag – #SaveSatinah – and celebrity pleas for mercy. At the same time as insisting their own nationals be spared, Indonesian president Joko Widodo has said he will refuse clemency for all 64 people on death row for drug offences. Six people faced the firing squad last month – five of them foreigners. Another group is scheduled for execution, and on Monday we learned that among them will be Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, members of the Bali Nine sentenced to death in 2006 for heroin trafficking. The Australian government is making the “strongest possible representations” to save these young men and have their sentences commuted to a long prison term – while insisting an execution would not affect the important relationship with Indonesia. The Mercy Campaign, an organisation set up to lobby for clemency, urges us to sign a petition to save the men, and celebrities have signed on to “stand for mercy”. You can argue about the death penalty in the abstract, and abhor the crimes committed by those condemned. You can throw around statistics about whether it’s a deterrent. But whenever you look at the details, the inconsistencies in how it’s applied, the politics that mean who is executed is often a matter of luck or timing, there is always something corrosive about state-sanctioned killing. Indonesia is hardly the world’s biggest executioner. Amnesty gives that title to China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Egypt is in a class of its own at the moment – it has just upheld the mass sentencing of 183 Muslim Brotherhood members to death, after trials Amnesty condemned as grossly unfair. If the death penalty is acceptable in any circumstances, we are forced to make gruesome compromises. The world condemns the brutal beheadings committed by the Islamic State (Isis), yet says little about public beheadings legally conducted by Saudi Arabia, which often lets bodies remain on display for days as a “deterrent”. In that country, you can be put to death for such things as apostasy or witchcraft. What, really, is the difference? Saudi Arabia is a state; Islamic State is not. Other than that, the horror is the same. A few years ago, Indonesia was granting clemency to those on death row. There was a four-year unofficial moratorium on executions until March 2013, partly in response to accusations that Indonesia was being hypocritical in pleading for their own citizens to be shown mercy. If Chan and Sukumaran – and all the others – had their clemency pleas determined then, they may well have been spared the firing squad. Now, local politics have changed. Jokowi wants to be seen as tough and decisive, and there’s a serious drugs “crisis” to be dealt with. He is far from the only politician to perceive the upside of capital punishment. It was Bill Clinton who raced back to Arkansas during the 1992 presidential campaign to oversee the death of the mentally defective Ricky Ray Rector, who told guards before his execution that he was saving his dessert “for later”. American states are gradually abolishing their death penalty statutes, unable to ignore any longer the evidence that innocent people have been convicted, and possibly executed – and that it is African Americans, the poor and the unconnected who overwhelmingly sit on death row. In the US and elsewhere, the death penalty reduces sensible people to debating points of law in order to avoid the essence of what is being done. In the US, that debate is about what is a constitutionally acceptable level of pain when someone is killed by lethal injection. As the New York Times noted recently, trying to make the death penalty more “humane” is a charade to avoid the fact that capital punishment is inherently violent. “If we as a society want to carry out executions, we should be willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous brutality on our behalf,” its editorial said. Even the Mercy Campaign to save Chan and Sukumaran is forced into contortions out of desperation to save two young men’s lives. Supporters and the men’s pro bono lawyers are opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances, yet they find themselves having to argue that Chan and Sukumaran’s lives are more worthy of saving than others because they are now good men, they are remorseful, they have reformed and they help other prisoners. It is understandable that they would use such arguments, or any others they can think of, to spare two men death. But their lives are really no more or less valuable than the Dutchman, the Brazilian, the Malawi, the Vietnamese, the Nigerian and the Indonesian who were shot last month. It doesn’t matter if they have reformed or are good men or bad. Australia is paying the price for our inconsistency, for limiting our interest only to cases where our own people are sentenced to death by foreign governments. When two of the Bali bombers were condemned to death in 2003, both the government and the opposition supported it, or at best looked away. “Some people say that I should be thumping the table and saying, ‘Don’t execute,’” John Howard, then the prime minister, said. “I’m not going to do that because I do respect the judicial processes of Indonesia.” Well, the judicial process of Indonesia will lead to the execution of two Australian men for trafficking heroin. That’s the law. At some point, we have to say that we have no respect for a judicial process that allows the state to kill, whether it’s the law of Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, China or the US. It doesn’t matter whether those so sentenced are Australians. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done or whether they’ve reformed. Any other response inevitably corrupts us in some way, leaves us debating and distinguishing things on the periphery, while avoiding the violence and cruelty at the heart of the sentence. |