Bali Nine: our Mercy Campaign prepared for everything except the worst possible day
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Version 0 of 1. I suppose we all knew this was going to happen, but we had hoped and dreamed that it wouldn’t. The dread – to quote Paul Keating’s former speechwriter – was in the marrow, and many times before those of us in the Mercy Campaign to save Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran had thought the deaths were only 72 hours away. There was the first notice – Myuran got his on 7 January. We supporters texted each other in disbelief. Wasn’t this new guy Joko Widodo, this cool new president, meant to do away with the death penalty? Wasn’t he meant to be for human rights? The tension and the nervousness mounted all through January. The executions started, a snap first “batch” one Sunday night, with Widodo vowing that more were to come. In early January Tony Abbott said although he disagreed with capital punishment, our relationship with Indonesia must be preserved. But we took some small measure of comfort in the small things – that one of Widodo’s favourite metal bands, grindcore veterans Napalm Death, were opposed to executions, that Dutch diplomats were being withdrawn and Jakarta must be starting to hurt. My Mercy Campaign co-founder Matt and I were hanging off Widodo’s words and trying to decode their meaning, trying to become experts on Indonesia on the run. There was one thing that seemed to matter more than anything: he said Andrew and Myuran would be executed together – and yet in those days at the start of January Andrew hadn’t received his notice. We clung to that like a talisman. Andrew hadn’t received his notice and that meant the guys would be safe, that they were protected, that Joko had an out and could still save face. Myuran may have the hangman’s noose around his neck, but all was good as long as Andrew was OK. The magical thinking kept us going as we met – in Hobart, Sydney, Melbourne – hatching ideas on the back of restaurant menus, but telling ourselves they were only contingency plans, that the worst wouldn’t happen, that the night I was preparing for wouldn’t come to pass. It was 22 January and I was in Melbourne. An ABC reporter called. Did I know Andrew’s clemency application had been formally refused? I left my office in Collins Street and found a bar frequented by businessmen. I thought I would cry – but I didn’t. Instead I just sat very still, for an hour or more, feeling very scared. The magical thinking ended then – but the hope didn’t. A sentence of death concentrates the mind wonderfully, Samuel Johnson said. Things moved fast from there, mostly through the courts. There were appeals, vigils and speeches in parliament. We also saw a political shift. Abbott wasn’t hedging about Indonesia now. He was using the language of mercy and forgiveness. Politicians started talking about their own personal lives and how they had been affected by drugs. There were tears in parliament. Time took on a new, warped dimension as the case lurched around in a nauseating way. Appeals were lodged then rejected. More appeals were lodged. The term “last ditch” became beautifully elastic. Throughout February and part of March, planning became impossible in this environment. We could set aside five days to make a video in Bahasa, then suddenly the timeline would change. Things that usually take people months now took a day or hours. You ask people to do impossible things in short times – but it happens. The artist Ben Quilty staged a concert in support of the pair with three days’ notice. The Sydney producer Nick Bolton put on a play about the case with less than a week for rehearsal. Matt and I held press conferences and collected signatures: 250,000 people signed our petition. The server broke from the weight of traffic but people we didn’t know before stepped in and helped. Things happened. All these things happened. But there was one thing we didn’t want to do. We didn’t want to organise the final vigil. We didn’t want to move with the speed and the horror and the urgency of the notice period. We would talk about it – what we might do if the worst happened – then stopped and talked about other things. It was superstition and also something else: a dread so large because the thing it attached itself to was too dark and unimaginable. But yesterday I went to a vigil in Sydney, one I organised. The council provided the tarpaulin for the candles, the local police gave their permission and someone from a union has lent us a PA system. Everyone I spoke to about these small acts of organisation has been careful and kind, and some crossed the breach and wanted to talk about the executions in a way that suggested less interest, more anguish. They tried to make it imaginable – the Indonesian industrial death complex – they made it all too real with their fighter planes and tanks and ghoulish selfies, and their construction of coffins and crucifixes and their rules and odd insistence that the condemned be “psychologically fit” for execution. They did all this. Yet it is still barely imaginable. • Brigid Delaney is the co-founder of the Mercy Campaign and the features editor at Guardian Australia |