Australians have been vocal in criticising Indonesia for upholding the death penalty, and for Indonesia’s alleged hypocrisy in advocating on behalf of its own citizens on death row in other countries.
Despite the appeal-related delay announced on Friday morning, President Joko Widodo has appeared consistently unmoved, and many Indonesians look upon Australian protests – especially those of our PM – as a joke.
If we really want to know why Indonesia does not seem to be taking us seriously, we only need to look in the mirror to glimpse what they must perceive as Australian disingenuousness.
To them, it would have to look like an ugly form of nationalism dressed up as repeated sanctimonious utterances about the so-called moral abhorrence of the death penalty.
They remember better than we do, the Australians who cheered, or gave assent by their silence, as the Bali bombers were on death row and subsequently executed in 2008. They are also keenly aware of our harsh treatment of Indonesian and other nationals in our efforts to ‘stop the boats’. Some would recall Australian complicity over the decades in Indonesian acts of brutality unrelated to the death penalty. These include Australia’s support for the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor that led to the deaths of up to 200,000 East Timorese.
We are rightly proud that two of our citizens have provided a textbook example of how convicted criminals can be rehabilitated and become a force for good, in Kerobokan prison, and potentially the community. But the transformation of Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan cannot hide the dubiousness of our stated philosophical objection to the death penalty, especially with our close cultural and defence ties to the United States, where the death penalty is an integral part of the justice system federally and in 32 of 50 states.
Australian advocacy for our nationals would be credible if we included in our pleas for clemency, the Nigerians, the Filipino, the Brazilian, the Frenchman, the Ghanian, and the Indonesian who are set down for execution alongside Sukumaran and Chan.
We could go one better and spearhead an anti-death penalty initiative across the entire Asia-Pacific region. This is the suggestion of Elaine Pearson, Australia Director at Human Rights Watch, who wrote on Wednesday: ‘Australia should jumpstart a campaign to reject the death penalty across the Asia-Pacific, educating the region’s populations in how the death penalty has failed to deter crime and been unjustly applied.’
She argues that