Until last week most Australians had probably forgotten about the existence of the Bali Nine.
Since the so-called ringleaders of the heroin smuggling gang, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, were executed in 2015 and Renae Lawrence was released in 2018, the others had dropped off the radar.
That the five who have survived 19 years of their life sentences in Indonesian jails are now back on the diplomatic agenda is a mixed blessing for them.
They will be full of fresh hope of moving to be closer to their families, and getting a potential release date.
For all this to be part of a political debate before the deal is done, puts them in slightly risky territory. To know why, we need to recall the history of a different drug smuggler: Schapelle Corby.
After years of diplomatic back-channelling, Corby – known in Indonesia as “the ganja queen” – was finally released early in 2014, after nine years.
Schapelle Corby’s release in 2014 will play a part in the political discussion in Indonesia over the release of the remaining Bali Nine members.
The then Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, had taken the political risk of looking soft on drugs and too pro-West by allowing her parole on compassionate grounds, for mental health reasons.
One stipulation was that she serve out her sentence at the family compound in Bali.
Instead, she was whisked from the prison in a limousine procured by an Australian TV network (Seven), masked to preserve its exclusive story, and taken to a luxury compound to prepare for a planned highly paid interview. Then she was photographed in her prison clothes sipping a beer.
The Indonesian public was furious. The way they saw it, their president had kowtowed to the West and now the TV network and the Corbys were making fools of them. At one point it seemed possible that she might be returned to prison.
Then, as now, the S-word — sovereignty — was invoked. An editorial in the newspaper Media Indonesia said Corby had ridiculed Indonesian law and sovereignty.
Attempts to bring the remaining five members of the Bali Nine home by December, carry some similar risks. Already firebrand international law professor Hikmahanto Juwana has said of the potential deal: “Our sovereignty is being ripped [to shreds].”
As a former colony (invaded and run by the Dutch, then the Japanese in World War II), Indonesians are wary of anything that smacks of foreign interference, particularly by Western colonial powers. They also have a great political intolerance for drugs.
Remaining Bali Nine members Matthew Norman, Michael Czugaj, Scott Rush, Martin Stephens and Si Yi Chen – another member, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, died from cancer in 2018 – were never as infamous in Indonesia as Chan and Sukumaran, but their story was still known.
You can only imagine the trepidation they are feeling now as their transfer is discussed but unconfirmed.
That said, much has changed since 2013. Indonesia is two presidents down the track. Yudhoyono was replaced in 2014 by Joko Widodo, who moved early to cement his populist-nationalist credentials with the show executions of Chan and Sukumaran.
Now Prabowo Subianto is in charge. He was educated in the West and became famous as a military general. He appears more comfortable in his own strongman skin, and Indonesia seems once again willing to talk. How Australia now acts and speaks, though, remains important.
When then-prime minister Tony Abbott reacted angrily to the proposed execution of Chan and Sukumaran in 2015, and reminded Indonesia of the billion-dollar contribution made by Australia in 2004 for post-tsunami aid, ordinary Indonesians made him the butt of a joke.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in Peru earlier this month.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
They collected small coins (as they do for beggars at traffic stops in Jakarta) to “pay back” the aid, and dubbed their campaign #koinuntukabbott, or Coins for Abbott.
Chan and Sukumaran were shot by firing squad, the date of the execution announced on Anzac Day.
After the current talks became public, shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash muscled up, saying: “Drug offences are some of the worst offences our society sees because of the devastating consequences on people, including death.”
This is no doubt true. But Cash should remember her words can be heard in Indonesia.
I am biased. I knew some of the Bali Nine and I believe that 19 years is long enough. I also believe, as Sukumaran put it to me in 2012, that they had “f---ed up” and they knew it.
“We were wrong, we know that. We’re paying for that.”
And he had a message that, in my view, should still resonate today: “We’ve changed … Our families shouldn’t have to suffer like this.”
Michael Bachelard was this masthead’s Indonesia correspondent from 2012 to 2014.
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