Calm leadership needed amid Indonesian execution tragedy

Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop and PM Tony Abbott were quick to respond to the executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Picture: Kym Smith

The Abbott government was right to withdraw Australia’s ambassador from Indonesia in response to the executions of the two young Australians. The ALP is right to support them. The ambassador, Paul Grigson, will come home at the end of the week. I guess it will be a month before he returns.

Abbott and his Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, have walked a difficult, narrow path with assurance and dignity. They are right to express the anger and disappointment Australians feel with the conduct of the Indonesian government in the executions of Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan. At the same time Canberra is rightly concerned not to damage the relationship unnecessarily and permanently.

This is not primarily because we are sentimental about Indonesia. Many Australians feel affection and goodwill for Indonesia and that is a good thing. But we invest in the relationship so heavily because it serves our vital national interests. It also serves Indonesia’s interests.

Withdrawing an ambassador is a time-honoured, well-recognised method of showing acute displeasure. Canberra has never before done it with Indonesia, though Jakarta has done it to Australia numerous times.

The Abbott government did everything it could to save the two Australians. It also gave full consideration to the policy questions. It had a senior group work through all possible responses if the executions did take place.

Neither Abbott nor Bishop wanted or planned to withdraw the ambassador.

But the behaviour of the Indonesians was such that they had no choice. It is impossible to run foreign policy completely against the wishes of the public. If Canberra had not done at least this much, it would have looked impossibly weak, not least to the Indonesians. But this inaction also would have become a huge controversy within Australia and, if anything, this would have set off more anti-­Indonesian sentiment within the community.

Apart from the terrible business of executing people for drug offences, the way Jakarta handled this whole process was very poor. Much that seems to be deliberate discourtesy and even cruelty was probably just incompetence and the usual shambles. It’s clear now that Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s sophistication shielded from international interlocutors a grinding and pervasive incompetence in the Indonesian system. But there were elements of gratuitous anti-Australian gesturing.

The families of the two exe­cuted Australians were put through a number of demeaning and cruel circumstances. The two young men were denied their choice of spiritual advisers to assist them in their last hours. There was a grotesque militarisation of the routine operation of transferring the two to the island where they were to be executed. This was particularly exaggerated in the transfer of the Australians, as though someone in the Indonesian system suspected the Australian SAS would swoop to steal the two men away.

This Indonesian behaviour was not only ridiculous but it irresponsibly fuels the paranoid conspiracy fantasies that run too easily through the Indonesian population.

There was also an unpleasant black market in Indonesian soldiers posing for gruesome selfies with the condemned Australians.

On top of all this, there came a point some time ago when Indonesia’s President, Joko Widodo, refused to take any calls from Australia’s Prime Minister. There were many Australian proposals, letters and communications that were ignored altogether.

There was a formal proposal by Canberra that Jakarta submit the appropriateness of the death penalty for drug offences to adjudication by the International Court of Justice. The Indonesians did not refuse this proposal. They simply did not bother to reply.

The Australian government made repeated requests that the Indonesian President should at least look at the appeal for clemency papers lodged by the Australians. The Indonesians refused point-blank to do this, saying no cases would be reopened and no clemency pleas entertained.

Yet at the last moment the system did take a fresh look at the fate of the Filipina woman whose execution has been stayed at least temporarily.

Jokowi is emerging as a dangerously weak president. His popularity has plummeted. He has no independent base in his own party, the PDI-P, which is run by former president Megawati Sukarnoputri. At the party’s recent conference where Mega was re-elected as the leader of the party, she introduced Jokowi as a party cadre and told him he had to toe the party line. At no stage did she refer to him as the President of Indonesia.

Jokowi, like many political leaders in trouble, is reverting to a fairly crude nationalism. Most people slated to be executed this year in Indonesia for drugs off­ences are foreigners, yet it is impossible to imagine that the Indonesian drug trade is primarily conducted by foreigners.

For all these reasons, Canberra would have looked spineless beyond the tolerable if it had not withdrawn its ambassador.

However, it is still the case that Australia has profound, enduring national interests involved in its relationship with Indonesia. It is also still the case that Indonesia involves, so far, the triumph of democracy over dictatorship, and moderation over extremism. It is still the case that no country has done more to combat Islamist terrorism than Indonesia, and that much of that terrorism would be directed at Australians if it were unleashed.

It is also the case that Indonesia is continuing to develop a serious civil society based on decent values of democracy and human rights. Although the death penalty is widely supported in Indonesia, Jokowi has been sharply criticised in liberal newspapers and the like for his determination to carry out so many executions this year.

Apart from withdrawing our ambassador, the Abbott government also has suspended ministerial visits. I do not believe the government will be remotely tempted to link any cuts in the aid budget in May to these executions. Because of overall aid program cuts already announced by the government, and confirmed in the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook, there will be cuts to the aid budget to Indonesia.

Our aid there does good work for deserving Indonesians and also serves our national interests. However, it would be no bad thing if the profile of aid as part of the bilateral relationship declined significantly. Long-term aid relationships always bring ill will on both sides.

The killing of the two Australians is a needless tragedy that could affect relations in ways similar to, though much less intense than, the killing of the Australian journalists in East Timor in 1975. That would be a very bad outcome. We need calm leadership and a calm community.