Jail, death and politics: Why we can’t know much about the Bali five

The big news in Bali’s media this week was the weather.

“We have floods, trees falling and killing people,” our Bali fixer, Amilia Rosa said on Wednesday. A few days after the remaining five members of the Bali Nine had been spirited out of Kerobokan prison, it was barely rating a mention. “And an elephant. It was carried by a flood and found dead this morning.”

What about in Jakarta? Preoccupying the media there are the policies of new president Prabowo Subianto: a goods and services tax, the building of 3 million new homes, and the release of 44,000 prisoners from the nation’s chronically overcrowded jails.

The fact that five middle-aged Australian men were snuck out of Indonesia under cover of official obfuscation, loaded secretly on a Jetstar flight at Denpasar airport and bussed last Sunday afternoon into a military facility in Darwin might once have dominated the airwaves. Now it was a small back page story.

Only after they had been safely tucked into dongas out of sight of the prying media did Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issue a press release. It was entitled, blandly, “Return home of five Australians”.

“Australian citizens Matthew Norman, Scott Rush, Martin Stephens, Si Yi Chen and Michael Czugaj have returned”, it began.

Albanese’s people briefed the media about what a marvellous job they had done; the prime minister expressed gratitude to Indonesia in a press conference. And that was pretty much it.

After almost two decades of articles, arguments, clemency pleas, two executions and at least one significant diplomatic rumble – followed by a month of feverish speculation on the timing and the legal mechanism of their return – the five former prisoners were, very quietly, back in Australia. And, on Friday, back with their families.

In the images we’ve seen of their journeys, they look bemused.

From left: Martin Stephens, Michael Cjugaz, Scott Rush, Matthew Norman and Si Yi Chen.

‘A living hero’

To the Australian government, all this looks like a victory. As political correspondent David Crowe wrote after the men’s release: “The last thing the Australian side wanted was blanket media coverage at Darwin to show the five men walking free – an image that might cause trouble for Prabowo among Indonesians who remain deeply uncomfortable with the release of the convicted drug traffickers.”

Word from Indonesia was that this silence was at the insistence of the Australian government, who told their Indonesian counterparts the Australian media was dangerous. As they travelled back to their home states on Thursday and Friday, the men remained silent.

The release a few days later of another prisoner, Mary Jane Veloso, was quite different. In 2010, Indonesia sentenced this former Filipina maid to death for trafficking drugs. On Tuesday night, she too was sent home to Manila in an almost identical deal as the one that freed the five Australians.

Mary Jane Veloso waves as she is reunited with her family at the Correctional Institution for Women in Mandaluyong, Philippines on Wednesday.Credit: AP

Unlike them, though, she was photographed being driven to the airport. She gave an impromptu press conference and sang the Indonesian national anthem to the smiling local media before being put on her flight. Back in Manila, her family was there to greet her as she was taken to her new jail. They hugged her, waved and beamed in jubilation, then gave a press conference of their own.

The head of a Filipino non-government organisation that supports migrant domestic helpers described Veloso as “a living hero”. Calls for her swift release from prison are loud and getting louder.

The difference between the two experiences is stark. To understand what just happened, and why, requires a brief look at a painful history of young, dumb Australians and hurt political feelings.

The ganja queen

The capture of marijuana smuggler Schapelle Corby in 2004 and the Bali Nine in 2005 were landmark moments in Indonesian-Australian relations.

By the time I became Indonesia correspondent in 2012, the regret of all of them was palpable. As young as 18 when they were caught, they’d thrown away their youths for enough money, perhaps, to buy a second-hand car.

Diplomatically, the existence of these prisoners and the media interest in them was one of the three Bs – Bali, beef and boats – a trifecta of irritants in the bilateral relationship.

An Australian customs lifeboat abandoned on the southern shore of Java after returning 28 asylum seekers to Indonesia in 2014.Credit: Michael Bachelard

So when the former Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono made the surprise decision in 2015 to grant clemency to “ganja queen” Corby, he reaped praise in Australia and bought himself serious pain in Indonesia. He took five years off Corby’s sentence – a decision challenged in court by a key anti-drug organisation as the nation’s parliament threatened revolt.

At the time, according to ANU emeritus professor in Indonesian politics, Dr Greg Fealy, Indonesian society was being flooded with cheap drugs – mainly ice – and it was affecting families throughout the social spectrum. “Everyone had a story about young people falling victim to hard drugs and was asking what was the government doing about it,” Fealy said.

Yudhoyono, by then in his last year of a decade in power, was seen as a do-nothing president who’d left Indonesia on autopilot and who worried too much about pandering to the West. Corby’s clemency and his apparent ignorance of the drug crisis at home played squarely into that.

Corby herself then inflamed the situation by signing an exclusive deal for a paid interview with the Seven Network, and leading the media – Indonesian and Australian – on a madcap, live-streamed race through the streets of Denpasar to a secure luxury compound. There she was pictured sipping beer as journalist Mike Willesee waited nearby to bring home the bacon for his network.

Indonesians were outraged. The arrogant Australians were rubbing their noses in it, they said. Yudhoyono faced sustained calls to revoke the clemency and lock her up again. It was an experience his successor as president, Joko Widodo, was determined not to repeat.

This picture of Schapelle Corby enjoying a beer with her half brother after her early release from prison outraged Indonesians.

Foreign interference

One of Widodo’s first promises was that he would actually carry out executions of drug traffickers who’d been waiting for years on death row. Drug offenders were akin to terrorists – they killed more people, they just did it unintentionally, it was said. The death penalty had 76 per cent public support.

So in his first weeks as president, Widodo announced he would revoke the clemency applications of 64 people on death row.

Among that number were two of the Bali Nine – Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Sukumaran, a ringleader of the group, but by then also an artist and a thoroughly reformed character, got in touch with me. “Very STRESSED out,” he wrote in an email. “We all are!

“We were hoping things would get better with Jokowi, that he would abolish the death penalty, but things seem to have gone from bad to worse.”

Australia, France and Brazil, among others, all argued for the lives of their citizens. Tony Abbott, who was then prime minister, unwisely reminded Indonesia of how much money Australia had given to rebuild Aceh after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. He was mocked and ridiculed in return.

Myuran Sukumaran, learning to paint from artist Ben Quilty in the art room he ran in Kerobokan jail, Bali.Credit: Getty Images

Soft diplomacy or hard, however, Widodo was not for turning. He described the pleas from world leaders as “foreign interference”.

“Jokowi would like to be seen by the world as firm, strong … in going after drug dealers,” the Bali Nine’s lawyer, Todung Mulya Lubis, told this masthead at the time. Over two years, Jokowi executed 19 people. His popularity shot to new heights.

At 3.35am on April 29, 2015, Chan and Sukumaran were riddled with bullets fired by the Indonesian state, along with six other people, all foreigners.

Of all those slated for execution on that April night, only one person was spared: Filipina Mary Jane Veloso. She was in the same line-up as Chan and Sukumaran but was plucked out at the last minute and given a reprieve.

In early 2015, then foreign minister Julie Bishop, Greens leader Senator Christine Milne, and Labor’s Tanya Plibersek led a candlelight vigil for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran on the forecourt of Parliament House in Canberra.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Maid in Indonesia

Unlike the others on the execution island of Nusa Kembangan that night, Veloso evoked sympathy in the Indonesian public. A transnational domestic worker, she claimed she’d been tricked into carrying the drugs found in her luggage. Like the Philippines, Indonesia is a huge exporter of domestic workers to other parts of Asia and the Middle East, and stories of mistreatment abound.

Ordinary Indonesians recognised Veloso. She could be their mother or sister or daughter.

In 2013, Prabowo, then on his first attempt to seek the presidency, took up their plight. He hired a lawyer for one Indonesian domestic worker, Wilfrida Soik, who was on death row in Malaysia for murdering her employer. He flew several times to Kuala Lumpur to support her and backed her story that she’d been a victim of human trafficking. (Ultimately, Soik was freed and met Prabowo again earlier this year, as president-elect.)

On October 20 this year, the political wheel turned again. Widodo’s term ended and Prabowo became president. A man with a dark military past, with allegations of kidnappings, extra-judicial killings and war crimes behind him, Prabowo had finally found a formula to win: by presenting himself at the election as a cute (gemoy) grandfather.

Foreign governments, though, have been sceptical. Would a man with his past return Indonesia to the kind of authoritarianism exhibited by his former father-in-law, Suharto?

Anthony Albanese and Prabowo Subianto at a bilateral meeting in Lima, Peru, in November.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

To defray this international image, says academic Tim Lindsey, he has travelled extensively and been welcomed in foreign capitals. He’s made an agreement over contested territory with China. He’s rejuvenated a slogan from Yudhoyono’s diplomatic kitbag (“a thousand friends and no enemies”) and is harking back even further, to the days of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, to recall his country’s leadership of a significant global bloc called the Non-Aligned Movement.

And now he’s authorised extraordinary agreements to let the Bali five and Veloso go home. A French death row prisoner, Serge Atlaoui, is reportedly next. The decision to embark on these negotiations is unambiguously Prabowo’s.

“It was the president’s discretion directed at fostering good relations with neighbouring countries,” said Willy Aditya, the head of the Indonesian parliament’s human rights committee.

And it’s smart, said Lindsey, the director of the centre for Indonesian law at the University of Melbourne. “It creates a diplomatic foundation for Prabowo to engage with the international community in a more constructive way,” and it removes “an irritant for Indonesia’s diplomacy, particularly when dealing with countries that have abolished the death penalty”.

The dividend he’s seeking, says Fealy, is investment, diplomatic clout and strategic co-operation.

“Prabowo is attempting to build up diplomatic and strategic capital so that all sorts of countries would be feeling he’s a well-disposed leader to them,” Fealy says.

In Australia, Albanese delivered those feelings in spades. “This is an act of compassion by President Prabowo and we thank him for it,” he said at his brief press conference.

Australia did win something that the Philippines did not, however. Veloso was required to go to prison in her home country – at least for the time being. But in an otherwise identical agreement, the document signed by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke only required that the Bali five undergo rehabilitation.

This, and the government’s aversion to a jubilant public reunion with their families, explains the stint the five men spent in Howard Springs before they flew out again on Thursday.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade did not answer questions about the extraordinary level of secrecy involved. None of the five returnees have yet spoken for themselves.

Death and politics

The lives of all these people have turned on changes in politics, and politicians. And as joyful as it is for the families of Rush, Czugaj, Stephens, Chen and Norman, their return must feel like another cruel blow to the loved ones of Chan and Sukumaran.

One change of president – to Widodo, a former furniture salesman determined to prove how tough he was – killed their sons. Another – to a man with a military past needing to find favour with the world – saw the unexpected freedom of five others.

It’s not a judicial process, it’s a political one.

As Sukumaran wrote in a final message to me shortly before his execution: “We’ve changed. We’ve done so much in the last six to seven years, more than most prisoners in prisons all over the world ... What use will executing us be? … Our families shouldn’t have to suffer like this.”

His pleas fell on deaf ears.

“It’s always been in the way in Indonesia in these matters,” Fealy said this week.

“It comes back to the president.

“There might be a time when Prabowo decides he’ll be hard-line on these issues too. So, in this case, we should all be grateful that the Bali five have been beneficiaries of a change of mood, and a change in the politics in Indonesia.”

Note to any other prospective young Australian drug smugglers out there: best not to try your luck.

With Karuni Rompies, Amilia Rosa, Zach Hope

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