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 the rejection of the death penalty reflects values that are universal, and not just Australian, and that we are well placed to partner with countries already against the death penalty - such as the Philippines and Cambodia - in an effort to persuade those who are in favour, including Brunei and Papua New Guinea, which are both taking steps to revive the death penalty.
Also on Wednesday, the Holy See made an appeal to the United Nations for international action against the death penalty, with its Permanent Observer at the UN, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, recognising that it is a long-term goal because many countries still believe it is necessary or are wavering. An ABC report on Friday indicated that there is argument in the Philippines that the death penalty should be brought back as the appropriate means of dealing with Australian alleged sex offender Peter Scully.
As for Australia, once nationalism is taken out of the equation and we align our anti-death penalty advocacy with that of like-minded nations, the leaders of Indonesia and other countries with Australian and other foreign nationals on death row will start to take our clemency pleas more seriously.
Michael Mullins is editor of Eureka Street.