Bali 9: The Untold Story (17 page)

Her brother’s school did much the same thing, but Vicki doesn’t know if the students were told not to raise the issue of Michael’s arrest with her youngest son. Michael’s brother tells his family that no one at school has ever mentioned it, but he’s quieter, more reserved than his sister, and his family is not quite sure. They’re watching him closely. At an age when drugs shouldn’t even be in their vocabulary, Michael’s younger siblings are living their family’s nightmare.

Similarly, for others the arrest of those they cherish has turned their lives upside down. Renae Lawrence
thinks the world of her younger stepbrother; Matthew Norman has a twin sister. Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen has younger siblings—so does Myuran Sukumaran. They all have parents. And all family members are dealing with it any way they can.

Scott Rush’s parents have become a fixture in Bali, escaping Australia to be by their son’s side at every chance, and watching the trials of his co-accused. They seem to be next to Scott whenever possible, attending court cases, taking notes, asking questions and seeking documents. They tried to stop Scott from leaving Australia for Bali, and now they need the best possible outcome for him. The Czugajs, too, are ensuring that Michael has plenty of visitors, rostering family members so that everyone doesn’t visit in the same week. Michele Stephens is a daily visitor and Lawrence, the only woman, is receiving visits from Australian supporters as well as both her parents. As is Norman.

They have become part of the story, these parents, spending their holidays and their incomes to be by their children’s sides. Some have stayed out of the limelight, still not recognisable to the public. Sukumaran’s young brother cuts a lonely figure visiting him, his parents sighted rarely by the local press. Chan receives visits from his brother too, his parents remaining firmly behind the camera.

Nguyen’s father and sister have travelled from their Brisbane home to support him, but the shame brought on them by the position he’s in has changed their lives irrevocably. In the Vietnamese community, more than
most, children can be their parents’ greatest pride, or their greatest shame. It’s a gamble, raising them in a clash of cultures in which they want them to remain true to their ethnicity but also do well in the world that surrounds them. And when the gamble fails, the family takes a tried and tested route: they remove themselves from their local community, hanging their heads in shame, and never uttering their grief out loud.

The Nguyen family is a deeply private one. And it’s a mixture of that and the mores within the Vietnamese community that has prompted them to break off contact with many of those who played a role in their lives. Even Brisbane’s community leaders have found it difficult to deliver the message of support they so want heard. The Nguyens cannot countenance that their eldest son, who had a future in the baking business and who seemed to respect their wishes, could be accused of drug smuggling.

Si Yi Chen’s parents, too, are a desolate sight, their small frames covered in bulky jackets in Bali’s stifling heat the first time they’ve been captured on camera visiting their son. Si Yi is their only child. To some parents, it almost seems as though they’ve been delivered their own personal death sentences.

T
he call came into Neil Mitchell’s 3AW studio at 10.19 a.m. on Tuesday, 19 April, less than thirty-six hours after news of the arrests broke. ‘These people that got caught over in Bali are a bunch of twits, mate,’ the caller said. ‘Honestly, I reckon they should be lined up and shot.’

The Melbourne caller wasn’t alone: across the nation, on talkback stations and in the letters-to-the-editor pages of newspapers, Australians vented their anger. Some were cheering for the death sentence to be imposed quickly on the nine young Australians now taking centre stage in Indonesia; others needed to have an old score settled, having lost a loved one to the scourge of drugs provided by someone, somewhere, sometime. Public anger was almost palpable. It spawned whole talkback shows, internet
forums and barbecue debates the length and breadth of Australia.

Melanie didn’t offer any personal story to Derryn Hinch, also on 3AW, but you couldn’t miss her point: ‘These people who strap heroin to their body—they deserve the gunfire because they kill a lot of innocent children,’ she said. One call spurred on another, and another, and another. Few—about one in ten—were supportive of Sukumaran, Chan and their cohorts, but even those people didn’t for a moment suggest that any of the group was innocent.

The images that filled television screens after the group’s capture were indelibly etched in everyone’s minds; images of four young Australians with their bodies caked in kilograms and kilograms of finely packed powder that would be worth a fortune on the streets of Sydney or Brisbane or Melbourne or Adelaide or Perth. Or anywhere in between. We weren’t just told about it—we saw it with our own eyes. We saw it sitting on the table beside the confused and scared faces of those who had been wearing it. And when George called 2UE’s John Laws and told everyone who was listening how his daughter was a heroin addict and that was why he could not have sympathy for those now looking down the barrel of death, the calls flooded in again.

It wasn’t just George. Michael, who lost his son to heroin abuse, called Laws’s rival station, 2GB. A father who was bringing up a handful of children after his wife died of an overdose called Brisbane’s 4BC. Others called their local radio station with similar tales of
tragedy and woe. The talkback chorus was clear in what it wanted: for the punishment to fit the crime and for these young Australians to serve as a deterrent to any others who might follow down the same reckless path. Day after day, the calls continued, with 90 per cent of callers nationwide airing their disgust at the group who quickly became known as the Bali Nine.

While the sentiment was similar, however, the specific points people wanted to express swung wildly. Some callers wanted to discuss the decision to prosecute the nine in Indonesia, which supports a death penalty, over Australia, which opposes death as punishment. Others wanted to express their disgust that heroin was the drug involved in the racket, not something seen as less poisonous. Still others called to discuss the greed and stupidity which must have filled the minds of those at the centre of the unfolding criminal and legal drama. Many wanted it known that no leniency should be granted, no matter what happened.

Dozens also wanted to compare the Bali Nine to Schapelle Corby, who had been arrested six months earlier and who was sitting in the jail that the Bali Nine would eventually learn to call home. Some felt that the Australian Federal Police should have waited until the Bali Nine lobbed back into Australia before arresting them. But probably a greater number, in the aftermath of the arrests, wanted to make sure that our politicians weren’t rushing over to bring them home. Like hell they should get to serve their sentences in ‘five-star’ Australian jails, callers said; they were a disgrace to our nation.

Sometimes the best barometer for what people are thinking is talkback radio and letters-to-the-editor columns of newspapers, and that’s where many people turn when an issue arises in their neighbourhood, or when a local politician steps out of line, or even in the event of a national scandal unfolding.

With the Bali Nine, the people-meter was quick and vicious. Internet forums took slightly longer to work up a head of steam, but when they did, they were no more forgiving. People logged on to chatrooms and forums in countries around the globe to have their say about the nine Australians who were at the heart of an international criminal and legal debate. Bloodthirsty online discussions became cheer squads for the death penalty; heroin smugglers were deemed akin to murderers. Australian taxpayers were warned to refuse any move that might help fund appeals or witnesses requesting immunity.

Perhaps it was a response to rising crime levels in our own communities, or a growing intolerance for those who abuse their bodies by taking drugs, but across the nation it seemed that the overriding reaction of the Australian public to the Bali Nine was that they had made their own bed. And, now, most people were eager to watch them squirm in it.

That response could not have been more starkly contrasted with the reaction that erupted over Corby’s arrest. She seemed to be the quintessential girl-next-door.
Disarmingly polite and neat, with finely chiselled cheekbones and well-sculpted eyebrows, Corby captured people’s hearts. She had been arrested six months earlier when she arrived in Bali with 4.1 kilograms of marijuana in one of her bags. But it had to be a set-up, many people thought. She didn’t know it was there, others opined. Why would someone take marijuana to Bali when they could source it there, and who would risk taking a bagful into a country that punished drug traffickers so harshly, others asked.

Going on the talkback barometer, the public didn’t believe that Corby was a drug carrier—and they could tell that by looking at her. That was the sentiment expressed many times over as Corby became the darling of talkback shows. Indeed, in the weeks after the Bali Nine arrests, as many people called talkback to discuss her case as they did the federal budget. More than twice the number of listeners devoted their call to Corby than they did to Douglas Wood, another Australian who found himself in trouble overseas after being kidnapped in Iraq. And, with Corby, the calls were overwhelmingly supportive, which contrasted sharply to the judgment the public wanted to make over the Bali Nine’s arrest.

Overall, almost four in five callers were on Corby’s side. Just take popular broadcaster Alan Jones’s 2GB program as an example: it recorded its biggest number of calls in one two-week period around the time of the Corby affair, with 93 per cent of those having their say believing that Corby was innocent of the charges. They
didn’t know her, but they saw her on television and staring out from the front page of their daily newspapers. They saw the haunted look in her eyes, the way she was dressed, the way she spoke—and it just didn’t fit with them.

Suspect baggage handlers became the bogeymen, along with the Indonesian justice system, which was seen as barbaric, primitive and corrupt; the Indonesian judges even being described on one show as ‘like monkeys eating bananas’. It was the same system that so many callers had supported during the Bali bombing trials and would support for the Bali Nine trials, but that didn’t matter when it came to Schapelle. Corby offered us intrigue, even though the court cameras showed off every tear, every nerve, every grimace. Few saw her tears and thought her guilty. It was the same cameras that showed off the heroin haul that had been strapped to the Bali Nine mules. No intrigue here—it was all on camera.

‘Free Schapelle’ banners were plastered to cars. Community campaigns urged people to wrap ribbons around the front gates of suburban homes. Some people egged on others to discard their Indonesian souvenirs and trinkets. Tourists dropped Bali from their list of dream destinations, and some travel agents followed that lead. Public parties were held to celebrate the birthday of the young woman now in an Indonesian jail cell. At airports, people lined up to have their bags plastic-wrapped. If it happened to Schapelle, many of them thought, it could happen to their daughter. Or their sister. Or their niece. Or them.

As Corby’s case progressed, the chorus of public anger at her plight grew. She was innocent; there was no proof, they said. Not like that other lot, the Bali Nine, where we saw the heroin strapped to their bodies. That killed people, that stuff, they’d say. Corby’s case just didn’t make sense.

‘It’s like the refrigerator salesman who didn’t do too well selling refrigerators in the Antarctic,’ one caller told the ABC in Melbourne. ‘Why would anyone smuggle marijuana to Bali? It’s just nonsense.’

People demanded that the government intervene in some way—Schapelle
had
to be rescued. Some complained that Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and the federal government had done more to help Douglas Wood, the Australian hostage in Iraq, than Corby. The SAS should be sent in, someone else offered. One caller who had visited Bali twenty-eight times felt so angry that she thought she might never return.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, Corby was the subject of conversation.

On the streets of Indonesia, though, Corby’s predicament wasn’t seen in the same light as in her homeland. Her bag had been stashed with marijuana, just as four of the Bali Nine had been found with heroin all over them. To many there, she was seen as another Australian flouting the laws of a country that was trying desperately to grapple with a drug-use problem that was killing their young; a country where legislators had decided to pull out all stops to
end the scourge that filled street corners and markets and nightclubs and bars; a country where the law was the law, and breaches of it were dealt with harshly.

Tony Fox, who set up the foreign prisoners’ support service about a decade ago, says many Indonesians see Corby as no different to the Bali Nine. ‘Here in Australia, everyone wants to believe in a fairytale. And the media have eaten this up with a great big soup ladle spoon,’ he says. Fox says he has been contacted by media outlets around the world asking if there are any other attractive, blue-eyed Australian girls wasting away in foreign jails. When told he can put them in touch with a young Asian-Australian in Cambodia, they are not interested. They all want to find the next Schapelle Corby. But Corby’s fresh-faced image didn’t wash in Indonesia.

In the month the Bali Nine were arrested, there were 150 arrests for drug-related matters in Jakarta alone. That illustrates crime-fighters’ crackdown on drugs, which end the lives of 15 000 Indonesian teenagers each year. And the toll continues to climb, as drug addiction takes hold in communities across the country; experts say that 3.2 million of the nation’s 220 million people are now drug users.

The charges laid at the feet of Corby and the Bali Nine meant that ten more Australians were added to the list of 100 or so other Australians on drug charges in foreign prisons. But in the country where they were caught—unlike three-quarters of those others—a
death penalty was the ultimate weapon available to be dished out as a deterrent by those in charge.

The debate about, and reaction to, the arrests of the Nine wasn’t confined to Australian suburbia. In media columns, in parliament and in universities, others joined in. Dr Tim Lindsey, Professor of Asian Law and director of the Asian Law Centre, says it would be foolish to judge international behaviour by Australian standards. ‘If you want to look at the region, then Australia is the odd one out,’ he says.

Corby would have faced certain death in Singapore, and almost certain death in other places like Malaysia or Vietnam. Lindsey says that within the Southeast Asian region, Indonesia is a ‘low executor, both per head of population and overall in numbers’, beaten strongly by countries like China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam—and the United States. And he blames the media for some of the public perceptions that paint Indonesia as being out of step in relation to the treatment it hands out for serious offences.

‘What it comes down to is a fundamental xenophobic attitude to Southeast Asia, whereby we salute and applaud, with bloodthirsty relish, the death sentences meted out to Imam Samudra and Amrozi for their offences and hear people say they’re happy to pull the trigger, they should be burnt and tortured and things like that, and our government says it is an appropriate sentence, but hey, white Australians who are involved in what would here be serious drug offences, they shouldn’t have to face death.’

Lindsey says he does not support the death penalty. However some, he says, would argue that perhaps death should only apply for terrorism and not for drug charges, but that’s not a debate being waged in Australia—at least, not officially.

‘Australia’s official position is we’re opposed to the death penalty. Well, how can the government view the death sentence for Imam Samudra and the others as appropriate? It’s a double standard. You either oppose the death penalty or you don’t, and of course it creates the perception that we support the death penalty for foreign terrorists with dark skin but we won’t want it for drug smugglers who are white-skinned.’

Do any of the nine young Australians deserve death by gunfire for their role in the aborted drug run? That became the crux of the Australian debate as the Bali Nine raced through their trials. As a nation, Australia has stood strongly and proudly against the death penalty, and yet, as Lindsey points out, we’ve supported it in the case of some terrorists who have acted against us. Isn’t it then hypocritical, some argue, not to support it when our own are in trouble? Indonesians don’t hide their warnings against drug smuggling, or the deathly consequences, and several people said that the Bali Nine could not have missed Corby’s unfolding saga as they boarded their planes.

The nation is split in two. On one side sit the proponents of death-as-punishment, arguing that if people commit a crime in a country that promises death, they should die. The argument put forward is
usually twofold: first, that Australians should respect the laws of those countries they visit, just as Australia requests visitors here to respect what’s on our statute books; second, drug smugglers traffic in death—they destroy families and cost communities dearly—there must be a deterrent, some say, and if the death penalty serves as one, so be it. Both are compelling arguments, heard over and over again as the Bali Nine have travelled quickly towards their fate.