Let’s
give Australia the prisoners
Tamalia Alisjahbana ; A former journalist with the BBC World
Service
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JAKARTA
POST, 12 Maret 2015
I am one of seemingly very few Indonesians who think that
Australian PM Tony Abbott’s request that two Australian prisoners on death
row be handed over to Australia is not unreasonable — if we are prepared to
set emotions aside and look at the request purely from a rational point of
view.
After the tsunami of 2004, Australia donated an aid package of
US$1 billion to assist with the aftermath and now Abbott is asking as a
return favor that we send back the two Australians on death-row for drug
offenses.
The $1 billion aid is a lot and at the time it was very much
needed. It helped to save hundreds if not thousands of Acehnese lives. We
would have been very hard pressed to find that amount of money in 2004.
Then again, we are sitting on a ring of fire, so it’s only a
matter of time until we experience another devastating tsunami, earthquake or
volcanic eruption.
So doesn’t it make sense to keep Australia happy? What does it
cost us to give them two prisoners on death row? Nothing, really.
Think about it, we would save money on prison expenses and
bullets and the poor soldiers who would have to shoot them would have one
traumatic experience fewer to deal with. A billion dollars in exchange for
two drug dealers sounds like a very good deal to me. Let Abbott have the two
Australians. In fact, if Abbott wants the Nigerians and the Brazilian as
well, I say that we should give them to him too.
It may be a bit of a puzzle exactly why Abbott desperately wants
two convicted drug dealers and desperately doesn’t want any Sri Lankan,
Afghan or Iraqi refugees who in all probability are perfectly law-abiding
people who have never killed anyone or sold drugs in their lives.
Indeed, it’s hard to fathom this kind of logic but well, perhaps
it’s a cultural thing, and as a multicultural society, who are we to judge
another culture as long as it is not violent and does not hurt us?
At the end of the day it’s not like Australia is asking us to
hand over an island or two (like some countries I could mention). Australia
is not our enemy — they don’t have any territorial ambitions in our
direction.
Australia provides us with lots of tourists, which is good for
our economy, and when we are in trouble they try to help us. What’s not to
like about them? So why all this hostility on our side?
Sometimes we react like a small country with a big chip on its
shoulder. If we are a truly confident country on a par with Australia we can
afford to be generous to our friends.
Now please don’t get the wrong idea from all this; I am not
opposed to the death penalty. I support the death penalty for drug
traffickers and I do note that Australia does not seem to get half as worked
up when those sentenced to death are terrorists rather than drug traffickers.
In Indonesia it is common knowledge that many drug traffickers
continue to ply their trade once they are released. Some even claim that they
continue to do so while still in prison.
So putting them in prison seems to be an expensive and rather
useless exercise whereas the death penalty is the only anti recidivism
program that I know of with a 100 percent success rate.
However, if thousands of Indonesian lives can be saved by
ensuring that we keep our friends happy enough to help us during natural
disaster emergencies then yes, I am happy to exchange two Australian lives
for thousands of Indonesian ones.
As for the Brazilians, do they get their chap on death row too?
Well, I guess we need to think about that. How good a friend are they? What
did they do for us during the tsunami? How much was it worth? Or did they do
something else for us? In politics, national interest needs to come first. ●
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