Max Lane
Since soon after Schapelle Corby's arrest in Bali, sections of the Australian media have waged a non-stop campaign agitating for her to be found innocent in her trial, while at the same time launching persistent attacks against the Indonesian prosecutors, judges, police, prison system and legal system as a whole.
Much of this campaign has been based on lies and exaggeration, fuelled by racism. Probably the most outstanding example of the tone of this agitation was the front-page headline in one issue of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, which screamed in huge letters: "Kill her". This was supposed to sum up the intentions of the Indonesian prosecution.
Of course, no Indonesian prosecutor ever called for the death penalty for Corby. Indeed, as a Jakarta Post editorial recently stated, no person — Indonesian or foreign — charged with any marijuana offence has ever been sentenced to death in Indonesia. The depth of deception in this headline is mind-boggling.
Perhaps a central plank in the attack on the Indonesian system has been the criticism of the judges: their record of never having found anybody innocent; their heartless statements about being "able to sleep well" after the sentencing; how they were seemingly unmoved by Corby's personal appeal in the court.
The Indonesian judiciary is a product of the 33 years of the military-backed dictatorship of Suharto. During this period, the judiciary did not function as an independent institution, but rather as an extension of the repressive state, an arm of the prosecution. Following the lead of the presidential family, it also became riddled with corruption. Although Suharto was overthrown by the student-led people's power movement of 1998, this culture remains strong in the judiciary. There are many Indonesian organisations and individuals, activists, lawyers and journalists who have been fighting what they refer to as the mafia pengadilan (court mafia).
This corruption and prosecution mentality is a direct product of the Suharto dictatorship which, in turn, was kept in power and praised to the heavens by the West and its leaders. From the moment it came to power in 1965, over the corpses of a million slaughtered Indonesians, Australian governments have done everything to keep the dictatorship in power and defend its "reputation".
In recent times, both Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating and John Howard were sycophantic in their praise of Suharto. Howard called him a "caring and sensitive" leader. "Australia" — that is the Australian political and business elite, those who own and are serviced by the media that has been conducting the agitation over Corby — is complicit in producing this judiciary. In fact, it was complicit in helping maintain a dictatorship that suppressed those fighting against the mafia pengadilan.
This hypocrisy is compounded by another: the total lack of interest by those conducting this agitation of the Indonesian victims of this system. Even today there are pro-democracy political activists in prison in Indonesia, jailed for "insulting the heads of state" during the period of Megawati SUkarnoputri's presidency. More have recently been tried under current President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
There is no doubt that life in Indonesian prisons can be very harsh. Attitudes from the dictatorship period still linger. Corruption, which reduces funds available for prison food and amenities, still exists. But the fundamental cause of these conditions, except in the directly military-ruled areas like Aceh, is the impoverishment of the country as a whole. Indonesia's per capita income is US$3500 per year, compared to Australia's US$30,500.
Where does this huge income gap come from? It's a legacy of hundreds of years of colonialism, reinforced by a neo-colonial economy consolidated under the dictatorship of the pro-West Suharto. Indonesia had no industry, no technologically advanced agriculture, no higher education system, no scientific research capacity and no modern health system when the Dutch ended their colonial rule in 1942. Despite the praise heaped on Suharto for his government's economic progress, Indonesia remains a backward, impoverished economy incapable of sustaining a decent quality of life in towns and villages, let alone in prisons.
Today, Indonesia's economy is worsening as the country implements the West's neoliberal economic prescriptions. Factories close; sectors of agriculture shrink; trafficking in women expands; numbers of migrant workers becoming virtual slaves overseas increases; student numbers in the better universities decline because of costs. The Australian government, through its membership of the International Monetary Fund and other agencies, helps enforce these policies.
At least, however, the mean spirit of neoliberalism has not stopped Indonesian prison managers from allowing friends and family to visit prisoners frequently and to bring in food, drink and even mobile phones. It was reported that where Corby is held, prisoners can have almost unlimited visits from friends and family during the day time. Compare this with trade union activist Craig Johnston, who was imprisoned in Victoria and allowed only two visits a week of up to four people for no more than five hours.
The hypocrisy of the current anti-Indonesian agitation is a reprehensible part of the Australian elite's racist, imperial mentality. But it is also something that can poison attempts to build good relations and solidarity between the working people of Australia and Indonesia, although little is being done to actually build those relationships at the moment. Even active links between trade unions and progressive political groups are weak.
Moreover, the very economic imbalance between the two countries can also poison relationships at the grassroots level, if there are not conscious efforts to build solidarity. Corby is often portrayed as an "Aussie battler", not a member of the Australian socio-economic elite. This is obviously true but it is something not grasped in Indonesia.
How does a working-class person get to have overseas holidays in the first place? This is the question that does not even register in Indonesia, where most people would expect that anyone who can take overseas holidays every year or so must be rich and part of a privileged elite. Even the very possibility of an "Aussie battler" being detained in a Bali prison flows, in the first instance, from the fact that standards of living, and therefore in dollar terms, the cost of living, is so low in Indonesia that an average young Australian worker can have a holiday in Bali, perhaps even every year. Here too, Australians benefit from Indonesia's poverty.
Guilty or innocent, there can be little doubt that Corby has suffered an injustice. Nobody should be in jail for 20 years for any marijuana related activity. Marijuana should probably in fact be a legally available substance. But the anti-Indonesia agitation of the last few weeks was never really about helping Corby. It was more about deepening fear among Australians of the non-Western world — that part of the globe now sinking deeper into poverty under the West's neo-colonial economic (and military) offensives. Only real solidarity with Indonesians fighting this poverty and its causes — namely, the neoliberal and neo-colonial economics pressed upon Indonesia by the West — can prevent the spread of the poison among both Australians and Indonesians that imperial hypocrisy can cause.
From Green Left Weekly, June 8, 2005.
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