Australia and state sanctioned murder

Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of the Australian, accepts that the Australian government should lobby on behalf of Chan and Sukumaran – but largely on the basis that the public expects some action. He worries, however, that the government will be pushed into going too far: 

The key will be the degree of public reaction in Australia. Ultimately, a government has to reflect community sentiment to some degree. Foreign policy that is opposed to public opinion is impossible to sustain. The problem is that most of the possible actions are counterproductive or self-defeating, or clearly contravene Australia’s long-term interests.

To understand those “long-term interests”, you only have to think back to the Suharto regime. Sheridan hailed former Indonesian president Suharto as “an authentic giant of Asia”, a man who “[produced] a stable Indonesia, and therefore a stable Southeast Asia”, and by so doing “bequeathed an inestimable gift to Australia”.

Of course, Suharto also presided over the state sanctioned murder of perhaps half a million citizens in the massacres of 1965 and 1966, an orgy of slaughter that left the rivers running into Surabaya clogged with the bodies of suspected leftwingers. The Suharto regime’s reliance on gangsters to strangle, stab and shoot its opponents by the hundreds of thousands was recently explored in the documentary The Act of Killing. 

Yet, as Sheridan says, in Canberra the enthusiasm for Suharto was entirely bipartisan, with a succession of Labor and Liberal foreign ministers preferring a blood-soaked strongman over the instability that any challenge to his regime might bring.

The Australian government’s willingness to tolerate repression in Indonesia is by no means anomalous. On the contrary, it’s entirely typical of Western attitudes to strategic allies, like Saudia Arabia, the oil kingdom in which the crimes punishable by death include apostasy, blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, sorcery, witchcraft and adultery. 

Precisely because the country is so deeply repressive, any mass struggle to reform the Saudi penal code would almost certainly end up as a broader campaign for political and economic rights. In other words, it would resemble the early phases of the Arab Spring – a movement that briefly threw into question almost every aspect of some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world.

And there’s the problem: Western powers did absolutely everything they could to prevent the Arab Spring troubling the Saudi royal family – privileging, once again, stability over justice. Indeed, when King Abdullah died a few months ago, John Kerry lauded the late dictator as “a man of wisdom and vision” and a “revered leader”. Tony Blair said “he was loved by his people and will be deeply missed”.

It’s a good thing that the Bali Nine case has led Australians to take far more of an interest in the Indonesian legal system, and the horror that many people feel about capital punishment is entirely justified and legitimate. But real change in Indonesia will come from the bottom, not the top, and so, almost by definition, will challenge the “stability” that Australian politicians and pundits have so often lauded.

That’s the challenge, then, for everyone appalled by the thought of the firing squad. If Indonesian protesters march on their parliament, just like waterside workers did here in in the case of the Ryan hanging in 1967, which side will we be on?