What an absolute travesty of justice the Schapelle Corby case is. Corby was sentenced in 2005 to a 20-year prison term for allegedly smuggling 4.2kg of cannabis into Bali, Indonesia. This week we are expected to jump for joy, because the Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has granted clemency to Corby ie, based on her deteriorating ‘mental health’, he has reduced her sentence by five years.
But you have to get beyond the pretty face and media hype, then ask yourself who… has the mental health problem here?
By this I mean, was the penalty for Corby initially so severe because of the damage ‘illegal drugs’ do to Indonesian health, Indonesian society? According to international statistics, 57 million Indonesians legally smoke and the habit reportedly kills 200 thousand citizens a year! And this number I imagine will only increase in the future, if current birth rates, literacy levels and government regulation remains the same.
You have to ask yourself also, was the initial penalty so severe because it is ‘illegal’ and therefore has the potential to corrupt the country’s moral fibre? My feeling is the 1965-66 anti-communist purge, 500,000 killed, the 1975 East Timor invasion, 100,000 killed, the suppression of East Timor independence [2000 killed], the current oppression of West Papuan independence aspirations, 100,000 killed, were and are, also illegal and morally… repugnant.
But to this time, to my knowledge, none of these state inspired actions have incurred similarly balanced judicial responses and in fact Yudhoyono, the current president, offering Corby clemency, was a platoon commander in Indonesian occupied East Timor in 1976…one year after the invasion!
Corby to my mind has been a convenient scapegoat, an out of luck Australian ‘whipping girl’ or ‘fall gal’, something to distract world attention from other internal Indonesian goings on and to ease wounded Indonesian national pride, after the abrupt loss of East Timor. Of course, bring Schapelle Corby home, get her back on Gold Coast beaches as early as possible, under any legalistic guise… but don’t clamour for standing room on the high moral ground, because there’s already no standing room.
Brendon Perrin,
Armidale
