Mission & Justice

Sarah Smiles; 10/11/08; (3 Items)
Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith expressed contempt for the Bali bombers yesterday but stressed Australia’s opposition to the death penalty. “I had nothing but contempt for what the Bali bombers did and what they had to say when they were alive. And my view hasn’t changed now,” Mr Smith said. But he added: “Australia, of course, for a long period of time, has generally opposed capital punishment.” Mr Smith said Australia would soon be co-sponsoring an international moratorium on capital punishment at the UN General Assembly.

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Paul Toohey; 7/11/08

How  are you going to feel? Vindicated? Indifferent? Sad? Angry? Glad they’re dead? Or does it make you feel sick? Consistently, since the 2002 Bali bombings, there has been little passionate advocacy from within Australia for the bombers to be spared. It is understandable. These were not Australians; they were enemies of Australia. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout Finch asks her father: “Atticus, is it true you defend niggers?” Atticus tells her that there has been “some high talk” around their town. Well, there’s been some high talk around this country, much of it cries for blood. The test, for me, is whether those people who clamoured for the executions would be prepared to themselves pull the trigger. Me, I could not do it. I guess that means I’m against the death penalty.

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4/11/08; (2 Items)

The Rudd government is putting the lives of Australians on death row at risk by supporting the execution of the Bali bombers, a Catholic priest says. Brisbane priest Father Timothy Harris last week visited former parishioners and convicted drug mules, Scott Rush, who is on death row in Bali, and Michael Czugaj, who is serving a long jail sentence. Fr Harris said supporting the execution of the three Bali bombers would make it harder for the Australian government to argue against the death penalty in other cases.

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Andra Jackson; 1/11/08

Jill Jolliffe knows that often in wars it is the heroes who are remembered while the suffering of ordinary people goes unnoted. But the Australian journalist, who has spent more than 25 years reporting on the East Timorese independence struggle, has found a way of ensuring that the memory of these silent sacrifices will be preserved. In 1983, Jolliffe landed an international scoop when a confidential Indonesian military manual made its way into her hands. It had been seized by Fretilin guerilla fighters during a raid on Indonesian military barracks, and smuggled out of East Timor. It was a counter-insurgency manual with a section of advice on conduct to be followed when administering torture, to avoid later identification. It included admonishments such as: “Do not take pictures of people when they are naked, and make sure nobody sees you,” she recounts.

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Joe Kelly & Stephen Fitzpatrick; 31/10/08 (2 Items)

Lawyers representing Australians on death row in Indonesia have urged the Rudd Government to signal its in-principle opposition to the imminent execution of the Bali bombers, or risk being “objectively identified as hypocrites” across Asia. Colin McDonald QC, who represents Bali Nine member Scott Rush, said the Rudd Government needed to speak with one voice in condemning capital punishment or it would be harder to save Australian lives in the future. “In practical terms, it makes it so much harder to save the lives of Australian citizens when there is apparent political ambivalence about the carrying-out of the death penalty overseas,” he said. Kevin Rudd told Neil Mitchell yesterday on Melbourne Radio 3AW that his Government was “universally opposed to the death penalty”, but would intervene only “in the case of Australian citizens”.

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28/10/08

PNG Consul General in Jayapura Bill Veri has refuted comments by Sandaun provincial police commander Sakawar Kasieng that there was a military buildup at Skouw and Arso on the Indonesian side of the border. Commander Kasieng said last week that there was a military buildup near the border, including the Tami river post.He reported of the construction of a trans-border highway on the Indonesian side from Wutung in the Sandaun Province towards the Western province. He said the road construction was luring the border communities especially on the PNG side who were seeking basic services to choose to be part of Indonesia.

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22/10/08

The West Sepik provincial police commander Sakawar Kasieng yesterday warned people in Vanimo and border villages not to travel to Jayapura in the Papua Province of Indonesia because of current unrest there. Mr Kasieng said police manning the border post at Wutung had been put on alert as the situation in Jayapura was tense with fully armed Indonesian soldiers conducting intensive checks on motorists at the border and the Jayapura District in search of firearms and offensive weapons following a demonstration last Saturday. According to unconfirmed reports three civilians in Waena in Jayapura about 80 kilometres from the PNG- Indonesian border were shot dead by the Indonesian military during the demonstration.

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Editorial; 22/10/08; (2 Items)

It may have been their last party before the firing squad, but Indonesia’s celebrity terrorists still managed to gloat. By all accounts, it was a grotesque and deeply offensive scene: the Bali bombers, all dressed up for the recent Islamic holiday and crowing over the carnage they unleashed in 2002, their fawning prison guards and followers hanging off their every word. No case has tested opposition to the death penalty more sorely than these abhorrent, grinning assassins. Yet those who universally oppose the death penalty would argue that the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was wrong, just as the former prime minister John Howard was wrong, to declare the Bali bombers “deserve the justice that will be delivered to them”. Opposition to the death penalty is a moral absolute. Australia cannot endorse the apparently imminent execution of the Bali bombers yet seek to save the lives of Australian citizens on death row. Nowhere is the moral contradiction more problematic than in Indonesia, where three of our own, convicted drug smugglers, are facing execution.

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Cynthia Banham; 21/10/08 (2 Items)

Divisions are emerging in the Federal Government over Labor’s stance on the death penalty as execution day for the Bali bombers approaches. Concerns are growing that the failure of the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, to articulate a consistent position on Australia’s opposition to the death penalty - regardless of nationality or crime - could jeopardise the chances of achieving clemency for the Australians on death row in Indonesia. Earlier this month Mr Rudd said the Bali bombers, who may be executed this week, “deserve the justice that we delivered to them”. The issue was brought up in caucus last week by Duncan Kerr, the Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs.

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20/10/08

Australian forensic experts are in East Timor to help solve one of the enduring mysteries of the Indonesian occupation — the location of mass graves from the 1991 Dili cemetery massacre. Forensic anthropologists from Victoria and Argentina have gone to the country to look for the graves of those killed in the 1991 massacre, believed to have numbered between 100 and 400. The Indonesian military opened fire on pro-independence supporters during a peaceful demonstration in Dili in 1991.

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