Drug trafficking: Why Indonesia was quick to execute the prisoners

An Australian national of South Asian origin, Myuran Sukumaran, was killed by a firing squad just after midnight on Wednesday (late Tuesday, Indian Standard Time) along with seven others convicted of drug trafficking in Indonesia.

Sukumaran was arrested in 2005 when he was 24, soon after he landed on the eastern Indonesian island of Bali. The Australian Federal Police had tipped off their Indonesian counterparts that a drug ring was going to smuggle in narcotics. Sukumaran had fallen in with the ring and dreams of quick wealth had got to him. Along with Chinese Australian Andrew Chan and others, he was allegedly offered a lighter sentence in exchange for money. And this allegation has been heard in several other cases, including those involving Nigerians.

A total of eight people – two Australians, four Nigerians, a Brazilian and an Indonesian – were executed early Wednesday in Indonesia for drug crimes. The role of the Australian police in informing on its citizens abroad had come in for severe criticism earlier and after the executions, there was widespread anger in Australia, Brazil and elsewhere. All the more so as Sukumaran and Chan were reported to have won praise for being helpful inmates, with the former teaching English and the latter acting as a Christian pastor.

The developments in Indonesia came a day after Pakistan executed its 100th convict since resuming state executions last December. Muneer Hussain from Kashmir, who was convicted of murder in 2000, was said to have been suffering from serious mental illness for at least 20 years prior to being sentenced, according to his lawyers at Justice Project Pakistan.

Most criminologists and jurists worldwide say the death penalty has no deterrent effect whatsoever. The United Nations, Amnesty International, Death Penalty Information Center and several other international organisations and NGOs are unanimous in the view that capital punishment does not deter crime. In fact, an exhaustive comparative study of two cities, Hong Kong and Singapore – with similar levels of economic development and population profiles, one without the death penalty and the other carrying one – by American professors Franklin Zimring, Jeffrey Fagan and David Johnson showed that when it came to homicide rates, there was no difference between the two. 

That finding can easily be extrapolated to other crimes, including drug trafficking. Incidentally, Singapore, which has some of the toughest anti-drug laws, for the first time in 2013 commuted to life the death penalty handed to Yong Vui Kong, a Malaysian national of Vietnamese origin. And it lifted the mandatory death penalty that had to be imposed on drug mules, allowing some leeway for judges. Behind this lay the indefatigable efforts to Singaporean lawyer, M Ravi, who has won much praise for his dogged determination.

In some jurisdictions, such as in Europe, drug smuggling carries at the most a few years’ imprisonment, with judges having the discretion to weigh mitigating circumstances. Indonesian judges obviously have wide discretion as they are widely accused of being corrupt and offering lighter sentences in return for bribes.

A few years ago, the then Indonesian foreign minister Marty Natalegawa had cited an international trend towards the abolition of the death penalty and declared, “Indonesia itself is already headed in that direction.” He linked the need to eschew capital punishment at home with Indonesia’s need to plead for the lives of its citizens abroad, who were accused of crimes including drug trafficking. “So, if we discuss narcotics crimes and the granting of clemency domestically, we also must remember that overseas, 45 per cent of Indonesians are facing the death penalty [for narcotics crimes],” he had said.

It is most unfortunate that President Joko Widodo went ahead with the latest executions. An Australian commentator has noted that the president is weak within his party and that, in order to pretend to be strong, he has gone in for the killing of convicts who had already served a number of years in jail.

This cynical act needs to be condemned strongly and forthrightly.