The Straits Times (Singapore) October 25, 2008
Time to put an end to spectacle John McBeth, Senior Writer YESTERDAY'S announcement that the Bali bombers will be executed in the first week of November comes as a welcome relief for those who wondered how much longer their lease on life would hold. At least now, there will be an end to the stream of gratuitous media stories that have done nothing more than milk public outrage over the condemned men's refusal to express regret for what they did. Imam Samudra, Ali Ghufron and Ali Amrozi bin Nurhasyim are fanatics. And because they're fanatics, they are not sorry about anything. They never will be. History is littered with their type, secular and sectarian. Breathless interviews, such as the one conducted recently by CNN, simply gave the three unrepentant militants a stage for their rantings. It is not clear why they were even allowed to talk to the media. But to hear the CNN correspondent trying to argue with Samudra and Amrozi over the morality of killing more than 202 people was, frankly, rather sickening. Although television has never been known for penetrating insights, it makes me wonder what has happened to my profession that we have come down to this. The Australian media has been no better, goading the ever-willing bombers into saying things that were only designed to stoke further indignation. For the families of their victims, it was simply cruel. Six years is not all that long to wait for justice to be done. In some American states, 20 years is often the norm for Death Row inmates. Much more interesting is why the Indonesian Attorney-General's Office dragged out the process for so long, the most recent act being the onstitutional Court's decision rejecting the bombers' contention that death by firing squad amounts to torture. In his first judgment since being made head of the court in August, chief judge Mohammad Mahfud declared: 'The pain death convicts endure is a logical consequence inherent in a death process ... so it cannot be categorised as torture.' Defence lawyers had argued that beheading - supposedly the condemned men's preferred method of dying - and lethal injection were less painful. Should anyone really care? Delaying the executions risked creating the very scenario the government wished to avoid: turning the bombers into a source of lasting fascination - not only for Islamic radicals, but for other impressionable elements of society as well. It is inevitable, of course, that the three men will be seen as heroes by a small but vocal minority. Perhaps as much as 10 per cent of Indonesia's adult population, according to a 2006 poll, believe suicide bombing is justifiable. Radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, the former alleged spiritual leader of the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) terror network, has already stirred such sentiment by describing the three as martyrs who will get 'special treatment in the afterlife'. One possible site for a proposed shrine in their memory is Cianjur, west of Bandung, the birthplace of Samudra and JI operations chief Riduan Isamuddin, or Hambali, who remains incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay. Cianjur was one of the breeding grounds of Darul Islam, a violent radical movement that sprang up in rural West Java in the 1950s. It sought to turn post-colonial Indonesia into an Islamic state. JI has its roots in Darul Islam, which pre-dated Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda by decades and, at one point, led the Sukarno government to declare a state of emergency across western Java. Not even the country's top anti-terrorist officials could figure out why the charade over the Bali bombers went on for as long as it did, short of the usual speculation that the government was once again giving ground to extremists. If it was fear of a public backlash, it didn't stack up. Although they might debate the moral issue of capital punishment, most of Indonesia's Muslims had little or no sympathy for the bombers. That would negate too possible concerns that the executions might have an impact on next year's legislative and presidential elections. If that had become an excuse to put off the fateful day, then the bombers could have rested easily in their cells until 2010. Apart from the Constitutional Court ruling, one more recent reason for the hold-up was that the authorities did not want to carry out the executions during the fasting month of Ramadan. Fair enough, although I have a few problems with the fact that Islamic militants once again ignored the sanctity of Ramadan with a string of suicide bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan. No sooner had Ramadan ended than the bombers were allowed to meet with their relatives and have a field day with the media. Then came yesterday's announcement from the Attorney-General's Office. Even for opponents of the death penalty, it was time to bring down the curtain on such an unseemly spectacle. [EMAIL PROTECTED] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
