What a difference a new president can make.
Ten years ago in the months after he assumed power, Joko Widodo ignored clemency pleas and diplomatic protests to press ahead with the execution of two members of the Bali Nine, Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan.
He wanted to show Indonesia was tough on drug smugglers.
A decade later, less than two months after he took office, new leader Prabowo Subianto has done pretty much the opposite — releasing the remaining five prisoners from life sentences and sending them home on humanitarian grounds.
In a sign of goodwill to Australia, the men have been returned in time for Christmas, as promised.
While the Australian government ensured the transfer of the men happened secretly without any media attention until they were back home, there’s little sign of a backlash in Indonesia.
Ever since news of the planned transfer leaked in November, Mr Subianto’s government has stressed that Indonesia wouldn’t grant the men clemency or release them early.
His top law minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra reiterated after the men boarded the Jetstar flight back to Darwin, that they weren’t granted clemency.
“We transferred them all in the status of prisoners,” he told the ABC.
But legal experts in both countries have for weeks said a prisoner transfer couldn’t happen because the laws between Indonesia and Australia to do it don’t exist.
Instead a “practical agreement’ deal was signed last Friday in a virtual meeting with Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, which appears to lack some of the conditions Indonesia had hoped to impose.
While Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the men have initially been taken to government-sponsored accommodation for “rehabilitation”, it’s understood they are now free men.
Indonesia had said it would reserve the right to “monitor” the “prisoners’ once they are back in Australia to continue serving their sentences, but people familiar with the arrangements have indicated that’s not going to be possible.
This prisoner transfer looks much more like clemency and an early release by Indonesia’s new president, even if not in name.
And if there’s assumption that it would be unpopular in Indonesia, the government in Jakarta isn’t deterred.
In the coming days, Indonesian authorities are expected to transfer home another convicted drug smuggler in a very similar agreement.
Filipino mother Mary Jane Veloso was due to be executed by the same firing squad that shot Bali Nine members Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan in 2015.
She received a last minute reprieve and will now be “transferred” to Manila, where she’s viewed as a drug mule victim and likely to be quickly released by a government happy to have her back home.
It’s a far cry from the tone set by Mr Subianto’s predecessor when he was in his early months, and a contrast to the strongman image that many have of the former military general who now runs Indonesia.
Little wonder the five men expressed their “immense gratitude” to Subianto upon their release, as well as to the years-long efforts of the Department of Foreign Affairs and successive Australian governments.
A former British prisoner who served three years in Kerobokan and Bangli prisons in Bali alongside Matthew Norman and Scott Rush recently described to me the overcrowded jails as places where inmates sleep on wet cement and are forgotten about.
In recent months he urged me to write a fresh story to remind people of the plight of the Australians he met in the prisons, ahead of the twentieth anniversary of their arrests.
Little did we know those men wouldn’t make it to the twenty-year anniversary behind bars in April next year.
The wheels were already in motion for their return home.
Loading…