It's Widodo who should be building bridges

Most of us would have seen the pictures of the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, jollying along with his Indonesian counterpart, Joko Widodo, earlier this month, together with the accompanying reports that Turnbull was “rebuilding damaged ties” caused by the execution of Australian drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in April.

It is, of course, inevitable that Australia-Indonesia relations will normalise. Individual can, and will, harbour grudges. Nations cannot afford to do so.

However, I found it demeaning that it was Turnbull who had to do the bridge-building; that the impression given was of a naughty boy who had to apologise for daring to question Indonesia’s right to put who they choose  up against a wall and pump bullets into them.

Given that it was Widodo who was the prime mover in these legalised murders – he could have stopped them with the stroke of a pen – I would have thought he should also be doing his share of apologising; or at least recognising that Australia’s abhorrence of the death penalty might have upset a good number of its citizens and he understood that.

He could at least have apologised for the way his minions thought it was all a big joke (remember the pictures of Chan and Sukumaran taken with their jailers on their way to the execution site?) Perhaps he might have said that on reflection the trademark grin he was wearing when he signed the death warrants was just a tad tasteless.

Instead it’s business as usual in Indonesia with the Chief of the National Narcotics Bureau, Budi Waseso, stating simple executions are no deterrent (a revelation that could have come to him much earlier if he had read any of the research done on the use of the death penalty in any number of jurisdictions the world over).

In a rambling speech at a stage-managed display of the Bureau’s latest drug haul, Waseso said convicted drug traffickers should be force-fed drugs until they are dead.

“The prisons get more crowded, the numbers of prisoners increase, the capacity of prisons is limited, so we must think of solutions and when these perpetrators have the intention to kill, and they commit mass and premeditated murders, then to ensure the country is not at lost, then let these people pay the consequences of what they’ve done,” was just part of what he said.

The drugs were then burnt so they did not “grow feet” and walk out of police storage – a ringing endorsement of the nation’s law enforcement officers.

Equally of the prison system where, he said, convicted drug smugglers carried on their trade, even on death row; or indeed of his own Bureau as sufficient narcotics still get though his net to satisfy the needs of Indonesia 2.5 million regular users.

Waseso has an answer for this failure – it is his country’s “geography” and “democracy” that can be blamed for the easy entry of the drugs.

Democracy is the problem. Ah, now  we can see where he is coming from ; anyone so enamoured with medieval-style torture techniques would obviously see democracy as a hindrance to the  solutions he so wants to implement.

And just to keep the record straight, I do believe drug smugglers should be punished, short of blowing them away or force-feeding them narcotics.

I also feel we should never forget the factors driving that country to the north of Australia and the kind of people who are put into positions of authority there.