Contrary to Corby's Mother...Balinese are not in shock
"YOU KNOW HOW MUCH BALINESE CARE about this case?" asks Made Wijaya, the Australian-born Michael White and 34 years on the island, where he's a world-ranked resort designer, and cross-cultural provocateur. "Kosong," he answers, employing the Bahasa word for zero as he fashions an "0" with thumb and forefinger. The Bulletin/Newsweek (Australia) Issue cover-dated June 1, 2005
Cover Story
Judgement in Denpasar
By Eric Ellis
BALI'S UBIQUITOUS FLEET OF pedagang koran - Indonesia's death-defying urchins who tempt motorists with mobile newsstands at traffic lights - have a keen sense of their market. As motorists streamed into Denpasar last Friday morning, the Lombok barefoots were peddling their usual line-up of papers, including the Jakarta Post's headline of the week: "Aussie media makes martyr of Corby".
But Friday was different. This time the touts balanced a pile of six-times-the-cover-price Adelaide Advertisers, West Australians, Sydney Daily Telegraphs, even a Hobart Mercury for goodness sake - titles seldom seen beyond their home cities let alone abroad. Awash with cash, the Schapellites were in town - a white-skinned juggernaut of media, diplomats, lawyers, advisers, family, camp followers and rubberneckers - and all were primed for plundering, as Bali does particularly skilfully of foreign visitors.
With amber turning red, one bule (foreigner) stole a glimpse of Melbourne's Herald-Sun. The paperboy, no more than 12, sensed a kill, whispering a single word into his ear to clinch the sale.
"Corrrrrbyy!!!" the imp hissed, rolling his r's into d's as Indonesians do when speaking Bahasa.
But Bali's news sellers also have a keen news sense. No sooner had Corby's fate been text messaged to Australians around Bali, and televised to the angry majority at home, the scamps were flogging the International Herald Tribune and Paris' Le Figaro. As Kerobokan prison's doors shut behind the teary girl with green eyes, Corby was old news on the island. If it ever commanded much meaningful attention at all.
"YOU KNOW HOW MUCH BALINESE CARE about this case?" asks Made Wijaya, the Australian-born Michael White and 34 years on the island, where he's a world-ranked resort designer, and cross-cultural provocateur. "Kosong," he answers, employing the Bahasa word for zero as he fashions an "0" with thumb and forefinger.
A Bali champion and expert on local culture and architecture, Wijaya is for once more concerned for his birthland than his adopted home. "What's happening down there? Have we gone completely and utterly mad? It's like the country's been hijacked by madmen. I thought we were more grown-up than that now in Asia. Clearly not."
The harsh truth is that 4 million Balinese are not, as Corby's hysterical mother Ros claims, "in shock" at Judge Linton Sirait's decision to jail her daughter for 20 years. Nor are 230 million Indonesians. Ask Wayan Sugiartha, a literate, mid-level ticketing executive with Indonesia's national airline Garuda. In his early 30s, married with two children and entrenched in Bali's middle-class, he's used to dealing with emotional, demanding Australians. "I suppose for Australians this is sad and we feel sorry for her as a person," he says. "But we are more worry [sic] about our president fixing KKN [the Bahasa acronym for Indonesia's society-sapping culture of corruption, collusion and nepotism], the cost of fuel, making a job and to fix the tsunami in Aceh ... we more concern about this than this bule lady."
Nor is the rest of Asia. Says the state-owned New Paper in Singapore, supposedly Australia's best friend in Asia, "Unfair dinkum? Not!" Asians are baffled that an Australia they normally see as a no-nonsense and logical country, struggling to shake off a not-too-distant racist past, can so unquestioningly embrace a convicted criminal and be so incapable of accepting a procedure which, for once, was applied by an Indonesian court that maintained its constitutionally enshrined but rarely practised independence. It may be cold comfort to the majority of Australians who believe Corby is innocent, but her sentence was lenient. A young Balinese woman, tried in an adjacent court but lacking the werewithal to whip her compatriots into a media frenzy, received 15 years for holding 1.5g of marijuana (about enough for a joint).
Sabam Siagian knows Australians as well as any Indonesian can. One of Asia's leading intellectuals, the Jakarta Post's former chief editor was Indonesia's ambassador in Canberra from 1991 to 1995, during the darkest days of Indonesia's East Timor occupation. "This needless reaction over her, it's incomprehensible to me," he says. "Australia has always boasted to us that it is an advanced society but this inexplicable display of emotion has Indonesians wondering if this is still the case.
"Australians must understand that this particular court operated very well, very fairly, that it took its task very seriously and correctly," Siagian says. "I think we Indonesians have to make more of an effort to understand the Australian psychology."
Says Dr Greg Barton, associate professor of politics at Deakin University. "This case says more about Australian attitudes to Asia than it does about Indonesia's legal system. [It] simply exposes the ignorance of most Australians about Indonesia. The West, including Australia, has been at Indonesia for years to fix the corruption in their legal system and yet when it works in largely the manner it's supposed to, we don't like it," says Barton. "You can't have it both ways.
"Given the extraordinary pressures it was under, the court was remarkably transparent, the judges admirable in their resistance to external politics, and the politicians admirable in their restraint in letting it play itself out."
IF MOST AUSTRALIANS BELIEVE CORBY IS innocent, what seems a larger proportion of those living outside it believe the opposite. Their view is shaped not by the ratings-hungry Australian broadcast media but by direct experience negotiating their way through life in Indonesia. Long practised in the comparative idiosyncrasies of Indonesia's legal system, these expat Australians are suspicious of Corby's histrionics, and stunned by what they see as the naivete and incompetence of her team (Corby's teary head lawyer Lily Lubis normally handles Bali property transactions, and the Sri Lankan-born advisor Vasudevan Rasiah is helping develop a casino here). They are appalled by the relentless barrage of insults sprayed at Indonesia from the "colourful" Ron Bakir and friends, their ill-founded accusations of corruption, the court outbursts, poster protests and basic cultural cluelessness. "Every time someone started mouthing off, or sent death threats to Indonesian diplomats, or caused a fuss in the court, it just made matters worse," says Andrew Grant, a Sydneysider who runs a global crisis management consultancy from Bali.
Perhaps more significantly for Australia's longer-term future in Asia, this case exposed as far-fetched myth the hopes of myriad Australian politicians that Australia might be developing a meaningful relationship with Asia. Take the mostly unchallenged racism of those like 2GB announcer Malcolm T. Elliott, who likened Indonesia's brown-skinned President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and the case judges to banana-eating apes. Remarks like this, said in Indonesia, and indeed most western countries, would have Elliott humiliated before a racial vilification tribunal, copping a heavy fine and possibly a jail sentence. In a more volatile Indonesia, it would threaten lives, much as American revelations of Koran desecration recently did in the Middle East. But in a Schapellised Australia, it barely raises an eyebrow.
Yet it was mostly the sheer ignorance of how Indonesia is evolving as a modern democracy, and the refusal of Corby's supporters to work alongside it instead of challenging it so vituperatively, which so astounded Australia's Indonesianists. Perhaps it was the Aussie accents of hacks and hangers-on, who've never seen much of Indonesia beyond a sanitised Nusa Dua resort, egging them on. But at times the Corby camp tackled the case as if it was the Southport Magistrate's Court. Their angry refusal to accept that Indonesia's legal system is different from Australia, that Sirait's panel should speak English for their benefit - the judge has a vocabulary of about 10 words, 10 more than most of Corby's champions have of Bahasa - and that somehow because Corby was a young white woman, she was entitled to (and was granted) legal privileges not extended to others was astounding in its muddleheadness
IT MAY SHOCK AUSTRALIANS WHO THINK their northern neighbours barbarian monkeys, but Bali has a civil society, too, a very advanced one, and its modern version is in some ways not dissimilar to Australia. Released in 1998 from 50 years of dictatorship, Bali now has shock jocks, newspapers debating a spectrum of views, even its own version of Pauline Hanson spouting exclusionist vitriol. Luh Ketut Suryani is a psychiatrist-anthropologist who doesn't see a great deal of difference between drug runners, the Bali bombers and the ex-Australian diplomat William Brown, who committed suicide in 2003 when unmasked as a pedophile. As she sees it, all are outsiders polluting Bali's delicate culture, and she wants them off her island yesterday.
She even wants internal passports to stem other Indonesians coming to Hindu Bali. Suryani is on the extreme fringes of a gathering movement on Bali called Ajeg. It translates as "straight" or "correct" and essentially is about a back-to-basics reinforcement of philosophical, religious and cultural values, a purpose not unknown at Hillsong Church, or in John Howard's vision of Australia. Most Balinese devote an hour a day to cultural activities. "And it's Australians who think they are the civilised ones?" posits Made Wijaya.
Social activist Putu Suasta is on Ajeg's progressive flanks. When The Bulletin broke the news of Corby's 20-year sentence, he thought the sentence "a bit harsh". Suasta helped President SBY secure 13 seats in Bali to bolster his tenuous coalition. "We are changing our laws, and our society. Soon our laws will be more specific so maybe it will only be five years for marijuana but still death for heroin."
Cathy Sudharsana and Jero Asri occupy unique places from which to view things. Each has lived in Bali for many years, Asri since 1978 and Sudharsana since the mid-1980s after they both married into Ubud's royal family. Asri was transformed from Jane Gillespie of Sydney into a Balinese princess of one of the world's most exotic courts, the western wing of Ubud's royal puri. Renmark-born Cathy came a decade later, to the eastern wing. With their collective five kids schooled in Australia and Bali (Asri now fears for her three children's safety in Sydney), they are both genuinely cross-cultural Balinese-Australian families.
"I'm sickened to death by this absolutely stupid reaction," Asri says. "For the first time in my life, I'm ashamed to be an Australian. I am so proud of the respectful way Balinese and Indonesia have handled this matter, the restraint they have shown despite the disgusting racism.
"She should consider herself lucky; she would've died if it had've been Malaysia or Singapore. I'd rather spend 20 years in Bali than in some Australian jail, with all the disgusting trollops there ..."
Having seen Bali's economy battle Indonesia's tortuous transition to democracy, the 2002 bombings, SARS and travel warnings, Asri and Cathy are sanguine about threats of Australian boycotts on Balinese tourism. Says Asri: "I've no doubt we've lost a certain type of Australian over this who might come here but good riddance to them, I say. Anyone normal, with a mind, an education, some brains who can see through the crap, to see it objectively, well it won't bother them at all and they will continue to come. I don't want to see Australian-Indonesian relations go down the gurgler because of some westie."
MEDIA REACTION
The Corby Letters
Australians responded with threats of tourism boycotts - and worse - in the wake of Schapelle Corby's sentence. "If they won't send her home, then send in a crack team and get her," wrote Sydney Daily Telegraph reader Ann. "Get angry and get even," advised another Telegraph correspondent. "How sad it is," wrote WA's Michael Monroe in The Australian, "that Australians are constantly told to respect other cultures when it is so blindingly obvious they do not respect ours." The banner pictured above appeared on a Bondi, NSW, apartment block over the weekend. World Vision spokesman Martin Thomas reported phone lines running hot in the minutes following last Friday's verdict, with callers demanding refunds for tsunami donations. Some wondered if this anger was misdirected; one Melbourne Age online contributor claimed, "The baggage was tampered with in AUSTRALIA by AUSTRALIAN baggage handlers, NOT Indonesians." Agreed Kim A.: "We should boycott Qantas until they flush out who did it."
Others found yet another party to blame. "The Australian media should collectively apologise to Schapelle and her family and offer to fund the very best defence lawyers for the appeal process," raged NSW's John Walker. A subset of Australians attacked the Corby clan and Bali holidaymakers. "It is all her vicious relatives and screeching supporters that bother me," wrote Age reader Andrew T. At the same forum another posted: "Who cares ... only beer guzzlers and tacky bogans go there anyway."
