andrew bolt, re aust. response to corby trial, page-29

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."