Gods and demons, p.16
Gods and Demons, page 16
Poor parents encouraged the marriages or offered their daughters to syndicates. So covert was the subject that most child welfare agencies were frustratingly poor sources. But the chief of one, Lidya Indayani Umar, reeled off a price list like it was a spa menu. ‘Typically the girl is sixteen to eighteen years old and paid between three million rupiah [A$300] and five million rupiah a month. If the girl is good-looking with a good body it will be more expensive. If the girl is a virgin she commands about IDR10 million [A$1000].’ She recalled the case of a girl who, under a kawin kontrak arranged by a syndicate, married a man waiting for a boat to Australia in 2012. ‘The contract was to last until he got on the boat.’
*
Intrinsic to many of my stories were two Iranian refugees, Mohammad and his wife Shirin, who took me to communities and translated from Farsi. Not only that, Mohammad picked me up at Jakarta’s airport. It was comforting to see a friendly face in that shambolic city, especially that of one calling me ‘sista’. Persecuted over their Christian faith, the couple and their young son, Ahoura, had lived in Indonesia since 2010, providing church services and care to refugees.
We became good friends. Once, Shirin asked me how I listed them as contacts in my phone. ‘I hope you don’t label us under “refugees”.’ They had their own story: each week at midnight they hit the airwaves broadcasting to thousands in Darwin and South-East Asia from the Indonesian capital. Through a church-sponsored program, they delivered news to refugees and offered help to those traumatised by dire circumstances and drownings of loved ones.
I went with the couple once to file a picture story. I hoped the coverage might push them up the resettlement queue. They were devastated to be rejected by Australia in 2015.
Over the years, Mohammad drove me all over Jakarta and Bogor for interviews – to strange areas I wouldn’t otherwise have seen. One afternoon we visited a South Jakarta IOM kost where painful memories and the discomfort of sharing cramped quarters – whole families squeezed into a single bed – took their toll. Among them, a couple’s four-year-old child had drowned in 2012 while attempting a voyage to Australia, and almost everyone had attempted multiple boat passages. Some had nearly drowned. The smell of fear still lingered – fear they would be rejected for resettlement and of persecution if they had to return to their countries of origin.
It was here that this fear became tangible to me through another’s voice.
A Pakistani Hazara refugee and freelance journalist, Syed Muhammad Hassan, was propped up on his single bed, his twelve-year-old son beside him. I perched at the end. Hassan spoke rapidly, in oddly inflected English. Depicting horrific scenes they had fled, he said, ‘We have a different colour, different skins, we will be recognised that we are Hazaras, Muslim Shia; they [terrorists] just come up to you, and BOOM,’ he bellowed, his arms flailing above his head. ‘It’s hell. You can’t go to Karachi, you can’t live in Islamabad. We are all psychotic, traumatised under these conditions. Yeah, we are psychos, you can’t see that, it’s hidden.’ Then he spoke of his eternal gratitude for the privilege of being safe and alive. ‘We are so lucky, we are sooo lucky,’ he repeated over and over. His voice stuck in my head. ‘And I’m thankful, deep in my heart, to IOM until I die, giving me food, accommodation. We have everything.’
Hassan, at forty-nine, shared the shoebox room and single bed with his son, Sheith Kazmi. It could have been a five-star hotel. In Pakistan, he’d made documentaries terrorists don’t like – about widows and orphaned children after their husbands and fathers had been murdered, and about human trafficking and sex slavery. First targeted as an ethnic Hazara, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (an al-Qaeda-affiliated group), the Taliban and other terrorists tried to gag him in warning calls. ‘They know me from TV, interviews. They said, “We know what time you leave, when you attend meetings. If you don’t stop writing about these people, we will kill you.” Once you get on to their list you’re dead.’
The names of politicians, police generals, media, neighbours, relatives, friends and businessmen tripped off his tongue: ‘All dead.’
‘It’s anarchy, different groups are killing people. You never know who is following on a motorbike. Sitting in a café outside, you hear the machine-gun fire.’ He was soon to be resettled in the US but he was afraid to be photographed. ‘They can do anything.’ He shivered. ‘I have nightmares every day. I don’t want to die now.’
A compatriot, Liaquat Ali Changezi, whom I met a few years later in Bogor, fit the high-profile category so appealing to the Taliban. In Quetta, Changezi – with movie-star good looks – wore several hats. He was a famous TV actor, news, documentary and drama producer, and he’d started his own production house in 2003. He was also on the hit list.
Back in 2008, terrorists in Balochistan, Pakistan, were targeting people like Changezi amid daily massacres in the enclave of Hazara Town. He described the picture Hassan had painted. ‘I had friends who were gunned down, point blank, in the street by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.’ One was the Hazara Democratic Party chairman Hussain Ali Yousafi, who was assassinated in 2009. Another, Pakistan’s three-time Olympic boxer Abrar Hussain Hazara, was shot dead by unknown gunmen in 2011 in Quetta.
The Pakistani Hazara also received death threats by phone. He fled Quetta, leaving his family in a secure compound, to work in Kabul, Afghanistan. When he returned to Quetta in 2013, he found a genocide of monumental proportions. ‘In one year they killed more than a thousand people. I decided there was no space for me.’ After paying US$36,000 to people smugglers, the family landed in Indonesia in 2014.
I had met Changezi in Bogor at the school he’d opened in 2014 after finding none for his four children. Now a mecca for refugees, the Cisarua Refugee Learning Centre overflowed.
In 2018 the family resettled in New Zealand, a few months before the Christchurch mosque massacre – a coincidence not lost on them.
*
I wanted to interview unaccompanied refugee children, not often documented by journalists. Mohammad knew a South Jakarta shelter for minors, and one day we took four excitable Hazara boys out for their first pizza. The interviews evolved without the burden of undue bureaucracy, which wasn’t uncommon in Indonesia – notwithstanding political sensitivities in areas such as West Papua and Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra.
The head of the all-male shelter, run by the Church World Service, granted me permission. I had one request: to interview the youngest boy, who was ten. I imagined him to have fewer inhibitions than the older children. They all eagerly piled into Mohammad’s tiny Mr Bean car wearing their best donated clothes. But at the restaurant I felt the tension build. As a mother, I was particularly confronted by their harrowing experiences and solitary journeys from their home countries without a parent or guardian. I wanted to hug them.
Considered lucky to have a place at the shelter, the boys were among 643 unaccompanied minors registered with the UNHCR. Hadayad Ullah, the ten-year-old, exemplified the acute pain of each child. An angelic-looking boy, he had arrived from Afghanistan the month before. He was just a baby but his eyes portrayed the horror he had witnessed. As he sat toying with his pizza, he told me his father had been kidnapped by the Taliban and he had no idea where his mother was, or if she was even alive. His chocolate eyes watered. He pushed the uneaten pizza away. ‘I’m so sad. They took my father. I thought maybe they will take me too. When I think about my mother and father I cry all night. I don’t know if I’ll see my mother again.’ He stared out of a window, holding back tears.
In his short, turbulent life, Hadayad had learnt more about arbitrary persecution and murder than about how to read or write. The eldest of five children, he’d never attended school because his family feared firebombing by the Taliban. A family friend had paid an agent to fly him from Kabul to Jakarta. ‘My life was in danger.’
‘Didn’t anyone ask why you were alone on the plane?’ I asked.
‘No, no one asked. I was scared and I felt sick.’
Arriving disoriented at Jakarta’s airport, he had US$150 in his pocket. He’d connected with several asylum seekers on the same flight, and they took a taxi to Cisarua. There they dumped Hadayad unceremoniously by the side of the road.
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘I was scared, I was crying. A person [an Afghan asylum seeker] saw me and took me to his house.’
The following day, Hadayad, with help from his new friend, registered at the UNHCR, enabling him to move to the shelter. He was lucky: many children ended up in squalid detention centres because there was nowhere else for them.
When my story was published in July 2014 in The Guardian, it drew hundreds of empathetic online comments. A few astounded me with conspiracy theories about Hadayad’s photo – he was apparently too good-looking, too angelic and too well dressed; he had been plucked in a ploy to gain sympathy and appeal to readers. These were such farcical observations. Hadayad was incidentally photogenic, a beautiful child and the youngest. Did his face make his story more poignant to the newspaper’s readers? If so, it could only be a good thing, I thought.
16
FREEDOM’S DOOR
Parallels and paradoxes could be drawn between the refugees and prisoners I visited: largely their absence of basic rights and protection. But each 17 August, Indonesia’s Independence Day, Kerobokan jail inmates cast their woes aside. Amid music and dance, inmates displayed the fruits of their rehab programs. The Bali Nine showed paintings, screen-printed T-shirts and jewellery, and even participated in sport competitions, with journalists invited to appraise and mingle.
Most importantly, prisoners on set terms traditionally received sentence cuts. In 2013, all of the Bali Nine were still housed in Kerobokan, but only Renae Lawrence, serving twenty years, was eligible for a reduction. She and Schapelle Corby were generously rewarded for good behaviour, but that year the announcements were postponed.
This didn’t dampen Lawrence’s spirits. ‘I’m happy,’ she told me, smiling, ‘as happy as I can be.’
With the usual pomp and pageantry for dignitaries over, journalists made a beeline for Bali Nine members. I had joined a small clutch around Lawrence. When reporters fanned out seeking other members, I remained chatting.
A UK correspondent approached us, inquiring after the welfare of Lindsay Sandiford. The British grandmother was known to be selective with reporters, and for her media silence. Lawrence firmly told the reporter that Sandiford, who never appeared on celebratory days, was off limits. When an Indonesian female inmate mumbled incoherently, Lawrence warned her to shut up. The UK journalist persisted. Lawrence reiterated authoritatively that ‘no one’ would be discussing Sandiford. The female prisoner again muttered indecipherably, and the UK punter sauntered off.
From left field, a strapping female warden stepped in, swiping the inmate across her face with an open hand. The prisoner cringed and bowed her head. No one in the crowd seemed to have noticed. Stunned, I stopped mid-sentence to stare at the prisoner who’d just been bashed. Lawrence followed my gaze. After a brief silence, she explained nonchalantly that the woman had been ‘speaking out of turn’.
Within the hierarchy of the jail, Lawrence wielded enormous power and was feared by many. She was known to have had a number of girlfriends among the inmates, and had been a leader, or tamping, entrusted by the jail governor and guards to uphold security within the women’s block.
By the time of her release in November 2018, Lawrence had been transferred to Bangli prison in central Bali after allegedly plotting to kill a prison guard in Kerobokan jail in 2013 – which she denied.
*
The ties between Lawrence and Schapelle Corby were fickle and ambiguous. Lawrence’s Indonesian lawyer Anggia Lubis Browne told me of jealousies, especially when Corby was granted parole. ‘She is a bit jealous. She’s upset, asking me to do something for her, and says, “It’s not fair.”’
The week preceding Corby’s climactic parole release on 10 February 2014 from Kerobokan, Australian media packs parachuted into Bali for the spectacle of the decade. I had reported Corby’s tumultuous course following her 2005 trial via the few permitted near the reclusive drug trafficker. But like most of the correspondents in Jakarta, I dreaded the unfolding media circus.
Amid a storm of controversy, in May 2012 Corby was granted five years’ clemency on her twenty-year sentence by then-president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on humanitarian grounds for her deteriorating mental health. With accumulated remissions, she qualified for parole. Anticipating the convicted drug trafficker’s first freedom steps, journalists staked out coveted positions around Kerobokan prison and Corby’s proposed new home in Kuta.
Australia’s then consul general to Bali, Brett Farmer, must have been relieved that his posting ended just before Corby’s release. His final consular duty was a meeting with the Kerobokan jail governor Farid Junaedi before fronting hordes of journalists and flying out.
The week dragged on. Cameramen were so desperate they snapped anything in the prison yard, from parked dump trucks to barbed wire. Each afternoon when the prison governor went home, the media pounced. ‘I’m waiting for the money shot,’ freelance Queensland cameraman Nathan Richter whispered conspiratorially to me outside the jail. I gazed at the media throngs – bevies of Indonesians, local TV crews and Australian networks were occupied with that singular thought.
Richter’s dogged enthusiasm finally got him deported when he was apprehended for working on a tourist visa near the Kuta home where Corby would stay with her sister and brother-in-law. Authorities denied the Corby family had requested his deportation. My source had seen Richter outside an office photographing Corby’s sister Mercedes. Shortly after that, Richter got his marching orders along with a Network Ten reporter, also working on a tourist visa.
Then came a request from Today Tonight asking me, as an old Bali hand, for an interview about local and expatriate attitudes to Corby. Was everyone on tenterhooks awaiting her release? From the locals’ point of view, they were bemused by the fuss, while expats repeatedly, irritatingly, asked me if Corby had been released yet.
The excitement around her release reached fever pitch as she left Kerobokan in a police van for official processing. For three hours after she emerged – her face bizarrely obscured by a hat and scarf – from Kerobokan’s gates through an obstacle course of officers and into a waiting van, she was in the eye of a rolling scrum of camera crews and reporters. They tailed the thirty-six-year-old on mopeds and in cars to her final destination: the Sentosa Luxury Villas in Seminyak. Only Corby’s van and entourage of black SUVs – one carrying Channel Seven’s veteran, semi-retired current affairs star, Michael Willesee, who planned to interview Corby for the Sunday Night program – eased inside the gates. Smiling broadly, Willesee would have been mightily disappointed. The exclusive paid interview, reportedly for about A$2 million, including spinoffs to the Seven Group’s New Idea magazine, hit a wall: the Indonesian government threatened to revoke Corby’s parole if it went ahead.
While Mercedes doubled down on negotiations, even flying to Jakarta to plead their case, Willesee strolled out of the bunker periodically to dine at the fashionable Petitenget restaurant across the road. Each time he ran the gauntlet of a media mob demanding to know what deal Seven had cut; the notion of a multimillion-dollar deal was just silly, he said.
The Sunday Night crew stayed in the Sentosa villa complex for three weeks with the Corby family, including Mercedes and their brother Michael, waiting in vain for a government backflip. It settled for an interview with Mercedes and a few still images of Corby.
When I called Australian Saxon Looker, owner of the Sentosa Seminyak where Corby was holed up, he seemed surprised a journalist had his mobile number. He declined to confirm Corby was a guest in the villa, which then cost up to US$1150 nightly. ‘If she’s there,’ Looker said carefully, ‘it’s probably at the behest of some TV station. I can only imagine there’s a big amount of money for an exclusive interview. The hotel is not part of a deal.’ Looker had obviously forgotten my damning piece about his huge Canggu development, Sea Sentosa, that had decimated a beautiful coastal village.
Each day I drove to a café abutting Sentosa’s gates where the media had set up office, waiting for a Schapelle appearance. News Limited, well represented, took a villa at the resort to get close to the Corbys. One night at a Sentosa drinks party, the entire Australian press corps was at the bar. Television networks and print journos huddled in groups, coordinating plans. We had made it to the inner sanctum but there was no sign of the Corbys, bunkered down in their villa cocoon.
We were running out of angles. During the hiatus, Fairfax correspondent Michael Bachelard threw a dinner party, ordering enough Balinese food for a jail. Ensconced in a magnificent compound in Batu Belig with other Fairfax reporters, the villas curved around an enormous centrepiece pool into which some plunged. No one got inebriated; they planned early morning starts and fresh tactics.
Meanwhile, journalists snapped up guesthouses in a laneway beside the Kuta family compound where Corby was expected to stay for her three-year parole with Mercedes, brother-in-law Wayan Widyartha and the couple’s children. Television crews pointed cameras intrusively into the Corby compound.
The day before Corby’s release I visited the Kuta family home, finding it eerily quiet, locked up with curtains drawn. Inside Wayan’s compound, there was discord among the seven families about Corby living among them. She was an outsider who didn’t belong in their Balinese Hindu tradition, they told me. Because of her history, they feared she would bring nasty spirits and bad karma. Nyoman, a priest as well as Wayan’s uncle, stressed Corby couldn’t live there. A cousin, Ayu, said, ‘She cannot be brought here because her religion is different. She’s not a member of the family.’
