Gods and demons, p.22
Gods and Demons, page 22
I’d first met Suryani in 2010 through her groundbreaking work on foreign paedophile networks and her Committee Against Sexual Abuse. Her name had become synonymous with a movement against Bali’s underbelly and fiery attempts to prod the provincial government into action.
Armed with intravenous anti-psychotic drugs, Suryani took me on some of her monthly home visits in 2014 to administer medication, tracking patients’ behavioural and physical changes. Most were well enough to be freed within several months, but if families kept them shackled she refused further treatment – as was Kadek’s fate. Based on her holistic approach, she offered meditation and hypnosis if patients recovered sufficiently. Suryani had found that 31 per cent of shackled patients recovered with ongoing treatment. Those who relapsed generally returned to restraints or confinement as many families resisted interference. Balinese psychiatrist Denny Thong told me, ‘They are ashamed of a mentally ill family member. They don’t say they have a mental illness, they say they are possessed.’
A decade earlier Suryani had successfully appealed to the former governor for funding that went to the Suryani Institute for Mental Health. She claimed almost all of her treated pasung patients remained free that year. But it was a one-off subsidy. Officials questioned Suryani’s methods of ‘meditation and singing sessions’. ‘They said, “She gets a lot of money just for teaching meditation and relaxation,”’ Suryani scoffed as we sat in her clinic. A strong advocate of religious beliefs and traditional healing, she contended, ‘[In Balinese Hindu culture] the purification ceremony throws out the evil spirit influence. It will make patients quickly recover and maintain mental health. I say, “Please do practise beliefs.”’ Suryani and Lesmana relied on donations; when they dried up, Suryani dug into her own pocket.
Thong, the founding director of Bangli Mental Hospital, similarly advocated treating pasung patients with a mix of Eastern and Western psychiatry. He knew Suryani from Bali’s Udayana University in the 1970s when he’d been studying psychiatry. ‘She was different from other Balinese women,’ he recalled. He described her as a force to be reckoned with; a charismatic, ambitious woman who bucked social strictures and alienated people. ‘Bali women are more submissive and subservient. She’s headstrong and outspoken. She wants things done her way.’ He smiled wryly.
Reasons for using restraints are primarily financial; families in remote villages regard it as the best option if mentally ill relatives are aggressive and disturb the peace. Most would prefer to consult nearby traditional healers rather than pay for travel to free facilities. There is also the stigmatisation. ‘The families generally believe mental illness is caused by curses, black magic or karma,’ said Lesmana.
Early one morning, I joined Suryani and Lesmana on a trip to Gianyar, an hour north-east from the tourist hub. The IV anti-psychotic drugs would tide patients over until Suryani’s return.
We had a grim start to the day: Suryani and Lesmana assessed a caged man following an alert from a charity organisation. It was a confronting scene. Flanking a deserted house where Made, a 43-year-old man suffering schizophrenia, had once lived with his wife and two sons, was a custom-built cage, his home of two years. Shirtless and heavily tattooed, Made hung his head and stood, occasionally groaning as he pressed against padlocked iron bars. The room behind him was putrid, with no toilet facilities or running water. The smell of excrement was nauseating, exacerbated by the fact Made had a prolapsed rectum. His skin was ashen, his body emaciated.
In a twenty-year history of mental illness, the former labourer had spun out of control in 2004 when his wife had married and had a child with his father. ‘He ran amok with a knife,’ said Suryani. ‘His family sent him to Bangli [mental hospital]. He wanted to kill the father and wife. The family and neighbours were scared of him.’ Frequent stints at Bangli were unsuccessful, and in 2012 the Banjar (local council) built the caged room and locked him in.
Suddenly Made turned, stripped off his clothes and lay naked on a foul mattress on the dirt floor. His teenage sons – Made, fifteen, and Wayan, eighteen – sat silently outside in despair amid mounds of rubbish. Both had been tormented and bullied over their ‘crazy’ father. They were the only visitors, delivering daily water and food rations bought by Made’s mother.
Suryani furiously worked the phones, appealing to a parliamentarian and hospital for Made’s immediate release and proffering her own money to make it happen. ‘Many people know about this but nobody wants to take action. Everyone worries he will be aggressive,’ said Suryani, adding that the Banjar’s edict wasn’t easily nullified.
Two paramedics arrived in an ambulance, but the key to the padlock was missing. They hacked at it with knives until it broke. Dazed, Made stumbled out, so weak he needed help to the ambulance. We followed him to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with anaemia and said he needed an operation for his rectal prolapse. He was shifted between various hospitals because no one wanted a psychiatric patient, and he ended up back in his caged room. But with ongoing treatment he ventured out more frequently. A few months later the charity Solemen renovated the dilapidated house adjoining the caged room – which was demolished – and paid for his medication. Living with his mother in the house, he picked up simple work.
Further on, we visited two women patients Suryani had treated for a year. Wayan lay on her bed, agitated, while her mother stroked her arms, attempting to calm her. The thirty-eight-year-old was catatonic and unable to walk after twenty years of being chained at her ankles in a locked room she shared with chickens. At fifteen she’d developed severe psychosis with hallucinations and started damaging the family home. During her turmoil she’d frequently run away – sometimes naked, screaming – disrupting the village. So her family had locked her up. After Wayan’s father died the year before, Suryani had begun treating her. She was moved to an open room where her mother slept alongside her on the floor.
‘The mothers love their children but they are hopeless and uneducated,’ said Suryani. ‘And they fear their child’s antisocial behaviour will provoke vicious attacks from neighbours who might beat or kill them.’ Wayan’s family rejected further treatment or aid.
Suryani’s next patient, Nyoman, was twirling a flower in her hand. Fixated, she was far away in the threadbare grasp of her own strange reality. Her mother kept a watchful eye. By all accounts, the forty-three-year-old woman had been a pretty and clever schoolgirl with numerous friends. But at sixteen she’d been assaulted by a man and something snapped. She had become painfully thin, and suffered schizophrenia and violent mood disorders. ‘She ran amok, cut up her clothes and bedding and destroyed her room,’ said Suryani, who’d first seen Nyoman in a room rank with excrement and urine. ‘She was harmful to herself, not others.’ For more than twenty years, Nyoman had been confined to a room. Her mother was her constant companion, even sleeping amid the putrid conditions.
Since Suryani had begun treating Nyoman, she was no longer confined. But, though improved, she was still clearly traumatised. ‘She doesn’t know anything – we must try to make her brain active again,’ Suryani muttered. I have stayed in touch with Suryani and Lesmana, who update me about their patients. The initial abhorrence and disbelief I felt on seeing these victims remain. To see humans at this level is beyond comprehension, an aberration and stain on humanity, in which beauty, goodness and tenderness are voided.
21
LAST THOUGHTS FROM DEATH ROW
The beginning of 2015 jolted Bali into the darkest of places. Foreboding leached into the air as Indonesia’s state-sanctioned executions cranked up after a four-year hiatus. The horror story with which I’d become intimately connected proved the most challenging and chilling of my career. It was a personal story. I’d followed the legal cases of death-row inmates Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan since my first visits to Bali in 2006. If I didn’t interview them on my numerous prison visits I frequently saw them and exchanged greetings.
On 17 January, hours before five foreign drug convicts and one Indonesian were executed by firing squad, I became the unwitting confidante of Myuran Sukumaran. As one of the Bali Nine ringleaders, he knew the resumption of executions was an ominous portent. He and his co-conspirator, Andrew Chan, were slated for a second imminent wave. So began the final stretch of their nightmare roller-coaster.
That weekend, I was coincidentally scheduled to interview Sukumaran and Archibald Prize-winning artist Ben Quilty for an arts piece inside Kerobokan jail. A year earlier, I had approached Quilty at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. He had spoken about his exhibition After Afghanistan, the result of his tenure as official war artist in 2011, and the synchronicity between it and his work with Sukumaran. The story was immediately obvious: I wanted to examine the unique relationship between Quilty, the art tutor, and Sukumaran, his inmate student. Both were enthusiastic.
But as news spread that January day in 2015, the tenor of the piece catapulted into a chilling front-page news story, and the prison went into lockdown. From his exhibition in Hong Kong, Quilty raced over to support his friend in Bali. After some difficulty, he was permitted into the jail to give an art class, taking his cousin – and Gold Walkley-winning photographer – Andrew Quilty as his ‘assistant’.
The forty-one-year-old Quilty had mentored Sukumaran for three years, paying regular visits to the jail. It had been home to the condemned duo since they were arrested in 2005, then sentenced to death the following year for plotting to smuggle 8.3 kilograms of heroin from Bali to Australia.
In the art studio, Sukumaran’s sanctuary, they spent a harried day, lurching from art work to panic, horror and despair. Andrew Quilty’s haunting photos bear testimony.
After their jail visit, I whipped over to the Quiltys’ hotel for an interview. Everything was rushed because the cousins were flying out of Bali that night.
That same evening I spoke with Sukumaran on the phone as he sat alone in his cell, hours before the first executions. It was one of his last interviews after the president’s rejection of his clemency bid on 30 December 2014. With Chan’s denial of clemency confirmed on 22 January, the fate of the two men was sealed as they were to be executed together. An interview published at that time would have jeopardised their legal cases and fragile bids for mercy, so my words could not then be told.
I knew Sukumaran better than Chan. To me, they were very different people sharing similar tough backgrounds and likeminded redemptive goals – and violent deaths. While Chan, who had become an ordained Christian pastor in jail, had been instrumental in inspiring scores of inmates to give up drugs and take up religion, Sukumaran had enlightened the moribund prison with his arts programs, miraculously creating a school behind jail walls, one that engaged and reformed dozens. From his studio, the impassioned novice emerged a talent after three years, drawing strength and dignity through his art until the night he and Chan were tethered to stakes and shot dead side by side, with six fellow inmates in Indonesia’s steamy jungle. At the eleventh hour 30-year-old Filipina migrant worker and mother of two Mary Jane Veloso was spared after her alleged recruiter surrendered to police.
On 17 January – the night the Quiltys left Bali – Sukumaran confided during our phone interview he was terrified he and Chan would be next. They were confirmed for execution on 2 February.
For the past week Sukumaran had been consumed by panic and dread, unable to put brush to paper. In his final year of a fine arts degree through Curtin University, he lost the will to concentrate. (Two months before his execution, his dream was realised: he was awarded an associate fine arts degree.)
Earlier that evening I’d sat in Quilty’s hotel garden listening to him describe Sukumaran’s reaction to his likely impending execution. ‘I was very worried about Myuran and how he would be, but he just wanted to get back to work.’ Mostly, Quilty had braced himself to discuss the subject of execution. ‘We discussed how he feels about it, really the nitty-gritty of what it means to be executed.’ He said his friend was shutting down. ‘It’s good timing for me to be there because he needs something to do.’
‘Will you come back to support him if he isn’t spared?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely, I will come back, I will be there for him. I love him, he’s my mate, he’s my friend,’ said Quilty. When it happened, though, he was in Australia, deeply disturbed and upset. He’d said goodbye on the phone. He had been told he would not be permitted into the prison. In the final hours, authorities allowed only the pair’s families and spiritual counsellors inside.
Doubtless, Sukumaran’s soul-saving, redemptive art that served him until the bitter end was largely influenced by Quilty, who had campaigned tirelessly for mercy for both condemned men. When Sukumaran complained he couldn’t focus on his painting that day, Quilty would urge him to pick up his brushes. ‘What else are you going to do?’ he’d ask. And Sukumaran did. As long as he had life in him, he painted feverishly, sharing his terror and grief from Nusa Kambangan, the island of his execution. One of his last paintings depicted the Indonesian flag dripping blood, forever stained.
‘We talked a lot about art,’ Sukumaran told me that evening on the phone after Quilty’s visit. ‘It was one of the better days I’ve had recently.’ Through the earpiece, as we discussed his probable fate, Sukumaran’s soft voice revealed a gamut of emotions: shock, terror, desperation, grief, regret and incomprehension. Facing his demons, racked with anguish and confronting his mortality, he said, ‘I’m cracking up. I walk around crying. I usually never cry. I can’t stop it. I don’t know what to do.’
Trying to gather my wits, I floundered. I could only listen; he was so alone.
He’d been sleeping fitfully, waiting for the footsteps of his executioners. ‘I keep waking up, and if I hear voices I think it’s someone coming to take me at night.’
The duo’s transfer to Nusa Kambangan island off Cilacap in Central Java would be under cover of darkness, with prisoners in lockdown to prevent riots.
I was in alien territory. What consolation or hope could I – or any psychologist, for that matter – offer someone in line for the firing squad? I grappled for apposite words.
There was only one person who could truly understand Sukumaran: that was Andrew Chan. When I feebly asked Sukumaran if it helped that Chan was in the same boat, he joked, ‘It’s better than going down by yourself, I guess.’
Their solid friendship withstood their ten-year ordeal. The pair kept each other’s spirits up, while simultaneously respecting each other’s privacy.
Quilty had painted Chan that same January day. ‘He’s a great guy. His Ocker accent … a huge Panthers [rugby] supporter. All he’s worried about is that the Panthers beat Melbourne this year in the Grand Final.’ Chan wore his Penrith Panthers rugby league jersey at his execution. He had smiled his way through a bittersweet wedding ceremony with his fiancée Febyanti Herewila, also a Christian pastor, the day before.
After Ben Quilty left Bali on the Saturday night of my interview, I found it difficult to contact him because he was in high demand from journalists. But as the story raged, I needed to maintain well-connected sources.
Melbourne artist Matt Sleeth was one. He’d conducted Kerobokan jail workshops with Quilty, and I could rely on him on deadline. Where most key figures pussyfooted around Indonesia, Sleeth bristled with rage and indignation, and I admired his outspokenness. He verbalised what many Australians thought after all our country’s urgent pleading failed. ‘Let’s not be so dainty and polite … it’s the height of barbarity, brutality and cowardice,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe they are going to take them to a dark beach in the middle of the night, tie them to a pole and shoot them through the chest in cold blood. It’s starting to feel less to do with justice and a lot more to do with political theatre.’
As a mother, I found it excruciating to watch the families’ nightmare jail vigils. Particularly gruelling was the torment of Sukumaran’s mother, Raji, who, utterly broken, begged for her son’s life. How President Joko Widodo remained deaf to her, I don’t know.
Back in 2010 I had covered the duo’s judicial appeals – the final appeal known as a PK (Peninjauan Kembali), or case review. Raji, along with Sukumaran’s brother Chinthu and sister Brintha, and Chan’s brother Michael had all watched the proceedings with little expression. When I’d asked Raji afterwards if she felt confident, she’d smiled and shrugged as though she didn’t trust herself to speak.
Australians vented outrage at Indonesia for condemning rehabilitated prisoners, the platform on which the pair’s lawyers had repeatedly appealed. A Twitter hashtag Boycottindonesia gained traction and in one day before their deaths Australians had posted 150,000 tweets condemning the executions.
Widodo’s hardline stance on drug convicts baffled Sukumaran: he couldn’t understand this sudden bloodlust. Elected in October 2014 on a platform of clean governance and human rights, Widodo had also pledged to be tough on drug offenders. Two months later, in a populist move to lift his support base, he’d declared the nation in the grip of a ‘drugs emergency’, vowing no drug convicts on death row would be spared. The data for his cherry-picked figures was later discredited.
Widodo shored up the domestic support he’d sought: 85 per cent of Indonesians agreed with the death penalty.
A substantial rump in Australia also opined Sukumaran and Chan were odious criminals who deserved to die. As Quilty remarked, it was easy for people to sit back in their homes in a first-world country and say that. ‘Myuran is a good man. He has reformed. I think compassion is the keystone of a healthy society, and I think compassion is often missing in Australia.’
*
The news coverage and media presence of the executions were unprecedented in my time in Bali. Journalists lined the roads around the jail, fixers and photographers keeping watch there round the clock. A daily revolving door of stony-faced lawyers, along with family, friends and religious figures came and went. International opprobrium and diplomatic ructions snowballed; members of the European Parliament wrote to Widodo requesting him to call off the executions, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appealed to Indonesia to spare the group, and foreign ambassadors in Jakarta were recalled in protest. Widodo’s standard response was to warn Australia – and the other countries whose citizens faced execution – not to interfere: Indonesia was protecting its political and judicial sovereignty. Until the eleventh hour, Australia’s then prime minister Tony Abbott and foreign minister Julie Bishop sought clemency, with Abbott raising heated bilateral tensions. Widodo remained unmoved.
Armed with intravenous anti-psychotic drugs, Suryani took me on some of her monthly home visits in 2014 to administer medication, tracking patients’ behavioural and physical changes. Most were well enough to be freed within several months, but if families kept them shackled she refused further treatment – as was Kadek’s fate. Based on her holistic approach, she offered meditation and hypnosis if patients recovered sufficiently. Suryani had found that 31 per cent of shackled patients recovered with ongoing treatment. Those who relapsed generally returned to restraints or confinement as many families resisted interference. Balinese psychiatrist Denny Thong told me, ‘They are ashamed of a mentally ill family member. They don’t say they have a mental illness, they say they are possessed.’
A decade earlier Suryani had successfully appealed to the former governor for funding that went to the Suryani Institute for Mental Health. She claimed almost all of her treated pasung patients remained free that year. But it was a one-off subsidy. Officials questioned Suryani’s methods of ‘meditation and singing sessions’. ‘They said, “She gets a lot of money just for teaching meditation and relaxation,”’ Suryani scoffed as we sat in her clinic. A strong advocate of religious beliefs and traditional healing, she contended, ‘[In Balinese Hindu culture] the purification ceremony throws out the evil spirit influence. It will make patients quickly recover and maintain mental health. I say, “Please do practise beliefs.”’ Suryani and Lesmana relied on donations; when they dried up, Suryani dug into her own pocket.
Thong, the founding director of Bangli Mental Hospital, similarly advocated treating pasung patients with a mix of Eastern and Western psychiatry. He knew Suryani from Bali’s Udayana University in the 1970s when he’d been studying psychiatry. ‘She was different from other Balinese women,’ he recalled. He described her as a force to be reckoned with; a charismatic, ambitious woman who bucked social strictures and alienated people. ‘Bali women are more submissive and subservient. She’s headstrong and outspoken. She wants things done her way.’ He smiled wryly.
Reasons for using restraints are primarily financial; families in remote villages regard it as the best option if mentally ill relatives are aggressive and disturb the peace. Most would prefer to consult nearby traditional healers rather than pay for travel to free facilities. There is also the stigmatisation. ‘The families generally believe mental illness is caused by curses, black magic or karma,’ said Lesmana.
Early one morning, I joined Suryani and Lesmana on a trip to Gianyar, an hour north-east from the tourist hub. The IV anti-psychotic drugs would tide patients over until Suryani’s return.
We had a grim start to the day: Suryani and Lesmana assessed a caged man following an alert from a charity organisation. It was a confronting scene. Flanking a deserted house where Made, a 43-year-old man suffering schizophrenia, had once lived with his wife and two sons, was a custom-built cage, his home of two years. Shirtless and heavily tattooed, Made hung his head and stood, occasionally groaning as he pressed against padlocked iron bars. The room behind him was putrid, with no toilet facilities or running water. The smell of excrement was nauseating, exacerbated by the fact Made had a prolapsed rectum. His skin was ashen, his body emaciated.
In a twenty-year history of mental illness, the former labourer had spun out of control in 2004 when his wife had married and had a child with his father. ‘He ran amok with a knife,’ said Suryani. ‘His family sent him to Bangli [mental hospital]. He wanted to kill the father and wife. The family and neighbours were scared of him.’ Frequent stints at Bangli were unsuccessful, and in 2012 the Banjar (local council) built the caged room and locked him in.
Suddenly Made turned, stripped off his clothes and lay naked on a foul mattress on the dirt floor. His teenage sons – Made, fifteen, and Wayan, eighteen – sat silently outside in despair amid mounds of rubbish. Both had been tormented and bullied over their ‘crazy’ father. They were the only visitors, delivering daily water and food rations bought by Made’s mother.
Suryani furiously worked the phones, appealing to a parliamentarian and hospital for Made’s immediate release and proffering her own money to make it happen. ‘Many people know about this but nobody wants to take action. Everyone worries he will be aggressive,’ said Suryani, adding that the Banjar’s edict wasn’t easily nullified.
Two paramedics arrived in an ambulance, but the key to the padlock was missing. They hacked at it with knives until it broke. Dazed, Made stumbled out, so weak he needed help to the ambulance. We followed him to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with anaemia and said he needed an operation for his rectal prolapse. He was shifted between various hospitals because no one wanted a psychiatric patient, and he ended up back in his caged room. But with ongoing treatment he ventured out more frequently. A few months later the charity Solemen renovated the dilapidated house adjoining the caged room – which was demolished – and paid for his medication. Living with his mother in the house, he picked up simple work.
Further on, we visited two women patients Suryani had treated for a year. Wayan lay on her bed, agitated, while her mother stroked her arms, attempting to calm her. The thirty-eight-year-old was catatonic and unable to walk after twenty years of being chained at her ankles in a locked room she shared with chickens. At fifteen she’d developed severe psychosis with hallucinations and started damaging the family home. During her turmoil she’d frequently run away – sometimes naked, screaming – disrupting the village. So her family had locked her up. After Wayan’s father died the year before, Suryani had begun treating her. She was moved to an open room where her mother slept alongside her on the floor.
‘The mothers love their children but they are hopeless and uneducated,’ said Suryani. ‘And they fear their child’s antisocial behaviour will provoke vicious attacks from neighbours who might beat or kill them.’ Wayan’s family rejected further treatment or aid.
Suryani’s next patient, Nyoman, was twirling a flower in her hand. Fixated, she was far away in the threadbare grasp of her own strange reality. Her mother kept a watchful eye. By all accounts, the forty-three-year-old woman had been a pretty and clever schoolgirl with numerous friends. But at sixteen she’d been assaulted by a man and something snapped. She had become painfully thin, and suffered schizophrenia and violent mood disorders. ‘She ran amok, cut up her clothes and bedding and destroyed her room,’ said Suryani, who’d first seen Nyoman in a room rank with excrement and urine. ‘She was harmful to herself, not others.’ For more than twenty years, Nyoman had been confined to a room. Her mother was her constant companion, even sleeping amid the putrid conditions.
Since Suryani had begun treating Nyoman, she was no longer confined. But, though improved, she was still clearly traumatised. ‘She doesn’t know anything – we must try to make her brain active again,’ Suryani muttered. I have stayed in touch with Suryani and Lesmana, who update me about their patients. The initial abhorrence and disbelief I felt on seeing these victims remain. To see humans at this level is beyond comprehension, an aberration and stain on humanity, in which beauty, goodness and tenderness are voided.
21
LAST THOUGHTS FROM DEATH ROW
The beginning of 2015 jolted Bali into the darkest of places. Foreboding leached into the air as Indonesia’s state-sanctioned executions cranked up after a four-year hiatus. The horror story with which I’d become intimately connected proved the most challenging and chilling of my career. It was a personal story. I’d followed the legal cases of death-row inmates Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan since my first visits to Bali in 2006. If I didn’t interview them on my numerous prison visits I frequently saw them and exchanged greetings.
On 17 January, hours before five foreign drug convicts and one Indonesian were executed by firing squad, I became the unwitting confidante of Myuran Sukumaran. As one of the Bali Nine ringleaders, he knew the resumption of executions was an ominous portent. He and his co-conspirator, Andrew Chan, were slated for a second imminent wave. So began the final stretch of their nightmare roller-coaster.
That weekend, I was coincidentally scheduled to interview Sukumaran and Archibald Prize-winning artist Ben Quilty for an arts piece inside Kerobokan jail. A year earlier, I had approached Quilty at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. He had spoken about his exhibition After Afghanistan, the result of his tenure as official war artist in 2011, and the synchronicity between it and his work with Sukumaran. The story was immediately obvious: I wanted to examine the unique relationship between Quilty, the art tutor, and Sukumaran, his inmate student. Both were enthusiastic.
But as news spread that January day in 2015, the tenor of the piece catapulted into a chilling front-page news story, and the prison went into lockdown. From his exhibition in Hong Kong, Quilty raced over to support his friend in Bali. After some difficulty, he was permitted into the jail to give an art class, taking his cousin – and Gold Walkley-winning photographer – Andrew Quilty as his ‘assistant’.
The forty-one-year-old Quilty had mentored Sukumaran for three years, paying regular visits to the jail. It had been home to the condemned duo since they were arrested in 2005, then sentenced to death the following year for plotting to smuggle 8.3 kilograms of heroin from Bali to Australia.
In the art studio, Sukumaran’s sanctuary, they spent a harried day, lurching from art work to panic, horror and despair. Andrew Quilty’s haunting photos bear testimony.
After their jail visit, I whipped over to the Quiltys’ hotel for an interview. Everything was rushed because the cousins were flying out of Bali that night.
That same evening I spoke with Sukumaran on the phone as he sat alone in his cell, hours before the first executions. It was one of his last interviews after the president’s rejection of his clemency bid on 30 December 2014. With Chan’s denial of clemency confirmed on 22 January, the fate of the two men was sealed as they were to be executed together. An interview published at that time would have jeopardised their legal cases and fragile bids for mercy, so my words could not then be told.
I knew Sukumaran better than Chan. To me, they were very different people sharing similar tough backgrounds and likeminded redemptive goals – and violent deaths. While Chan, who had become an ordained Christian pastor in jail, had been instrumental in inspiring scores of inmates to give up drugs and take up religion, Sukumaran had enlightened the moribund prison with his arts programs, miraculously creating a school behind jail walls, one that engaged and reformed dozens. From his studio, the impassioned novice emerged a talent after three years, drawing strength and dignity through his art until the night he and Chan were tethered to stakes and shot dead side by side, with six fellow inmates in Indonesia’s steamy jungle. At the eleventh hour 30-year-old Filipina migrant worker and mother of two Mary Jane Veloso was spared after her alleged recruiter surrendered to police.
On 17 January – the night the Quiltys left Bali – Sukumaran confided during our phone interview he was terrified he and Chan would be next. They were confirmed for execution on 2 February.
For the past week Sukumaran had been consumed by panic and dread, unable to put brush to paper. In his final year of a fine arts degree through Curtin University, he lost the will to concentrate. (Two months before his execution, his dream was realised: he was awarded an associate fine arts degree.)
Earlier that evening I’d sat in Quilty’s hotel garden listening to him describe Sukumaran’s reaction to his likely impending execution. ‘I was very worried about Myuran and how he would be, but he just wanted to get back to work.’ Mostly, Quilty had braced himself to discuss the subject of execution. ‘We discussed how he feels about it, really the nitty-gritty of what it means to be executed.’ He said his friend was shutting down. ‘It’s good timing for me to be there because he needs something to do.’
‘Will you come back to support him if he isn’t spared?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely, I will come back, I will be there for him. I love him, he’s my mate, he’s my friend,’ said Quilty. When it happened, though, he was in Australia, deeply disturbed and upset. He’d said goodbye on the phone. He had been told he would not be permitted into the prison. In the final hours, authorities allowed only the pair’s families and spiritual counsellors inside.
Doubtless, Sukumaran’s soul-saving, redemptive art that served him until the bitter end was largely influenced by Quilty, who had campaigned tirelessly for mercy for both condemned men. When Sukumaran complained he couldn’t focus on his painting that day, Quilty would urge him to pick up his brushes. ‘What else are you going to do?’ he’d ask. And Sukumaran did. As long as he had life in him, he painted feverishly, sharing his terror and grief from Nusa Kambangan, the island of his execution. One of his last paintings depicted the Indonesian flag dripping blood, forever stained.
‘We talked a lot about art,’ Sukumaran told me that evening on the phone after Quilty’s visit. ‘It was one of the better days I’ve had recently.’ Through the earpiece, as we discussed his probable fate, Sukumaran’s soft voice revealed a gamut of emotions: shock, terror, desperation, grief, regret and incomprehension. Facing his demons, racked with anguish and confronting his mortality, he said, ‘I’m cracking up. I walk around crying. I usually never cry. I can’t stop it. I don’t know what to do.’
Trying to gather my wits, I floundered. I could only listen; he was so alone.
He’d been sleeping fitfully, waiting for the footsteps of his executioners. ‘I keep waking up, and if I hear voices I think it’s someone coming to take me at night.’
The duo’s transfer to Nusa Kambangan island off Cilacap in Central Java would be under cover of darkness, with prisoners in lockdown to prevent riots.
I was in alien territory. What consolation or hope could I – or any psychologist, for that matter – offer someone in line for the firing squad? I grappled for apposite words.
There was only one person who could truly understand Sukumaran: that was Andrew Chan. When I feebly asked Sukumaran if it helped that Chan was in the same boat, he joked, ‘It’s better than going down by yourself, I guess.’
Their solid friendship withstood their ten-year ordeal. The pair kept each other’s spirits up, while simultaneously respecting each other’s privacy.
Quilty had painted Chan that same January day. ‘He’s a great guy. His Ocker accent … a huge Panthers [rugby] supporter. All he’s worried about is that the Panthers beat Melbourne this year in the Grand Final.’ Chan wore his Penrith Panthers rugby league jersey at his execution. He had smiled his way through a bittersweet wedding ceremony with his fiancée Febyanti Herewila, also a Christian pastor, the day before.
After Ben Quilty left Bali on the Saturday night of my interview, I found it difficult to contact him because he was in high demand from journalists. But as the story raged, I needed to maintain well-connected sources.
Melbourne artist Matt Sleeth was one. He’d conducted Kerobokan jail workshops with Quilty, and I could rely on him on deadline. Where most key figures pussyfooted around Indonesia, Sleeth bristled with rage and indignation, and I admired his outspokenness. He verbalised what many Australians thought after all our country’s urgent pleading failed. ‘Let’s not be so dainty and polite … it’s the height of barbarity, brutality and cowardice,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe they are going to take them to a dark beach in the middle of the night, tie them to a pole and shoot them through the chest in cold blood. It’s starting to feel less to do with justice and a lot more to do with political theatre.’
As a mother, I found it excruciating to watch the families’ nightmare jail vigils. Particularly gruelling was the torment of Sukumaran’s mother, Raji, who, utterly broken, begged for her son’s life. How President Joko Widodo remained deaf to her, I don’t know.
Back in 2010 I had covered the duo’s judicial appeals – the final appeal known as a PK (Peninjauan Kembali), or case review. Raji, along with Sukumaran’s brother Chinthu and sister Brintha, and Chan’s brother Michael had all watched the proceedings with little expression. When I’d asked Raji afterwards if she felt confident, she’d smiled and shrugged as though she didn’t trust herself to speak.
Australians vented outrage at Indonesia for condemning rehabilitated prisoners, the platform on which the pair’s lawyers had repeatedly appealed. A Twitter hashtag Boycottindonesia gained traction and in one day before their deaths Australians had posted 150,000 tweets condemning the executions.
Widodo’s hardline stance on drug convicts baffled Sukumaran: he couldn’t understand this sudden bloodlust. Elected in October 2014 on a platform of clean governance and human rights, Widodo had also pledged to be tough on drug offenders. Two months later, in a populist move to lift his support base, he’d declared the nation in the grip of a ‘drugs emergency’, vowing no drug convicts on death row would be spared. The data for his cherry-picked figures was later discredited.
Widodo shored up the domestic support he’d sought: 85 per cent of Indonesians agreed with the death penalty.
A substantial rump in Australia also opined Sukumaran and Chan were odious criminals who deserved to die. As Quilty remarked, it was easy for people to sit back in their homes in a first-world country and say that. ‘Myuran is a good man. He has reformed. I think compassion is the keystone of a healthy society, and I think compassion is often missing in Australia.’
*
The news coverage and media presence of the executions were unprecedented in my time in Bali. Journalists lined the roads around the jail, fixers and photographers keeping watch there round the clock. A daily revolving door of stony-faced lawyers, along with family, friends and religious figures came and went. International opprobrium and diplomatic ructions snowballed; members of the European Parliament wrote to Widodo requesting him to call off the executions, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appealed to Indonesia to spare the group, and foreign ambassadors in Jakarta were recalled in protest. Widodo’s standard response was to warn Australia – and the other countries whose citizens faced execution – not to interfere: Indonesia was protecting its political and judicial sovereignty. Until the eleventh hour, Australia’s then prime minister Tony Abbott and foreign minister Julie Bishop sought clemency, with Abbott raising heated bilateral tensions. Widodo remained unmoved.
