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Mary Jane Veloso: Why was she spared in the Indonesian executions?
The Guardian (Australia) - April 30, 2015
She was the also was the only one to be spared, granted an 11th-hour temporary reprieve by the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, after a woman handed herself into police in Manila claiming to have recruited her.
The question remains: why on the basis of new evidence is Veloso still alive, while Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, whose lawyers presented evidence of judicial corruption, were shot dead? Eight people – seven foreign nationals and one Indonesian – were executed by firing squad on Indonesia's Nusa Kambangan prison island on Wednesday.
Analysts say the outcome is a combination of factors – politics, shoddy diplomacy and the affinity many Indonesians feel with Veloso.
"The Mary Jane Veloso narrative as a foreign worker being duped hits very close to home," said Indonesian political analyst Yohanes Sulaiman. "So without considering her evidence is kind of, you know, similar to the plight of Indonesian workers in Saudi Arabia."
Every year there are horror stories about the mistreatment of Indonesian migrant workers ruthlessly beaten and tortured by their employees, some of who are on death row in Saudi Arabia for killing their employers in alleged self defence.
A high-school dropout and former domestic worker in Dubai, who left after an attempted rape, Veloso has consistently claimed she is a victim of human trafficking, duped into smuggling 2.6kg of heroin into Indonesia.
In a country that is virulently against drugs and where approval ratings for capital punishment are high, the Indonesian Twitterati came out in force to support a women they saw as one of their own in the days leading up to her scheduled execution.
The hashtag #MaryJane was among the highest trending topics, with messages lambasting the president not for battling drugs but "executing poor women, like migrant workers in Saudi Arabia!!"
Noting that "governments have proven to be sensitive to hashtags" and that Widodo seems to "intuitively understand his voters", Paul Rowland, a Jakarta-based political analyst said the decision would have pandered to a domestic audience.
While the choice to grant the reprieve was a combination of factors, Rowland acknowledged that "the public probably would have been in favour of the president taking a few extra steps".
Widodo did not have that much to lose when the Philippine president, Benino Aquino III, requested the execution be postponed after a woman claiming to have recruited Veloso unexpectedly turned herself in to Manila police. The Indonesian president has stressed he has granted only a temporary reprieve while Philippine authorities investigate, but Veloso's lawyers have vowed to continue their fight in the supreme court on the back of new evidence.
But most tragically for Chan and Sukumaran, the new evidence in their case – that judges were negotiating bribes for more lenient sentences – undermines the integrity of the Indonesian legal system in a way the new evidence in Veloso's case does not.
Muhammad Rifan, a former lawyer for the Bali Nine duo, told the Sydney Morning Herald that judges had asked for $130,000 to give a sentence of 20 years or less.
After the judges were allegedly ordered by senior government and legal figures in Jakarta to hand down the death penalty, that deal reportedly fell though.
The explosive claims, at a time when the country's anti-corruption body has suffered blow after blow under Widodo's rule, might have opened up an ugly "can of worms", said Sulaiman.
"The accusation of bribery threatens the idea of a fair justice system and the government has already invested too much prestige on being 'tough on drugs'", he said.
In a rush job, the judicial commission completed its investigation into the allegations earlier this week but did so without interviewing key witnesses or making its findings public.
"It is illogical," said Todung Mulya Lubis, of the Bali Nine legal counsel, "if the commission were to investigate then witnesses have to be questioned. Now they don't have the witnesses."
According to one researcher from Indonesia Corruption Watch, the judicial commission is generally viewed as quite clean, even though "there are some notes on some of the commissioners".
Outside court, the lack of diplomatic prowess from the Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, did not do Chan and Sukumaran any favours either.
Abbott's insensitive remarks about conditional aid after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami kickstarted a viral campaign to collect coins to pay Australia back.
In contrast, days before the executions Aquino met his Indonesian counterpart on the sidelines of the Association of South-east Asian Nations (Asean) summit in Malaysia, where he gracefully managed to plant a seed of doubt about Veloso's innocence.
"President Aquino doesn't seem to be 'shirtfronting' the Indonesian government in the same way Tony Abbott did," Rowland, referring to Abbott's aggressive comments about the Russian president Vladimir Putin, "so it got a more sympathetic reaction."
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/indonesian-executions-why-was-mary-jane-veloso-spared.
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