There’s chatter that it’s on.
Talk that the death squad is at the ready; that a new, bigger execution ground is in the making. Officials say it could be just weeks away.
And after the circus last year, the security minister Luhut Panjaitan hopes there will be less “drama” this time around.
One year after the international uproar and the diplomatic fallout over the execution of eight drug traffickers – including two Australian men, Bali Nine pair Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran – it appears more executions could be on Indonesia’s horizon this year. Among the foreigners on death row in Indonesia are two Britons, convicted drug smugglers Lindsay Sandiford and Gareth Cashmore.
“I still don’t want to believe it,” says lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis, who this time last year was fighting to save the lives of Chan and Sukumaran. “Yes, there will probably be a statement, but in the end I don’t think there will be any executions. I refuse to believe it.”
After 14 prisoners were executed at dawn in two separate rounds in early 2015, a third round has been on hold for the past year, ostensibly for economic reasons, but perhaps, in part, for political ones, too.
Yet after whatever fallout there might have been, Australia’s recalled ambassador has returned (after a five-week protest), and executions are back on the agenda.
This month, even as Indonesia was being booed at the United Nations for reiterating its support for the death penalty for drug offenders – a punitive action that runs counter to international law – the attorney general Muhammad Prasetyo indicated that another round would go ahead.
British prime minister David Cameron said he had raised the case of Sandiford – the English woman sentenced to death for smuggling almost 4kg of cocaine into Bali – during an official visit to Jakarta last year. But on Jokowi’s return visit to London earlier this month, there were no indications that her case – or that of fellow death row Briton Gareth Cashmore – was revisited.
When questioned on the matter by German chancellor Angela Merkel on a recent visit to Berlin, Indonesian president Joko Widodo, or Jokowi, defended capital punishment as a justified approach to the country’s “drug emergency”.
There is nothing definitive yet, no date, and no official list of the next prisoners to face the firing squad: the Indonesian government is keeping its cards close to the chest. But some are still operating on the assumption that it is probably just a matter of time.
“The last information we received is that the attorney general has asked the parliament for the budget for the third round,” says Putri Kanesia, from the Jakarta-based human rights organisation Kontras. “But they should stop and evaluate the first and second batch. There were a lot of unfair trials.”
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