Naked City: War on Thugs

Historically murder has always been regarded as the most heinous of crimes, invariably punished by the taking of the murderer’s life – the biblical tradition of an eye for an eye. These days the act of murder, in many countries, has been relegated to a secondary position as the smuggling and peddling of drugs is elevated to the status of number one public evil.

After all narcotics cause thousands of deaths, through addiction and overdoses. The fact that nicotine and alcohol reap a much greater toll is pushed aside as the war on illegal drugs rages blindly on, despite overwhelming evidence that it’s been a monumental flop. It remains an emotive call to arms, heavily promoted by ambitious publicity seeking politicians and widely supported by the majority of the non drug taking public who revile at the stereotypical image of the dope head junkie thrusting a needle into their arm.

In a country like Indonesia the war on drugs is a political godsend, particularly for a weak and morally corrupt leader like Joko Widodo. The blatantly stage managed circus of death, that robbed the life of two Australians last week, was the perfect diversion from all that is rotten with present day Indonesia. The endemic and systemic corruption that allows the drug culture to thrive, the 57 million Indonesians who puff away on cigarettes with twice the nicotine level of the Australian product claiming an estimated 300,000 lives a year and the countless human rights abuses in West Papua.

During the mid 60s it was communists, not drug dealers, who posed the greatest threat to Indonesian society as both the security forces and general public went on a frenzied purge that took the lives of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Sukarno loyalists. Shootings and beheadings were common place and at one stage the rivers running into the city of Surabaya were clogged with hundreds of dead bodies.

There was little protest from Australia at the time, enveloped as we were in our own anti-communist paranoia and after all, who were we to interfere in the politics of a sovereign country? These days there are still many Indonesians seeking justice for the slaughter of their family members during the purge, however they are continually shunned by the ruling regime.

If you take a perverted view of Indonesian politics from the 60’s onwards, the conclusion that the summary executions during the PKI purges, repeated a decade later in East Timor and the brutal colonisation of West Papua, have established an enduring legacy of state endorsed thuggery. And throw into the equation the seemingly light sentences handed out to a number of the Bali Bombers, like Muhammad Colili (released totally unrepentant after serving only half of an eighteen year sentence), and you wonder how much emphasis the legal system there places on the sanctity of life.

In the era of international diplomacy, human rights abuses are constantly overlooked in the interests of trade and other good relations, few governments would chose to refer to the current Indonesian regime as a bunch of thugs. The dictionary defines thuggery as violent criminal behaviour, devoid of any empathy for the victim and often enforced with acts of brutality. Forget the phoney war on drugs – what the world really needs is a universal war on “thugs”.