this.
Spelling altered for obvious reasons.
Text from the Herald Sun follows:
Co and the mob
Andrew Bolt
01jun05
AND now to the verdict on the Sc Co case. I find
the defendant guilty of xenophobia, spite, boorishness and
a self-righteous tribal hysteria.
No, I don't mean Co.
I'm referring to the weeping and bellowing mob that is
demanding we do all it takes -- even starve the poorest
Indonesians -- to free this convicted drug trafficker.
"Our"
Sc
What a shock to see the beast of mob rule roar like this,
and in support of a woman who seems on the evidence more
likely to be guilty than she's painted.
Yes, Co may be as innocent as she says. But picture how
she must look, and how we all now look, to an Indonesian,
whether a judge or a citizen.
Here is a surfer girl who worked as a bar hostess in
Tokyo's nightclub area, flying into Bali for reportedly
the
fifth time in six years.
(Co, a student beautician who'd scraped up cash from
working at a fish-and-chip shop, told 60 Minutes she'd
been
to Bali "five or six times since I was 16".)
Customs officials screen her bags and detect something
suspicious. They watch her, and later tell a court she
seems
nervous. Her bodyboard bag is more than twice its usual
weight, bulging with an extra something the size of a
stuffed
pillow.
Actually, she says later, she'd only dragged her bag, and
had so much other luggage she couldn't tell its weight was
unusual, or that there was anything inside but a bodyboard
and flippers. Yes, well.
Two police and two customs officials agree on what happened
next. They say Co's brother James carried the bag for
her to the customs area, where officer I Gusti Nyoman
Winata
asked her to open it.
Co zipped open the front pocket. Now the main zip,
demanded Winata.
"The suspect (seemed) to panic," he later testified.
"When I opened the bag a little bit, she stopped me and
said, 'No!'
"I asked why. She answered, 'I have some . . .' She looked
confused."
ABC's Lateline showed Winata re-enacting Co's lunge to
stop him opening her bag. He seemed as honest as Co
does, and said he had no doubt of her guilt.
Winata looked inside and found 4.1kg of top-quality
marijuana, stowed in two airlock plastic bags, one tucked
inside
the other.
What is it, he asked?
"It's marijuana," the officials heard Co reply.
Keep thinking how this all must look to an Indonesian. Who
would you believe?
Think how it seems when the marijuana turns out to be
hydroponically grown, and worth anywhere up to $80,000 in
Bali, where it is prized by expatriates who are sick of the
weak local weed and feel safer buying from a tourist. Big
profits.
Keep picturing. The Indonesians learn that Co, although
having no criminal record, comes from a wild and woolly
family.
One of her brothers is in jail for burglary and stealing,
her mother is on to her fourth partner after having six
children by three men. Her father had a minor conviction
some
30 years ago for possessing marijuana.
Sure, none of that makes her guilty, but how would all
this make Co seem to an Indonesian? Here's a tip: Not
like
she came from the responsible land of the
straight-and-narrow.
I T gets worse. Co's defence team is soon headed by a
salesman who looks like a spiv and is a former bankrupt
who
still owes creditors plenty.
Her main defence witness becomes an alleged rapist flown
in from a Melbourne jail to tell how he heard some crook
who'd heard some other crook say Co was unwittingly
carrying drugs for crooks operating at the Brisbane and
Sydney
airport terminals.
With Australians like this behind Co, it's a wonder the
whole country wasn't tossed into the cell with her.
The judges are then asked to believe these unknown
smugglers took the marijuana into a high-security area at
Brisbane
in easy-to-see-through plastic and popped it into a random
bag to be flown to another high-security area in Sydney.
Why the smugglers would do that, rather than simply drive
the drugs down to Sydney by car, all safe, no one can say.
That they then let their valuable drugs fly off to Bali is
another mystery.
No wonder our own Australian Federal Police Commissioner
Mick Keelty dismissed Co's theory as "flimsy". Co's
judges must have thought her team took them for idiots.
Idiots? They soon learned plenty of Australians took them
for far worse.
And now it was not Co on trial, and losing, but
Australia.
In one heady spasm, hundreds of thousands of Australians
became certain that Co the beautiful battler was in fact
innocent.
Suddenly she was the star of a reality-TV Perils of Pauline
-- complete with cartoon-like big breasts, every-woman
prettiness and more tears than a soapie. It helped the
plot
that she was repeatedly filmed hands bound and besieged,
pale in a jabbering, jostling crowd of brown foreigners.
Damn those natives. "The judges don't even speak English,
mate, they're straight out of the trees, if you excuse my
expression," raged 2GB Sydney fill-in host Malcolm T.
Elliott.
"Whoa, give them a banana and away they go."
Others screamed that the judges were lying Muslims out for
revenge (in fact, the chief judge was a Christian, and the
other two Hindus).
Newspapers attacked Indonesia's courts as corrupt and their
jails as temples of "gloating sadism" where there was
"little sympathy of foreigners, for which you may perhaps
read
Christians". Save "our"
Sc from the demon heathen!
No surprise, then, that Indonesian officials here were
bombarded with so many threats and insults that Foreign
Affairs Minister Alexander Downer had to plead for them to
be
left alone. What would we say of Indonesians if our own
diplomats were monstered like this?
Now Co's defenders demand we boycott struggling Bali.
Actor Russell Crowe, among others, even warned Indonesia
to
remember we gave money for its tsunami victims -- as if we
only gave charity in exchange for passes out of jail.
Sick, but the feeling has grown. The Salvation Army, out
on its Red Shield appeal, had to promise not to send
donations to Indonesia. Let their poor suffer for "our"
Sc.
Meanwhile, radio hosts insisted the Prime Minister call the
Indonesian President to fix things in court for Co, as
if such interference wasn't plainly corrupt.
Worryingly, even senior politicians lost their heads in
the hysteria, with Justice Minister Chris Ellison vowing to
try bringing Co home in a "one-off" prisoner exchange.
The other 150 Australians in jail overseas should get
breast implants.
HAVE we lost our heads? Are we really such a vile rabble?
What must Indonesians make of this hissing mob that
threatens their diplomats, vilifies their country,
blackmails
them with aid and treats their judges as the corrupt
playthings of our politicians? And all this for the sake
of a
convicted drug smuggler who seems quite probably guilty,
and
only possibly innocent.
Even our whinges about their drug laws must seem bizarre.
Guess who truly has the worst laws -- Indonesia, which
gave Co 20 years' jail for having 4.1kg of marijuana; or
Victoria, which meanwhile gave a mere 12-month community
service order to a teacher found with 29kg -- and let her
keep her teaching licence?
So how must we seem to Indonesians? Like barbarians, or
even terrorists, and it's hard at the moment to think them
very wrong.
bolta@heraldsun.com.au