Running Drugs, and Idiots, in a Country with Consequences

Summary

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JUSTICE FOR THE Australians arrested on drug import-export charges in Bali will not be achieved by trashing Indonesia in print or on the airwaves. Quite the reverse. The Indonesians, perhaps with the tiny exception of Bali, are already on the hostile side of suspicious about Westerners generally. The situation is not likely to be improved by demands -- all the way up to an absurd call to send in the Australian SAS to extract Schapelle Corby in an Entebbe- type raid -- that the Jakarta Government and judiciary be somehow heavied into sending those arrested back home, presumably to be given a short stay in a clean and comfortable prison just around the corner from mum and pals. Besides, the implications of the Corby case must be already well understood by Bali, at least, without having to trowel it on. Clearly her arrest seven months ago for allegedly trying to smuggle a huge bag of marijuana into Bali, brazenly stuffed into a boogie board bag, is in a completely different league from the other nine Australians caught last week in what appears to be a major operation to smuggle heroin through and out of that same resort island.

Corby's alleged crime does not have the same ring of stupidity as the latest crop of mules -- arrested with the drug strapped to their bodies -- and those said to have been arranging further shipments. Primarily, it has not been explained why anyone, much less the cash- strapped Corby, would want to take a 4kg, $50,000 plastic sack full of marijuana to a country the same thing sells for $10,000. Additionally, there is every possibility that her unlocked board bag was simply unzipped and loaded with the dope between her Brisbane check-in and Denpasar Customs -- for whatever unfathomable reasons. Australian witnesses vouch that the bag contained only swimming gear. The plastic sack was never fingerprinted, despite her pleas to do so, and check-in and check-out weight discrepancies were not taken into account. Backed by those startling blue eyes, Corby's conviction and dispatch to a long spell in a fetid Indonesian jail would be so contrary to the Australian concept of valid evidence and a fair trial that a spontaneous tourist boycott would surely follow, with painful consequences for the Balinese.

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Running Drugs, and Idiots, in a Country with Consequences

The other nine are in a completely different c...

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