[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

April 3



INDONESIA:

Bali bombings: A sister's search for justice


It was the day tragedy came to paradise, and more than 200 tourists were
brutally killed. As three men behind the Bali bombings appeal against
their imminent execution, Susanna Miller explains how she lost her
brotherDan in the atrocity  and why his murderers should now be allowed to
live


I awoke early in the morning to the sound of the Bombay traffic hooting
its way past the Gateway of India, with mixed feelings of jet lag,
disorientation and excitement that I was waking in India. It was my
partner Theresa's birthday, and the start of a long- anticipated holiday.
We spent a happy few minutes outlining our plans for a day that would take
us into the countryside, to tea plantations and bird sanctuaries. Room
service knocked with our breakfast, and the celebrations began. The date
was 13 October 2002.

It was with a sudden, strange foreboding that I turned to my mobile phone
to switch it on. It erupted with buzzing alerts of multiple messages. With
mounting alarm, I read the first text. It was one of a sort we all dread:
"Phone home urgent."

Making that call was like fal-ling though a trap door into a parallel
universe of death, terror and destruction.

My father answered the phone immediately. There had been a terrible
bombing in Bali and my 31-year-old brother Dan, his wife of five weeks,
Polly, and one of their bridesmaids, Annika, were somehow caught up in it.
Polly had managed to phone her parents to say that she was injured, and
couldn't find Dan and Annika. My father then said that I had to get off
the phone in case Dan, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office [FCO], or anyone
else was trying to get through with news. He said that news was patchy and
that Polly's mum had been trying to get through to the FCO emergency lines
for 12 hours.

Reeling with confusion, I rushed to the TV, jabbering the news to Theresa
as I struggled to find CNN. There followed the agony of seeing the
devastation of a bombing, knowing my brother and so many friends  he'd
been on the island with his rugby team  were caught up in it, and
discovering that the death toll was already estimated to be over 150. I
remember pacing around the room, phoning relatives with the TV flickering
with fire and destruction in the background, and rushing to the loo as
waves of shock and distress hit me.

The images of Dan happily leaving on his honeymoon were still fresh in my
mind. I kept muttering to myself, "People don't get killed five weeks
after getting married"; and, "If anyone could survive, it would be Dan; he
is so young, motivated and super fit"; and, "The chances are that he's
lost in the confusion." But all the time I felt a creeping realisation
that no news probably portended eventual bad news, and that every passing
minute without hearing from Dan made the potential outcome all the
bleaker.

We took the next available flight back to the UK. I had wanted to go
straight to Bali to search for Dan, but my parents insisted that I return
to the UK. We flew through the night, hoping and praying (well, it was
more pleading) with gods I hadn't spoken to for years. The flight was
painfully poignant, flying through the heavens in the dead of night with
the Earth below, not knowing if my brother was alive, dead or dying.

It was to be a long time before I could bring myself to acknowledge that
he really might be dead. It seemed impossible. He had been part of my life
for 31 years, and I even remember his birth. We grew up together, were
proud of each other, squabbled and played conkers. He is still the fastest
runner I know, the keenest sportsman, a dedicated lawyer and my only
brother. I was tormented by thoughts of what he might be going through,
and desperately hoping that when the eight-hour flight was over, good news
would greet me.

We landed at Heathrow to a cold, bleak October dawn. The news was bleaker:
still no word of Dan's fate, but my parents had been told that he was last
seen standing close to the area where the bomb went off, with many friends
and teammates, all of whom were missing-presumed-dead. Polly had been
badly burnt and airlifted to hospital in Australia. All emergency phone
lines to the FCO were still jammed, and no one seemed to know what was
happening. The FCO had, however, managed to assign a Family Liaison
Officer [FLO] to us  a depressing sign that things were indeed very
serious.

There followed bewildering and miserable discussions with our FLO,
describing Dan's physical characteristics, locating his dental records,
giving DNA swabs, giving details of his address in Hong Kong, his office,
the Hong Kong amateur rugby team he played for. All the while, we were
desperately hoping for a miracle and refusing to give up; giving up would
have seemed a betrayal. I insisted that miracles happen, and that Dan
might be unconscious in a hospital somewhere. The FLO replied, as gently
as he could, that all those in all hospitals had been identified and
accounted for, but the morgue was full of bodies waiting to be identified.
There was not going to be a miracle.

For the next 2 weeks, we lived from hour to hour, jumping every time the
phone went. Tourists and Dan's surviving teammates still in Bali took on
the role of hunting through the hospitals and morgues. A surreal cavalry
of florists' vans kept arriving with flowers and messages of inexpressible
pain, sympathy and disbelief. We avoided watching TV, as the graphic
images were too disturbing. We listened to the radio and read newspapers
instead. We lived in dread that the media would be tipped off and we would
be invaded or besieged by the press.

The confusion at the FCO seemed total: we seemed to be updating them with
news from Bali: details such as the hospital in Australia to which my
sister-in-law had been taken; and the status of my brother's dental
records. My mother flew out to Australia to nurse Polly and help her
mother. She was terribly ill with septicaemia, and her chances looked
bleak. Others injured in the bombing were dying in the wards around her.

Then the fateful phone call came, bringing the news we had dreaded: Dan's
body had been formally identified. Within 24 hours, Theresa and I were on
a flight to Indonesia. My father, being unable to travel for medical
reasons, stayed to co-ordinate things in the UK. Stunned and struggling
with the unbelievable and impossible fact of Dan's death, we flew to the
carnage and devastation of Bali. We were travelling to bring Dan's body
back to the UK, an unendurably sad and painful journey, tinged with
unreality.

****

What had happened, we eventually worked out, was this. On 12 October 2002,
at 23.08, one day, one month and one year after the attacks of 11
September 2001, 2 bombs exploded seconds from each other in a bar and
nightclub area in Kuta, the crowded main tourist area of Bali. The bars
were particularly busy as an amateur rugby tournament was being held that
weekend, attended by expats from right across South Asia, including my
bother and many of his friends from Hong Kong and from Singapore.

The 1st bomb was strapped to a man who walked up to a group of British
rugby players drinking in Paddy's Bar, stood among them and activated his
detonator. Aside from the carnage this produced in the bar, it forced
survivors out to the crowded street, into the path of the second bomb.
This further device was in a minivan, packed with explosives and a
specific chemical (a type of napalm) that ensured that burns suffered by
victims would be as severe as possible. The minivan had just parked next
to the Sari Club, an open-air bar and dance venue.

The van had been driven through crowds of people and stopped in the road
between Paddy's Bar and the larger Sari nightclub, which was packed with
hundreds of revellers. It was set off 12 seconds after the first bomb,
causing a massive explosion that damaged buildings over a mile away, and
killed or injured the vast majority of victims, including my brother. A
third bomb exploded near Bali's US Consulate, but no one was hurt.

The terrorists responsible did not know their victims: they chose them as
tokens, innocent bystanders who would lose their lives as part of a token
gesture. The final death toll is officially 202, however, owing to the
massive damage caused by the explosions, this figure took a year to
finalise, and is still a best estimate. There were 21 different
nationalities among the known victims, and they covered the globe, from
Ecuador to Japan, from Indonesia to Poland, from South Africa to Taiwan,
from the USA to Australia, from Canada to Sweden. Three have still not
been identified.

Many of those killed knew each other. A friend of Dan's, who had attended
his stag party a few months earlier in Singapore, estimated that half of
all those who were on that stag weekend died in Bali. 2 of those who had
attended Dan's wedding were killed, including one of his bridesmaids.
Hundreds more people were injured, many with burns and blast injuries.

In the ensuing weeks, it emerged that the bombings had been carried out by
Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorist group with links to al-Qa'ida, based in
South-east Asia and lead by a Muslim cleric named Abu Bakar Ba'asyir.

****

Some 18 days after the bombing, we arrived at a deserted Denpasar airport
on the island of Bali, and were driven through near-deserted streets to
our deserted hotel. The following day, we were given a police escort,
along with an escort of UK Police and FCO officials, to visit the bomb
site. We were driven in Jeeps with police lights flashing down near-empty
roads, which seemed bizarre. I remember thinking, "But the emergency is
over, it's too late  the worst has already happened".

The streets around the bomb site were blocked with debris, and we had to
walk the last part of the journey. Guided by the police, Theresa and I
picked our way over hundreds of yards of debris and broken glass, passing
through partially gutted buildings when the streets were totally blocked.
We passed twisted cars and mangled metal. As an architect, I was amazed at
the damage done to buildings made from concrete and brick. I remember
thinking that I shouldn't have been wearing flip-flops; then I recalled
that they were what Dan was wearing when he died.

When we finally reached the site, I placed sprigs of Kentish oak and
withered autumn roses from my parents' garden beside the crater. A
combination of Australian forensic police, British diplomats and assorted
specialists looked on.

I will never forget the awful smell of death that seemed to linger in my
nostrils for months after that day. The most bewildering fact was that
this carnage had been co-ordinated, intended, deliberate. Suspects were
starting to be arrested, but terrorists were clearly still at large and we
were several times confined to the hotel by bomb threats during our short
stay there. The malevolent intent nearby seemed very strong.

The day we left Bali, we had a blessing ceremony for Dan. My brother's
best man and two of his closest friends travelled from London and
Singapore. Although we were warned by the police and Foreign Office not to
go to the morgue owing to a typhoid outbreak, we went anyway. Dan was a
religious man and it felt right to have a service for him in Bali before
we left the island.

Dan's coffin lay draped in the Union flag. It was on a dais with a tin
roof and open sides in the forecourt of the morgue. We saw it as soon as
we drew up at the short perimeter wall. I was struck by the overwhelming
impression that he was so glad to see me and grateful that we had come. We
put photos of him, of his wedding, and of his team-mates (many of whom had
also been killed) on his coffin. An Australian padre said prayers and read
Psalm 23. We stood around in the strong Asian sunshine, reeling with the
bleak and merciless reality of it all. We prayed for Dan's soul as we
stood by his young corpse, surrounded by so many other young corpses in
refrigerated containers, piled around us. Deep down, I still could not
really believe that the events of the previous weeks had happened, or that
it was Dan in the coffin.

The journey to Bali gave both Theresa and I months of nightmares and
sleepless nights. Feelings of loss, shock and grief mellow over time. But
the scale of the tragedy and what it meant for my brother and the other
victims remains as sad and as tragic as the moment the bomb went off.
Dan's loss was, and still is, just too profoundly sad to justify anger.
Yet I find that anger seems to cloud his image in my mind if I let it in.

So, we come to the question of whether the men who killed my brother have
received justice. The question of whether Ali Gufron, Imam Samudra and
Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, whose appeal against their death sentence is
scheduled to be heard this week, should indeed face death by firing squad;
whether the cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, spiritual leader of the Islamist
group who carried out the bombings, should have been released from prison
(his two-and-a-half-year sentence ended, four months early, in 2006).
Whether Riduan Isamuddin, who is accused of helping to train Dan's
killers, should now be in Guantanamo Bay, and whether he should eventually
be tried by a US tribunal.

****

The world will draw a line under the Bali bombings. It will forget that
key individuals implicated in the case are still at large; it will think
that the three executions now being considered will somehow help those
bereaved and injured; and it will think that things are safer in Bali. It
will forget about subsequent fatal terrorist bombings in 2003, 2004, 2006
and 2006 in Indonesia. It will forget that Abu Bakar Ba'asyir's release
from prison has allowed him to continue spreading his message of hatred,
to call on followers to attack Westerners and become martyrs for Islam.
The world may even think that somehow the death penalty will help people
such as my parents and I to achieve "closure".

The world will be wrong. Up until the Bali bombings, I had always thought
that capital punishment was an impossibly primitive, clumsy and flawed
answer to the question of how to punish those convicted of the most
serious crimes. I felt that there were clear moral and practical problems
that should consign it to history. I associated its proponents with deeply
vindictive and reactionary mindsets. I could not understand how people
could advocate such an absolute and irreversible sanction, when the
shortcomings of the judicial system meant that a conviction could never be
said to be infallible, and when the point of the trial is to demonstrate
that the taking of a life is a crime.

Before Dan was killed, I had always believed that capital punishment was
an ineffective deterrent to murder. I believed that the convicted murderer
should instead be put through some moral journey, to see the error of
their actions, and with luck be rehabilitated. If repentance and
rehabilitation is too much for some individuals, then so be it, I thought
they can at least provide a resource for understanding the criminal mind.
I agreed with the premise that the death penalty violates a fundamental
human right to life, and is therefore morally unjustified.

My view has not changed. One of my strongest memories is of standing
beside that bomb crater in Bali, with my eyes closed, trying to block out
the destruction and sense Dan in it all. Although I could not block out
the smell of murder, and the sheer enormity of the carnage, I did feel his
presence there, just beyond living reach.

My brother was a lawyer, deeply versed in the moral and practical
arguments surrounding law and its role in society. As we grew up, Dan and
I sparred happily over numerous family suppers. As far as I remember, Dan
also thought that the arguments, both moral and practical, against capital
punishment were compelling and conclusive.

That day was one of the saddest moments of my life, and one that
reinforced to me the sanctity of human life, and the appalling effects of
taking it. Yet capital punishment seemed even more inappropriate then than
before. I felt, and still strongly feel, that there is never justification
for another human being to wilfully end another's life.

Justice is symbolic: the punishments given for crime are intended as both
a deterrent and a gesture to the victims of crime  in cases of murder, to
their relatives. If I had been able to create a justice system to try the
men who planned and executed my brother's killing, it would have been
different. The bombings were an international crime, against international
targets, by an internationally organised network. I would have preferred
an international court under the jurisdiction of international law, where
victims' relatives and survivors had a right to give impact statements and
explain their grief and loss. I would have preferred any convictions to
have carried custodial sentences in prisons run by the United Nations,
with no death penalty.

Crime, punishment, judgment, retribution, deterrent, martyrdom, incitement
and guilt are all such complex concepts that none can be made simpler by
capital punishment. If Ali Gufron, Imam Samudra and Amrozi bin Nurhasyim
are executed, I can't see it making any difference to what they destroyed.
2 the men who actually made and detonated the bombs have both already
died, violently resisting arrest. Yet the knowledge of this gave me no
feeling of satisfaction. I merely felt frustration that they could no
longer be put on trial and go through the indignity of detention.

****

I remember the hours watching from the plane window as the world slipped
past, far below, as we flew back to the UK in November 2002, conscious of
my brother's body in the cargo section of our plane. I was thinking that
there will come a time when I will be able to look back on those awful
events, and maybe have found some answers.

Nothing, though, will change the fact of the death of my brother. The only
truth I can find is in the words of Mahatma Gandhi: "An eye for an eye
will make the whole world go blind". If we allow execution, we take an
unacceptable step towards a territory as morally corrupt as those we
execute.

There is nothing more to say, except that, in crime, the victims are often
forgotten. 202 people were killed in the Bali bombing, and so many more
have been grievously damaged and scarred by the events of that night. And
my brother, a Cambridge-educated lawyer who could run faster than anyone I
know, died of blast injuries, five weeks after marrying, aged 31.

A charity has been set up in Dan Miller's name to treat adult burns
victims. It has already raised over 1m (www.dansfundforburns.org)

Most wanted  the men accused of the Bali bombing

Since the Bali bombing of October 2002, an extensive network of more than
30 suspected terrorists have been detained and, in some cases, convicted
of involvement in the attack. Many of them have links to the shadowy
terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), which is described by experts as an
Indonesian offshoot of al-Qa'ida. Of these suspects, three men  convicted
of being the strategic masterminds behind the bombing  have been sentenced
to execution by firing squad, and are currently appealing against their
death penalty. They are: Ali Gufron (better known by the 1t name Mukhlas),
Amrozi bin Nurhasyim and Imam Samudra, who are profiled below.

The 3 were due to be executed last year. However, repeated appeals against
their sentences have prevented the executions taking place. After an
initial attempt to overturn the decision failed last month, the trio are
in the middle of another. The 1st hearing is scheduled to be held this
week. 2 other high-profile figures  Abu Bakar Ba'asyir and Riduan
Isamuddin  have also been implicated in the attack. Isamuddin is held at
Guantanamo Bay; Ba'asyir was convicted of inciting terror, but released in
June 2006.

Ali Gufron (aka Mukhlas)

Mukhlas is thought to have studied at the Islamic boarding school in Solo,
in central Java, run by the Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir. Police say
he attended the Bali plotters' initial meeting, in Bangkok in February
2002, at which a decision was taken to bomb "soft" targets. He reportedly
had overall responsibility for the attack, authorising it and helping to
both plan and fund it.

Amrozi bin Nurhasyim

Amrozi bin Nurhasyim is believed to have owned one of the vans used to
carry out one of the bombings, as well as to have purchased explosives. He
is said to have studied at the same Islamic school as Mukhlas, and to have
plotted the bombing with Imam Samudra, meeting him in Bali six days before
it took place.

Imam Samudra

Imam Samudra chose the target and led planning meetings. Prosecutors
claimed that he stayed behind in Bali for four days after the attack, to
see how the police operations proceeded. Giving evidence at the separate
trial of Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, Imam Samudra said that the bombings were part
of a jihad.

Abu Bakar Ba'asyir

Abu Bakar Ba'asyir is a former teacher at an Islamic school in Solo, Java,
and allegedly the spiritual leader of JI. Ba'asyir was accused of being
connected with bomb attacks blamed on JI  including the Bali bombing of
2002  and sentenced to 30 months in jail for inciting terrorism. He was
released in June 2006, after 26 months. Ba'asyir has recently called for
further attacks on tourists who flout Islamic values.

Riduan Isamuddin (aka Hambali)

Indonesia-born Hambali, real name Riduan Isamuddin, is believed to have
been operations chief for JI. He is wanted by Indonesia, Malaysia,
Singapore and the Philippines for a series of bomb attacks, and is jailed
in Guantanamo Bay. Hambali has been linked with the 2002 Bali attack.

(source: The Independent)