Miranda Devine: Corby vs. Hicks
Grace under fire moves a nation
The Sun-Herald
Composed: Corby, flanked by police officers, as she left court on Friday
Photo: AFP
After visiting Schapelle Corby in prison after her conviction, her defence team met beside the pool at the rented Seminyak villa of her financial backer, Gold Coast businessman Ron Bakir.
They ordered pizza and wept, as Bakir, 28, played Corby's song on the stereo - a homemade mix of Michael Buble's song Home and poignant snatches of Corby's voice in the courtroom.
"It's not fair," said red-eyed Bakir of her 20-year sentence, as news came that the prosecutor was appealing its "leniency".
Lebanese-born Bakir, a high school dropout made good from Merrylands, western Sydney, and his friend, Gold Coast lawyer Robin Tampoe, 38, are chivalrous men a little in love with the damsel in distress sitting in Kerobokan prison a few kilometres away. Bakir, a former bankrupt, has been portrayed as an opportunistic spiv, but the reality may be quite different, as his genuine anguish after the verdict indicates.
Tampoe, whose dark good looks come from his Irish-Sri Lankan background, is another poor boy made good, specialising in commercial law for Japanese and Korean businesses. With the oft-criticised young Indonesian lawyer Lily Lubis, they are characters straight from central casting in Corby's David v Goliath struggle to prove her innocence.
"They are just a poor family," said Tampoe of the Corbys, "a normal family. Those type of people normally don't fight, do they? Everyone thought they wouldn't fight and they all dismissed us. But they underestimated her."
Schapelle's Princess Diana-like popularity in Australia is seemingly unstoppable. It sneaked up on politicians and much of the media and has caused a world of trouble between Australia and Indonesia. It has brought out the worst xenophobia in her fellow citizens, complete with bomb threats to Indonesian consulates, and one radio host describing the three judges as monkeys, "straight out of the trees".
It has forced Prime Minister John Howard and his ministers into damage control, trying to offload blame on to her defence team as public anger grows at the realisation the Government, the Federal Police and Qantas did little to help her case.
What was remarkable in that muggy chaotic Denpasar court room on Friday was Schapelle's composure as she was convicted of trafficking 4.1 kilograms of marijuana into Bali. Through the chaos of 40 flashing cameras poked through the open windows, 200 journalists, family and friends, packed thigh to sweaty thigh behind her, rows of armed Indonesian police lining the walls, the sound of crashing tripods outside, swearing cameramen, reporters filing live crosses and a dozen translators murmuring, she stayed calm and straight-backed for almost two hours.
It was only as the third judge began to read his portion of the verdict in a harsh hectoring tone that the 27-year-old Gold Coast student beautician began to rock and weep. But she always pulled herself together and turned to smile and mouth "It's OK" to her family, sitting gloomy and uncomprehending in the front row.
She seemed only to despair when her sister Mercedes and mother Ros began shrieking at the judges after they pronounced the 20-year sentence.
"You people, how dare you," yelled Ros. "You judges will never sleep."
"Mum, stay calm. Mum, stop, it's OK. Just relax," pleaded Corby as the police rushed to surround the family, and Corby's usually placid father Michael crossly shushed his ex-wife.
"Schapelle's asked you," he said.
"I know what I'm doing," Ros snapped back.
The family dynamics bolstered an impression of Corby which has emerged throughout her seven-month ordeal, that she is the dutiful third daughter of a poor, loyal but relatively dysfunctional family; adored by her terminally ill father, who left the family when she was six; who has tried to make something of herself by being perfect.
Her grooming every day of the trial has been immaculate, a Herculean task in her circumstances, with just bowls of water to wash in.
The Australian public has seen what Corby's defence team saw long ago: a transcendent grace that makes her guilt implausible. Her strength of character, not to mention the careful styling and stunning good looks, improved in recent months by jail-time weight loss, have bolstered her claim she is innocent and that corrupt baggage handlers planted the drugs in her boogie board bag.
Public belief in her innocence is evident on the baggage carousel at Bali's Denpasar airport. Almost all the bags are locked, or bound with straps, some even shrink-wrapped in plastic.
A new paranoia has joined the Australian travellers' worries, along with Islamic terrorists and windshear. If, as Corby claims, someone put the plastic sack of hydroponic marijuana in her bag between Brisbane airport and Bali, then any one of us could be sitting in her dank cell in the Kerobokan prison tonight.
Protection, not money, the key to securing exclusive access
Contrary to popular belief, Channel Nine did not pay Schapelle Corby's mother Ros a cent.
Australian journalists covering the story in Bali have been complaining about chequebooks all week because Nine had gained exclusive access to Ros, Schapelle's father Michael and other family members.
In fact, Nine paid for air fares and a villa in Bali for Ros and her partner Greg. "She chose a really modest villa," producer Sean Walsh said. "She never hits us up for extra money for food. She's never been greedy. She's just really decent."
What the public may not understand is that in media-saturated situations, families like the Corbys will often choose to give exclusive access to one outlet, not for money, but in order to gain protection from the rest of the media, which is competing fiercely for their attention.
The chosen media organisation will then shield the family from media scrums, organise getaway cars, courtroom seats, translators, secure accommodation and such mundane items as bottles of water and cigarettes.
It is, of course, infuriating for other journalists to be blocked from getting the story but that doesn't mean the family is venal
What I tried to say was
In an email from Java, Professor Tim Lindsey, director of the University of Melbourne's Asian Law Centre, took exception to last week's column which quoted him defending the Indonesian criminal justice system. He wants to make clear he never said the Indonesian justice system is not corrupt.
However, he says: "I have not seen anything to suggest that this court is acting corruptly in Corby's trial.
"What I have said on repeated occasions is that the Indonesian system has serious problems of institutionalised corruption at all levels but this certainly does not mean all judicial decisions in Indonesia are corrupt.
"Many major commercial cases are often subject to corruption, as are many political cases. Routine criminal cases are, however, less likely to be exposed to this problem.
"The current Chief Justice of Indonesia, Professor Bagir Manan, is a committed reformer and under his leadership there have been major steps towards cleaning up the courts."
Professor Lindsey is none too popular with Corby's defence team, after he said they "did not rise well to the challenge" of countering the prosecution case. He also slammed Indonesian lead lawyer Lily Lubis for crying in court and being "young and relatively inexperienced".
But the competent Lubis had hired a more experienced, albeit less photogenic, well-connected lawyer to run the case in court. Erwin Siregar, a lawyer in Denpasar for 26 years, has defended more than 100 drugs cases and among those people who bombarded his mobile phone with messages of support after the verdict was good friend Denny Kailimang, Jakarta-based head of the Indonesian Lawyers Association.
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'Guilty' puts end to the Hicks myth
By pleading guilty to terrorism this week, David Hicks has plastered egg all over the faces of his supporters - the naive hysterics who believe he is a tortured innocent as well as those glory-seeking civil rights lawyers who have attached themselves to his case.
The egg was coming, anyway, as the prosecution finally had an opportunity to lay out its allegations before the United States military commission in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But even as they wiped the yolk from their surprised brows yesterday, apologists for the 31-year-old Muslim convert, aka Mohammed Dawood, had found another way to spin this piece of bad news to their advantage.
"There's no way that this can be seen as a genuine guilty plea," the Greens senator Bob Brown told reporters, ignoring the fact that an innocent man would do anything to have his day in court.
"[It is] simply a plea for release for exit from the inhumane Guantanamo Bay gulag."
Singing from the same songsheet were newspaper letter pages bulging with outrage: "By accepting a plea deal to escape the Guantanamo Bay hellhole, a bit player who hurt nobody becomes a self-confessed war criminal," wrote Lesley Pople of Cremorne.
Thus you see the spin: Hicks only pleaded guilty to get out of the gulag, not because he is guilty. And even if he is a teensy bit guilty he's not a big scary terrorist, like Osama bin Laden. He's just a bit player. A small fish. Which is what most terrorists are. You don't find big fish like bin Laden or Khalid Sheik Mohammed strapping on backpacks full of hydrogen peroxide.
But with Hicks pleading guilty to the charge of providing material support to a terrorist organisation, we can only hope for some respite from the mythology that has grown around him.
No more "Free David Hicks" posters in cafes across the "intellectual" suburbs. Getup! might stop running ads portraying the self-confessed terrorist with the receding hairline as a cherubic nine-year-old. It might even think about returning the $500,000 it received last year in public donations, much of which it spent on salaries and expenses, as Australian Securities and Investments Commission documents reportedly revealed last month.
Maybe now Hicks's supporters might stop referring to him as "gaunt" since courtroom artists in the prison camp have revealed how porky he has grown on meals consumed on the US taxpayer.
Maybe now his lawyers might even drop the pretence that Hicks's hair is long because he needs to wrap it around his eyes to block out an "inhumane" light in his cell 24 hours a day, even though US authorities keep saying the "security light" is so dimmed at night you can't read a book by it.
Maybe now, we can put the American system for dealing with terrorist detainees in perspective, instead of falling for the line that it is the moral equivalent of al-Qaeda.
One such line came from Steven Miles, an America bioethicist who appeared on ABC's Lateline this week complaining about conditions at Guantanamo Bay. One of the techniques was to put "nude pin-ups on the chests of prisoners, having them take them off and then match them up with pin-ups on the floor". Another interrogation tactic was to make the detainees watch movies such as Die Terrorists, Die.
Responding on the program to the allegation that interrogation is designed to manipulate detainees' emotions and weakness, the US chief prosecutor, Moe Davis, said: "I would certainly hope so. I mean, that's the purpose of an interrogation is to obtain intelligence information to prevent the next 9/11 or the next Bali bombing."
Maybe now that he has confessed to being a terrorist people might start remembering the real David Hicks.
Here are the inconvenient facts:
On October 5, 2001, the Australian Government announced it was committing troops to the war against terrorism. By this stage, according to the charge sheet prepared by US prosecutors, Hicks had been at Kandahar airport for about two weeks with other al-Qaeda fighters. He had been issued with an AK-47 rifle and then "on his own armed himself with six ammunition magazines, 300 rounds of ammunition, and three grenades to use in fighting against the US Northern Alliance or other coalition forces".
It was a full two months before Hicks would be captured in Afghanistan.
On October 22, 2001, the first deployment of our Special Forces Task Group left Australia for Afghanistan.
This was about the time Hicks "decided to look for another opportunity to fight in Kabul", where he had heard fighting would be heavy.
On or about November 9, 2001, Hicks met a terrorist friend "who requested Hicks go to the front lines in Konduz [in the north] with him". Hicks joined a group of fighters including the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, who were "engaged in combat against coalition forces".
After the front line collapsed, Hicks spent the rest of November in Arab safe houses in Konduz, still with his AK-47. By late November, there were reports that an advance party of Special Air Service soldiers was in Afghanistan. On December 3, 2001, Australian SAS troops were confirmed to be in Kandahar. That was about the time Hicks was arrested, in a taxi heading from Konduz to the Pakistan border.
It's worth remembering that on February 17, 2002, an Australian SAS soldier, Sergeant Andrew Russell, was killed in Afghanistan after an anti-tank mine exploded. While his death occurred two months after Hicks's capture, it nevertheless highlights Australia's very real exposure on the front line.
Hicks was not a misguided child who only went back to Afghanistan to retrieve his clothes, as some of his supporters maintain.
He was a well-trained terrorist, an al-Qaeda "golden boy" who had watched footage of the September 11, 2001, attacks which killed 3000 innocent people, including Australians, on a friend's TV in Pakistan, who "approved of the attacks" and went back to Afghanistan to fight the US and its allies with his terrorist mates. He was the enemy traitor when Australian troops were on the ground.
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