Not my words but those of a journo. Make your own judgement
The Corby Case
A differing point of view ...
Corby and the mob
Andrew Bolt (Opinion, Herald Sun)
01jun05
AND now to the verdict on the Schapelle Corby case. I find the defendant guilty of xenophobia, spite, boorishness and a self-righteous tribal hysteria.
No, I don't mean Corby. 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" Schapelle.
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, Corby 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.
(Corby, 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 Corby's brother James carried the bag for her to the customs area, where officer I Gusti Nyoman Winata asked her to open it.
Corby 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 Corby's lunge to stop him opening her bag. He seemed as honest as Corby 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 Corby 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 Corby, 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 Corby seem to an Indonesian? Here's a tip: Not like she came from the responsible land of the straight-and-narrow.
It gets worse. Corby'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 Corby was unwittingly carrying drugs for crooks operating at the Brisbane and Sydney airport terminals.
With Australians like this behind Corby, 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 Corby's theory as "flimsy". Corby'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 Corby on trial, and losing, but Australia.
In one heady spasm, hundreds of thousands of Australians became certain that Corby 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" Schapelle 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 Corby'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" Schapelle.
Meanwhile, radio hosts insisted the Prime Minister call the Indonesian President to fix things in court for Corby, 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 Corby 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 Corby 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
Stanley ·