Australian-Indonesian relations threatened by executions

Curiously terrorism doesn't get the same brutal treatment. Jokowi has spoken publicly about taking "softer religious and cultural approaches" as these were better tools in eradicating terrorism than the "security approach". He declined to elaborate.

There's no sophisticated debate on the death penalty in Muslim-majority Indonesia where State-sanctioned killings don't arouse the abhorrence felt in Europe and Australasia. Even concerns about the innocent dying through flaws in a notoriously corrupt judicial system are muted. Capital punishment is accepted as a just and effective deterrent though the facts say otherwise.

SBY's moratorium ended in 2013 with five well-publicised executions. That year British grandma Lindsay Sandiford, 58, was caught carrying almost five kilos of cocaine. She is also on death row in Bali.

Despite the prominently advertised penalties drug arrests continue to be commonplace with the alleged criminals pictured before cakes of contraband while cops in balaclavas look on.

One of the latest is Kiwi pensioner Antony de Malmanche, 53, caught in Bali in early December allegedly carrying 1.7 kilos of methamphetamine. He too could be torn apart by fragmenting bullets if convicted.

Indonesian executions are horrific. In 2008 Catholic priest Charlie Burrows supported two Nigerians facing a midnight firing squad in Central Java. He later told a Constitutional Court challenge to the death penalty that the men bled and moaned for seven minutes after being shot from a metre away by a dozen policemen armed with assault rifles.

The hooded drug traffickers had been tied to crucifixes with car inner tubes. A target had been put over their hearts by a doctor (presumably breaking the Hippocratic Oath) who did not pronounce them dead till ten minutes after the gunfire ceased.

A Sydney Morning Herald report of Father Burrows' testimony quoted the priest saying: "I think it is cruel, the torture."

Death for druggies is a simplistically attractive solution to a social evil that's well entrenched in Indonesia, but President Jokowi may soon face the dilemma that so troubled his gun-happy predecessors. Indonesia has more than four million workers overseas, with 280 on death rows in countries like Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

Some of these people are young maids accused of murdering their bosses. Their defence of responding to employer rape has little impact in Arab states. Indonesian diplomats pleading a stay of the sword on behalf of their citizens find the going tough when reminded that their own country also lacks compassion.

Despite defeating the colonial Dutch for independence in a bloody four-year conflict, and running the world's third largest democracy, Indonesians retain a strange sense of international inferiority: Banging the nationalist drum always rouses a parade.

Shelling a Vietnamese fishing boat for TV news, or shredding the torsos of Australian drug runners will go down a treat with Indonesian voters, particularly if the folk next door are enraged. Snubbing mercy pleas by Tony Abbott will damage relations between the neighbours but do Jokowi's image at home no harm at all.