Carnival of capital punishment for Bali Nine

What’s overlooked in the glee at having a deaf-to-reason president who seems to care nothing about international concerns is the needless damage being inflicted on a nation long seen as chaotic and corrupt.  Now it’s being painted cruel.

And not just to the condemned.

Politicians pontificating in the capital about deterrents don’t get to labour in the killing fields.  No blood on their boots.  No sleepwalking like Lady Macbeth as the nightmares play, rewind, replay.

That’s the fate of the wong kecil, the little people who get to do the State’s dirty work.   Pity these unwilling actors in the Jakarta-produced horror show, and think how it’s going to scar their lives.

Let’s start at the end.

In Indonesian executions ambulances collect the corpses, not hearses.  Paramedics are used to accidents and trauma.  Their job is to rush the ill and injured to hospital.  They’ve been trained to save lives.

Not this time.

Instead they’ll load bodies into coffins.  Maybe they’ll first unpin the target aprons to be washed, ironed and reused, because butchering is expensive. The entry mark for a 5.56 mm bullet is little more than the diameter of a ballpoint pen, but the exit wound is fist sized and gaping.

So the back of the victims’ shirts will be ripped and splattered with blood, bone splinters and slices of pink flesh, the front soaked in a frothy mix of gore, tears and vomit, the pants filled with urine and excreta for every orifice  opens up in the death throes. 

The stench a mix of warm blood, faeces and upchuck laced with cordite.

If the marksmen have blinked back a tear when squeezing triggers – for only unhinged monsters can kill another defenceless human in cold blood without a ripple of revulsion – then an officer will have fired a final shot into the temple.

Hunters know that killing wounded animals this way bursts the brain and blows out the eyeballs on stalks like mushrooms.  In a flash facial features become unrecognizable.