We have forgotten that abolishing executions required a struggle
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Version 0 of 1. In 1967, 4000 unionists from the Waterside Workers Federation protested in Melbourne against the looming execution of Ronald Ryan by trying to storm Parliament House, yelling as they did so: “Hang [premier] Bolte!” and “Ryan should not hang!” Theirs was not the only demonstration during the bitter campaign to save the last man hanged in Australia. Later, a noisy march of 5,000 protesters tramped up Sydney Road to Pentridge – and, then, the evening before the execution, 3,000 people gathered outside the stone walls, where, throughout the night, they faced off against 200 police, with 97 people arrested in what the newspapers called ‘wild scenes”. These days, we remember the Ronald Ryan case through the Vaseline lens of baby boomer nostalgia. The campaign against the death penalty is presented, like so much else from that time, as uncontroversial and sensible – the inevitable triumph of liberal reason over backwardness and hate. Related: Let Victoria's government keep its promise: don't demolish Pentridge | Michael Hamel-Green We forget, in other words, the intensity of the struggle – and our amnesia shapes our thinking about executions elsewhere. As the grim countdown continues on Bali, it’s tempting for Australians to consider the abolition of capital punishment simple, a straightforward piece of modernisation that Indonesia’s leaders might yet be convinced to adopt if only we explain to them patiently enough. Unfortunately, history suggests otherwise. Capital punishment has never really been about justice. Today, the vast majority of death sentences are imposed by judicial systems that are neither open, transparent nor fair. In 2013, the most recent year for which figures are available, China led the world in state killings. We don’t know how many prisoners were shot in Chinese execution yards (Amnesty International says thousands), something that in and of itself speaks volumes about the circumstances in which the killings took place. A separate Amnesty report describes the Chinese court system as notoriously capricious: “an estimated 500,000 people [are] currently enduring punitive detention without charge or trial, and millions are unable to access the legal system to seek redress for their grievances”. The judicial code is equally arbitrary in most of the other nations on the mass execution table: Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and Somalia. Indeed, the only real surprise among the mass executing countries is the United States, which remains almost alone in democratic nations in its enthusiasm for the death penalty. Part of the explanation for that probably stems from America’s particular history – as Sangmin Bae argues in When the State No Longer Kills, “in the US, the regions with the most lynching a century ago have the highest percentage of executions, while there are fewer executions in the regions that lack any substantial history of extreme vigilante behavior”. That pattern also means that capital sentences are generally carried out in US states where the legal representation for racial minorities and the poor is often grotesquely inadequate. In other words, almost everywhere, the death penalty is applied in contexts in which fair treatment for defendants cannot be guaranteed. This is not a coincidence. Famously, Foucault argued that an essential characteristic of sovereignty was its “power to exercise the right to decide life and death”. That’s why, in pre-modern societies, executions were generally public performances: as the historian Stuart Banner says, “the primary purpose of capital punishment was the emphatic display of power, a reminder of what the state could do to those who broke its laws”. Killing, in a sense, defines statehood: the ruler is the ruler because he can legitimately take the lives of others, whether in war or on the scaffold. In his epic study of people executed in 18th century Britain, The London Hanged, Peter Linebaugh notes that: [J]ust as each hanging renewed the power of sovereignty, so each hanging repeated the lesson: ‘Respect Private Property’. So, if the hangings are to be considered as dramas, the conflict that they represented was the conflict of the Powerful and the Propertied against the Weak and the Poor ... Yet, like any other performance, an execution necessarily involves a degree of uncertainty. The bloody destruction of a criminal or dissident might leave the people cowed – but it also sometimes offers a chance for public defiance. Linebaugh, for instance, chronicles the many instances in which London crowds tried to save the condemned man – and, if that were not possible, to snatch his body back for his family. In the 19th century, with the authorities in most developed countries nervous about public gatherings of the working class, public hangings gave way to prison executions, so that the prisoner could be dispatched without any risk that a mob would transform the celebration of state power into a demonstration of state impotence. Private hangings more properly corresponded with the transition from a feudal legal code – in which penalties were specific, individualised, arbitrary and spectacular – to the norms of bourgeois justice where punishments were associated less with an individual sovereign and more with an impersonal bureaucracy. But it was a shift of form rather than content, with executions remaining intensely political events. We forget, for instance, the tremendous unrest generated by the hanging of Ned Kelly, with the bushranger’s supporters collecting 60,000 signatures on a petition calling for commutation. A week before the execution, 6,000 people gathered at a protest meeting in Exhibition street, leading the Bendigo Independent to warn that “male and female beasts” had “come out of their holes and […] were at the Kelly meeting, […] shocking the respectable classes, and enabling them to comprehend upon what a fearful volcano society stands”. A later rally nearly turned into a full-fledged riot – and some 5,000 people (the Telegraph called them “a mob of nondescript idlers”) gathered outside the Old Melbourne Gaol on execution day. Similarly, the hanging of Angus Murray in 1924 led to huge protests involving an extraordinary 12,000 people, a petition with 70,000 signatures, and a rally of 10,000 on the Yarra Bank. On the day that Murray died, Port Philip Stevedores called a strike, and several thousand people – mostly working class women – assembled outside the gaol where they had to be held back by mounted police. In Australia, the political polarisation that took place over the Ronald Ryan hanging led to a consensus that executions would no longer serve their traditional purpose: instead of displaying the might of the state, capital punishment was inducing the people of a relatively stable society to disobey the authorities. Or, to put it another way, hangings were fostering rebellion rather than ensuring compliance. In other countries, however, the state did not give in so easily, treasuring executions as important demonstrations of authority. It’s noteworthy, for instance, that capital punishment was abolished in the defeated nations of the Second World War before it disappeared from the countries that won. In Italy, Germany and Austria, the fascists had made vigorous use of the executioner – and the removal of the death penalty was pushed by the occupying powers as part of the reconstruction process. The regimes that clung most fervently to the death penalty in the second half of the 20th century tended to be those violently suppressing an unruly populace. South Africa, for instance, increased its rate of executions as the freedom struggle intensified: according to Amnesty International, the apartheid government put more people to death between 1985 and 1988 than any other country in the world, save Iran. Thus, the defeat of apartheid also signaled the defeat of the hangman: the first session of the post-apartheid Constitutional Court of South Africa declared: “Everyone, including the most abominable of human beings, has a right to life, and capital punishment is therefore unconstitutional.” Today, the parallels are obvious. Like the old South Africa, the Chinese government executes so many people because so as to maintain autocratic rule over a huge and increasingly restive population. The thousands of prisoners shot each year provide a simple warning to separatists, pro-democracy activists and other dissidents: this is a state that will kill you dead. The arbitrariness of the penalty is a demonstration that the authorities can and will strike down anyone they please. The same might be said about almost all of the nations in which executions still happen regularly. For instance, as Poengky Indarti reminds us, though the origins of the death penalty in Indonesia can be traced back to Dutch colonial law, its use really became normalised under the Suharto dictatorship, during which executions were imposed under the authority of the Extraordinary Military Tribunal (or Mahmilub) so that “political enemies were equal to enemies of the state”. Suharto, she argues, sought to institutionalise civilian fear of the regime through a combination of extrajudicial murders and official executions. The application of capital punishment to drug offenses was entirely secondary, a decision made in 1997 in emulation of the equally authoritarian regimes in Malaysia and Singapore. Since the fall of Suharto in 1998, the reformasi process, despite the hopes so many pinned on it, has not changed the deep structures of Indonesian society. Today, a fairly shaky government still needs dramatic demonstrations of power to keep together a nation state under challenge both from separatists (in Aceh and elsewhere) and from the rise of a new politicized Islam. For that reason, serious agitation against the death penalty in Indonesia would, almost certainly, entail a direct confrontation with the state, one in which activists would have to tackle a host of other questions: everything from the role of the military to the relationship between religion and politics. To put it another way, a campaign for the reform of the legal code would be very likely to become a campaign for reform more generally, in a nation in which, traditionally, reformers have not been treated kindly. In recent weeks, almost every Australian political leader has (rightly) spoken out for clemency for the two young men facing execution in Bali – and, hopefully, their lives will yet be spared. But, leaving aside the specific cases of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, where would Australia stand if Indonesia were gripped by the sort of mass campaign necessary to fundamentally reshape its judicial code? In that context, it’s illuminating to read a recent column by Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of the Australian. He accepts that the Australian government should lobby on behalf of Chan and Sukumaran – but largely on the basis that the public expects some action. He worries, however, that the government will be pushed into going too far: The key will be the degree of public reaction in Australia. Ultimately, a government has to reflect community sentiment to some degree. Foreign policy that is opposed to public opinion is impossible to sustain. The problem is that most of the possible actions are counterproductive or self-defeating, or clearly contravene Australia’s long-term interests. To understand those “long-term interests”, you only have to think back to the Suharto regime. Sheridan infamously hailed former Indonesian president Suharto as “an authentic giant of Asia”, a man who “[produced] a stable Indonesia, and therefore a stable Southeast Asia”, and by so doing “bequeathed an inestimable gift to Australia”. Of course, Suharto also presided over the murders of perhaps half a million people in the massacres of 1965 and 1966, an orgy of slaughter that left the rivers running into Surabaya clogged with the bodies of suspected leftwingers. The Suharto regime’s reliance on gangsters to strangle, stab and shoot its opponents by the hundreds of thousands was recently explored in the documentary The Act of Killing. Yet, as Sheridan says, in Canberra the enthusiasm for Suharto was entirely bipartisan, with a succession of Labor and Liberal foreign ministers preferring a blood-soaked strongman over the instability that any challenge to his regime might bring. The Australian government’s willingness to tolerate repression in Indonesia is by no means anomalous. On the contrary, it’s entirely typical of Western attitudes to strategic allies, like Saudia Arabia, the oil kingdom in which the crimes punishable by death include apostasy, blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, sorcery, witchcraft and adultery. Precisely because the country is so deeply repressive, any mass struggle to reform the Saudi penal code would almost certainly end up as a broader campaign for political and economic rights. In other words, it would resemble the early phases of the Arab Spring – a movement that briefly threw into question almost every aspect of some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world. Related: Indonesians should be too familiar with death to support executions | Laksmi Pamuntjak And there’s the problem: Western powers did absolutely everything they could to prevent the Arab Spring troubling the Saudi royal family – privileging, once again, stability over justice. Indeed, when King Abdullah died a few months ago, John Kerry lauded the late dictator as “a man of wisdom and vision” and a “revered leader”. Tony Blair said “he was loved by his people and will be deeply missed”. It’s a good thing that the Bali Nine case has led Australians to take far more of an interest in the Indonesian legal system, and the horror that many people feel about capital punishment is entirely justified and legitimate. But real change in Indonesia will come from the bottom, not the top, and so, almost by definition, will challenge the “stability” that Australian politicians and pundits have so often lauded. That’s the challenge, then, for everyone appalled by the thought of the firing squad. If Indonesian protesters march on their parliament, just like waterside workers did here in 1967, which side will we be on? |