According to President Jokowi and Vice President Jusuf Kalla, drug trafficking leads to thousands of fatalities every year. It is therefore an “extraordinary crime” for which the only appropriate penalty is death by firing squad.
Ever since that fateful day on Dec. 9, when Jokowi stood before an audience of students and condemned 64 felons to a bloody execution, we have been led to believe that drug trafficking is, in itself, a lethal offense, and that drug traffickers can therefore be held personally responsible for overdose deaths and other tragic, drug-related accidents.
“[T]here will be no clemency for convicts who committed narcotics-related crimes,” Jokowi said. “There are between 40 and 50 Indonesians, mostly young people, who lose their lives every day due to drug use…”
Similarly, when Kalla was asked whether the 64 executions would contravene the “right to life,” which is enshrined in Indonesia’s Constitution as well as international law, the vice president argued that it is the drug traffickers who violate human rights when they supply deadly substances to an illicit market: “[E]veryone must obey the law,” he simply stated, “[and] drugs cause the deaths of others… It’s fair: the president will not give clemency to those who destroy the nation.”
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Double standards
Jokowi believes that drug trafficking is an immoral enterprise chiefly because it leads to needless fatalities. He believes that 40 to 50 Indonesians die each day from drug use, and therefore believes that 14,600 to 18,250 Indonesian drug users die each year.
These figures, which originally appeared in a 2013 National Narcotics Agency (BNN) report, are of course estimates; but for the sake of argument we’ll agree to take the stats at face value.
So let’s say it’s true: let’s say that exactly 50 Indonesians die each day from drug use, and let’s also say Jokowi’s rationale for executing the supposed culprits is morally and logically sound: i.e. drug traffickers deal in dangerous substances, the dangerous substances kill our children, and we should therefore kill the drug traffickers.
If you truly believe that this line of reasoning offers a useful moral principle for Indonesia’s justice system to uphold, then you should be more than willing to see a tobacco baron or an automobile tycoon vanquished before a firing squad.
Consider the proprietors of Indonesia’s two great tobacco companies – Budi Hartono of Djarum and Susilo Wonowidjojo of Gudang Garam – who also happen to be at number one and number two respectively on Indonesia’s rich list.
These two men have been in the tobacco business for several decades, and have been handsomely rewarded with a combined net worth of over $24.5 billion. But if we attempt to quantify how many deaths these men are jointly culpable of – using Jokowi’s logic, that is – we would find that Mr. Hartono and Mr. Wonowidjojo have “killed” literally millions of people.
Just look at the World Lung Foundation’s 2008 study, which concluded that tobacco consumption kills at least 200,000 Indonesians per year, in addition to a further 25,000 who die each year from second-hand smoke.
If we grant that the WLF’s figures are as accurate as the BNN’s drug death statistics, then we must concede that passive smoking alone kills more Indonesians per year than all illegal drugs combined, and that active smoking kills 10 times more Indonesians per year than all illegal drugs combined.
Yet somehow, according to the thinking of Jokowi and Kalla, it is Indonesia’s illegal drug problem that warrants a “state of emergency” and a spate of 64 “shock therapy” executions, rather than its much more deadly tobacco epidemic. Meanwhile, of course, Budi Hartono and Susilo Wonowidjojo are laughing all the way to the Forbes 500.
If President Jokowi and Vice President Kalla really do care about saving lives, and if they really do believe that this can be achieved by executing the “kingpins” who trade in dangerous substances, then why not execute Budi Hartono and Susilo Wonowidjojo?
Is it not obvious that these two men – if we are to use Jokowi’s logic – have been directly “responsible” for millions of preventable deaths over the years? And more repulsive still, just like our so-called “kingpins” on death row, Hartono and Wonowidjojo have made an exquisite personal fortune as a result.
This sort of double standard has to stop.