Children under the sword
The President and the country are right to rejoice that Nasiroh has escaped the Saudi sword, although the execution of Soleha Anam Kadiran earlier in October cast a giant shadow over the result of this intervention by the government of Indonesia. Nasiroh is reported as having written of another "16 Indonesians awaiting the death sentence" -- the government would be well advised not to see this as "rumor", but instead conduct a very thorough investigation, and pressurize the Saudi Arabian government. However many await beheading in Saudi jails, they are certainly not all Indonesians.
Two girls, one eight and one 13, await a similar fate. They were members of a large Pakistani family caught drug-trafficking. The two girls, in fact, were forced to swallow packages of heroin, in spite of the extreme danger of death should the packages burst.
Clearly a crime had been committed, but an eight-year-old girl would not have the maturity to understand the criminal act of drug-trafficking, as well as having little option but to obey the commands of male relatives.
In spite of relentless, shocked protest by Amnesty International and Human Tights Watch, the Saudis have ignored appeals, and the young girls will enter the same, one-way secret process as Soleha did -- no access to defense lawyers, and no appeal procedure. Islamic scholars have reacted with horror to this possibility, and Dr. Youessef Al-Khoie, head of a major Islamic foundation in London, said "the problems in such a case is not the tenets of sharia law, but the fact that the religious courts in Saudi Arabia follow a particularly narrow school of interpretation, they are extremist and literalist".
We need not worry the Saudis would draw the line at beheading children -- the youngest so far reported was a 15-year-old boy, who was hanged in 1992, for "abandoning his faith." I have seen no reports of moderate Islamic countries, whose ministers were in Jakarta recently, offering moral support and assistance to the government of Indonesia to pressurize the Saudis, whose primitive concepts of natural law and justice, cause such distress and revulsion worldwide.
There is, of course, a political element to their devious evil -- does anyone believe they would ever execute a U.S. citizen, whatever the charge? No, of course not, much easier to enforce the law on nationals of countries like Pakistan, the Philippines and Indonesia, where governments are reluctant to get involved, in case it jeopardizes the foreign exchange gained by these nationals working in Saudi Arabia.
The Indonesian government is to be congratulated on the success of its hasty mission to settle Nasiroh's case.
Finally, I thank my friend, Buhari Abdu, for taking the trouble to call me and support my earlier letter on the detestable action of the Saudis. The question remains: Who will care?
BILL GUERIN
Jakarta