Drug traffickers scourge of Bali visitors and locals

There is a bright new sign at Denpasar's Ngurah Rai Airport. Against a glowing background of red, it declares in English and Indonesian: Death penalty for drug trafficking.

The fact that the warning is given after passengers file through immigration should make little difference. If tourists flying into Bali have somehow missed the chain of official cautions that are part of travel in Asia - Singapore has executed 340 traffickers in the past decade - they should at least have read something of the nine Australians facing death here for allegedly smuggling heroin, or of Schapelle Corby, the Gold Coast beauty therapist charged with importing 4.1kg of cannabis.

At best, traffickers who escape execution will spend most of the rest of their lives behind the grim white walls of Kerobokan jail, where their view of the world outside is limited to a tropical sky framed by the wicked shards of broken glass that top the prison at one end, and the inward-leaning wire grill of the remainder.

Outside, in the maze of streets that run from JL Merta Agun to Kuta and the coastal tourist strip in one direction, and through Bali's capital of Denpasar to the rice paddies and villages where the island's traditional life continues in the other, few care. Little attention can be spared from the tough daily grind of making a living, and even less sympathy.

In a Denpasar coffee shop Yanti, a young waitress, expresses the view of many Balinese: "People who sell drugs should pay a lot of money, or have the death penalty." At the nearby city markets, 21-year-old Komang agrees on the price traffickers should pay: "As hard as you can go," he says. "The maximum."

The maximum is a firing squad. Last year 32-year-old Thai mother Namsong Sirilak and 62-year-old Saelow Prasert were tied to oil palm trees in northern Sumatra and shot for trafficking in heroin, following the earlier execution of their Indian accomplice, Ayodhya Prasad Chaubey.

Few tears were shed in Bali. The island has seen the tragedy of narcotics begin to afflict its youth, not only as a by-product of the tourism that keeps its economy afloat, but also as an evil spreading down from Java, where as many as 500,000 putaw (heroin) addicts are estimated to live and trade in Jakarta's big industrial area of Jabotabek.

In the shade of the trees at Kuta's German Beach, where outriggers are chartered to take surfers to the outlying reef, young people do not want to say anything about drugs. But the old fishermen, who have seen their community and way of life change immeasurably over the past three decades, are angry.

"The local people don't like drugs coming to Kuta," says Made, now in his 60s and a fisherman all his life. "It's because of the tourists. Before tourism our people didn't know about drugs."

Everyone knows about them now. Corby and the Bali Nine are just a new set of statistics. Last December 45-year-old Massimo Mancini from Melbourne was arrested, allegedly in possession of heroin, joining four other Australians already in Kerobokan jail. This month 42-year-old expatriate John Pyle was charged with possessing 1.8g of hashish, which could put him behind bars for 10 years.

Across Indonesia, the number of arrests for drug trafficking rose from just over 1800 in 1999 to more than 9700 in 2003, the national narcotics agency, BNN, says. The agency estimates that drug addiction afflicts 3.6 per cent of the nation's 220 million people, with an increasing number of juvenile users.

Amnesty International, in a briefing on the death penalty, says 30 of the estimated 54 people facing execution in Indonesia were convicted of drug-related offences, 20 of them foreigners and six of them women.

The nine Australians arrested in the dramatic airport bust and hotel raids last month are at serious risk of joining them. Found with heroin strapped to the bodies of four of their number, more drugs recovered from hotel rooms and an increasing body of incriminating evidence, they have been told that prosecutors will seek the death penalty.

Their arrests undermined what had been a surprising level of support in Bali for Corby, whose tearful claims to be an innocent victim of a bungled domestic Australian drug smuggling operation had touched hearts. But even with many of those hearts hardening after the arrests of yet more Australians, a large number of locals believed her innocent in the week leading up to yesterday's decision by the panel of Denpasar judges.

Corby is a remarkable exception to a number of rules. The Balinese have taken notice only because of the furore her case has unleashed in Australia, and the army of TV crews and journalists that has camped here to cover it. Otherwise she is just another foreigner caught with drugs.

In Australia, public sympathy has spawned websites, clothing and paraphernalia, created a media frenzy and forced Corby on to the peripheral agendas of Prime Minister John Howard and Indonesian President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono. A prisoner exchange scheme is being hurried along, with proposals now to create an interim agreement to accommodate Corby's early return home if a full deal cannot be worked out in short order. Cynics call it the "spunk factor", because Corby is a young, attractive woman.

No others - and certainly not the Bali Nine - have achieved such attention. There are 104 more Australians on drug charges in foreign cells, two of them facing execution in Singapore and Vietnam. About one-third are in Asian jails, where the death penalty applies.

At least as far as the Bali Nine are concerned, much of the apparent public hand-washing lies in the nature of their arrests, the drugs with which they were allegedly caught, and the unravelling of connections that allegedly tie them to much larger trafficking operations.

Their arrests were made with the full co-operation of the Australian Federal Police, despite a policy not to help in laying charges that could lead to execution. But with the main drug arteries traversing countries where death for trafficking is all but universally automatic, what else could the AFP do?

Co-operation between Australian and Indonesian law agencies has grown rapidly since the Bali bombings, particularly in the kind of intelligence needed to track international drug shipments. Tied closely to counter-terrorism work, former antagonisms and suspicions are melting away: last year the two countries opened a joint law enforcement centre in Jakarta, and set up a transnational crime centre to combat drug trafficking and other serious crime.

The growing depth of the relationship was shown in the AFP's involvement in the capture of the Bali Nine. It is believed the heroin allegedly being moved by the group, probably originating in Myanmar, had been tracked by the AFP. It passed the intelligence on to Jakarta, which made the decision to act in Bali.

The AFP gave further help, such as breaking mobile phone codes that handed more evidence to the Indonesians and led to the associated arrests of four people in Australia, including 21-year-old New Zealand woman Atoalii Partsch.

The arrests confirmed that Indonesia, including Bali, is a key hub in the vast river of heroin pouring out of the Golden Triangle at the junction of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, and for an increasing trade in other illicit drugs. The big drug cartels are diversifying their transit strategies, still employing low-paid "mules" to carry shipments through customs, but also using mail and air and sea freight, which in Australia has seen heroin concealed in injection moulding machines, sacks of potassium bicarbonate and an industrial gas oven.

Not all the drugs leave Indonesia. Flowing through Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta Airport and in sea containers that the United States Drug Enforcement Administration says are handled by front companies and packed with cheap goods such as plastic bags, soy sauce, T-shirts or chopsticks, a fatally sufficient amount is siphoned off for local consumption.

As in the West, a chilling trade has developed among the young. A 2003 report by the Indonesian office of the International Labour Organisation said that about 4 per cent of the country's drug users were under 17, and that trafficking was increasing at schools.

At Denpasar, 18-year-old Indra says dealers are moving in on the young. "It is a problem also for the children," he says. "They are putting drugs in candy and selling drugs at primary schools and secondary schools."

Administrators at Bali's schools have responded with tough strategies of their own, instructing teachers to watch for signs of drug use or sale, and launching surprise, random searches. Without warning, children will be ordered from classrooms and all bags and desks searched. Police also visit schools regularly to warn of the dangers.

Balinese from outlying villages worry about their young who travel to work in Kuta, where they frequently have to stay during the week because of the cost of commuting. This is where the main drug problem lies, a product, says Denpasar trader Komang, of globalisation: "The young people go with foreigners and are introduced to narkoba [drugs]."

Narkoba are not the only danger. HIV/Aids is exploding, with the US Centres for Disease Control warning that Indonesia is the country most at risk in Asia, mainly because of narcotics. The CDC says HIV infections from drug use soared from less than 1 per cent of the nation's total to more than 19 per cent in 2000.

The Burnet Institute's Centre for Harm Reduction in Australia warns that Indonesia's problems could eclipse even those of Africa because of the accelerating incidence of drug injection in the rate of HIV infection.

With all this, convicted traffickers can expect little mercy. Even if they are not tied to a palm tree or a stake on a deserted beach and shot by a firing squad, life will be unrelentingly hard in Kerobokan jail, shared as it will be with the Bali bombers, murderers, rapists and the like in conditions that would appal Western sensibilities.

Indonesia is a poor country with a per capita gross domestic product of just US$1276 ($1800) and an official unemployment rate approaching 10 per cent. In Bali that translates to a wage for shop assistants of about $107 a month, less perhaps $37 for board during the working week. There is no dole, social welfare, state health care or pension.

The island has never fully recovered from the 2002 bombings. Kuta guide Nyoman Purwata was out of work for a year, and now earns far less than before the tragedy. His wife Kadek runs a small shop in front of their home in the family compound at Sobangan, about an hour from Kuta, barely eking out an income to support them and their 4-year-old son Pol.

Tourism has been recovering slowly, with 1.7 million visitors expected this year, but business is still agonisingly slow.

It could get worse. The Australian reported a poll by Australia's Travel Daily that found that 65 per cent of the nation's travel agents planned to direct customers elsewhere if Corby was convicted. Bali Governor Dewa Made Beratha this week conceded that Corby's trial could inflict more pain.

Criminals are well down the food chain. Kerobokan, now firmly off limits to journalists after early excesses by the Australian media, is by all accounts as low down as you can go. It has the fundamentals of most Third World prisons: if you want more than rice and water, you need money or friends on the outside. One of the concerns for the imprisoned Australians is how they will fare when interest wanes and the big media groups no longer see the benefit of funding family visits in exchange for exclusive information.

Those who have been inside Kerobokan tell of intense heat (outside temperatures are now 30C, rising to 40C in summer), poorly ventilated cells and foul smells. Sanitation is a single bucket of water and squat toilets. Beds are rattan mattresses.

In Bali, these are the options for drug dealers: Kerobokan for a lifetime, or a palm tree at sunset.