Opium Museum Ticket
I don't generally read much in any publication that uses "world socialist" in their heading, but a link provided today from IndonesiaNews.net seemed to be worth a look. The first portion of the article was a rehash of the sad behavior of the Australian government regarding the arrest of the "Bali Nine" but the latter section goes into some juicy detail about the kingpins of the heroin smuggling operation. Plenty of meat for conspiracy theorists here.
Unanswered questions on Bali Nine operation
If the nine young people are guilty of acting as drug mules, then they made a serious and tragic mistake, which may well cost their lives. But whatever the outcome, it will make absolutely no difference to the international heroin trade. None of the major heroin suppliers connected to the Bali Nine case has been arrested, and initial AFP claims that the investigation could result in the break-up of international drug syndicates have been quietly dropped.
Even with the AFP’s specific intelligence, Indonesian police failed to monitor Andrew Chan when he allegedly purchased the heroin in Bali. This was despite the fact that all nine suspects were under constant surveillance. The transaction was clearly the most important part of the police operation, and could have led to the prosecution of international heroin dealers. But the Indonesian police claim they lost Chan on the streets of Kuta, after he disguised himself by wearing different caps.
Paul Toohey in the Bulletin offered a more plausible explanation: “It would probably be too indelicate for the AFP to inquire of their Indonesian colleagues how come they were so stupid as to miss the most important part of their surveillance job: the buy.... It is a particularly hard question for the AFP to ask because it raises the possibility that the Indonesian police did follow Chan, observed the deal, and decided to help themselves to the heroin cash.”
Cherry Likit Bannakorn, a Thai prostitute who allegedly sold the drugs to Chan, has disappeared. On April 27, Man Singh Ghale, an alleged international heroin “kingpin” who, according to some reports, supplied the heroin to Chan via Bannakorn, was shot dead in a Jakarta police raid. “Witnesses reportedly saw Ghale, a Nepalese, being led away by police with a bullet wound to the leg,” Toohey reported. “He somehow took another fatal shot while in police custody.... Ghale no longer has anything to say for himself but it begins to look as though he was a patsy.”
The Indonesian autopsy report has never been released, despite requests from at least one foreign embassy. According to an August 1 report in the Age: “Doctors who carried out the autopsy are too frightened to say how many times he was shot or where the bullets entered his body, and Senior Superintendent Indradi Tanos, of the narcotics division at police headquarters, refused to disclose the contents of the report.”
Toohey’s suggestion that Ghale was used as a patsy is just one possible explanation of his death. It could also be the case that the trafficker was killed in accordance with the mafia principle that dead men tell no tales. Had Ghale been put on trial, he could have revealed details of connections he may have had with senior security, political and business figures in Indonesia and internationally.
The Nepalese national had previously been arrested by Indonesian police in October last year. International police agencies, including the US Drug Enforcement Agency, suspected that he was directing major trafficking operations in America and Europe. Despite this, Ghale somehow escaped from custody two days after his arrest.
“Even more unusual is the fact that several weeks after he fled custody, he returned to Bekasi, where police say a local man agreed to rent a house on his behalf,” the Age reported. “Why a fugitive would go straight back to the area he had been living in when arrested remains unanswered. Then there is the fact that 10 days after the nine Australians were arrested in Bali, Ghale had still made no effort to flee his house, and carried on living as normal [despite being under AFP surveillance].”
No-one in the Howard government or the AFP has ever addressed the question as to whether senior Indonesian police and security officials—not to speak of politicians and businesspeople throughout the region, including Australia—are involved in the heroin trade. Such is the real face of the “war on drugs”. The major players with powerful connections go unmolested, while those arrested and executed are almost always young people, caught up in the lowest rungs of the drug trafficking ladder.
The effective abandonment by the Howard government of any pretence of opposition to the death penalty is indicative of its wholesale repudiation of fundamental civil liberties. Moreover, the bipartisan defence of the AFP’s setup of the Bali Nine is a stark indicator of just how far the political establishment as a whole has gone in abandoning basic legal and democratic rights, including opposition to capital punishment.
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