One commentator said (and I tend to agree) that Australians are generally good hearted people but scratch around and you’ll get racism and xenophobia. Schapelle Corby is an Australian girl who has just been convicted of importing drugs into Indonesia and sentenced to twenty years in jail. All the while she has protested her innocence with a glut of media attention and the backing of a lot of the Australian public. In response to the conviction a large section of Australians have reacted with racism and xenophobia, people have suggested that money given for Tsunami Aid should be returned, and most recently a threatening letter containing a ‘biological agent’ was sent to the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra.
I think this high moral groundists would benefit from reading (not that I imagine any of those kinds of people read my blog) the story of Chika Honda. I am quite sure they aren’t aware of it already; I only became aware of it yesterday.
When Justice Gets Lost in Translation
Is Schapelle Corby the victim of rough justice? Ask Chika Honda, writes Sushi Das.
She was jailed for smuggling drugs into a foreign country. She claimed somebody else put them in her bag, but the judge didn’t believe her. Her lawyers fought language and cultural problems to put her case, but their efforts came to nothing.
Schapelle Corby? No, her name is Chika Honda. Arrested in Melbourne, she served 10-and-a-half years in Victorian jails before being deported to Japan. Thirteen years on, she is still trying to clear her name.
Miscarriages of justice, if that is what has happened in the Corby case, can happen in any country, even one with a sophisticated legal system untainted by corruption, such as Australia’s. Even one whose citizens presume to hold the moral high ground.
Those using the Corby case to slander an entire nation, accusing Indonesia of having a barbaric legal system, where the judges are “monkeys” and justice goes awry, should reflect on the details of the Honda case.
Chika Honda was one of four Japanese tourists found with heroin in false panels in their suitcases when they landed at Melbourne Airport in 1992. (A fifth man Yoshio Katsuno, was believed to be the main drug smuggler.) All had stopped over in Kuala Lumpur where they said the van containing their luggage was stolen.
Yoshio Katsuno later told the others that their suitcases had been found, but because they were damaged, a friend of his had replaced them with new ones and transferred their belongings. All were charged in Australia with importing nearly 13 kilograms of heroin with a street value of between $20 million and $30 million. They claimed to be innocents abroad who were the victims of a set-up. But the court in Australia didn’t believe their story. Just like the court in Bali didn’t believe Corby’s.
When they were found guilty in 1994, Judge Russell Lewis said foreign nationals convicted of importing drugs into Australia must be sent to prison.
Yoshio Katsuno got 20 years behind bars. He is still in jail today. The others, Masahara Katsuno, Mitsuo Katsuno, Kiichiro Asami and Chika Honda, alleged to be drug couriers, spent 10-and-a-half years in jail before being deported in 2002. They have never stopped protesting their innocence.
Having exhausted appeals to Australian authorities, 50 lawyers on their behalf have appealed to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, arguing that their trial was a violation of their human rights because inadequate language interpretation affected their right to a fair trial.
Chika Honda, the only woman in the group, came to represent the group’s innocence. Issues of language, money and cultural difference form interesting parallels between the Corby and Honda cases.
When charged with a crime in a foreign country, language becomes crucial, but so does the need to maintain perspective. According to one Sydney shock-jock: “The judges (in Corby’s case) don’t even speak English, mate, they’re straight out of the trees.” By the same reckoning, the judge in the Honda case should have spoken Japanese.
There’s also the issue of cash. Honda’s legal aid team could not afford investigators to mount a substantive defence. Money is also likely to be important in Corby’s future.
Then there is the obstacle of cultural differences. The Japanese failed to aggressively assert their innocence in court. In Japan this is seen as culturally appropriate, but in Australia it’s seen as a sign of guilt. In Corby’s case, cultural differences were apparent in a courtroom where cameras were allowed and judges talked freely to the media.
Much Australian public sentiment has savaged the Indonesian judicial system as primitive and brutal. Perhaps the Japanese thought that about Australia’s system.
On returning to Japan, Masahara Katsuno said: “The current Australian judicial system has a very serious problem.” Mitsuno Katsuno said he believed racial prejudice was to blame: “I realised later on that in Australia, many Asian Australians committed crimes. That’s why I think they believed we were the same as them.” Chika Honda also spoke of injustice: “I was humiliated. I need some time to free my mind.”
Honda has not given up her fight to clear her name. Two Australian legal experts are preparing a petition to the Governor-General requesting that he exercise a Royal Prerogative of Mercy. They are asking for her conviction to be nullified on the basis of new evidence yet to be revealed.
It would be unfair to condemn Australia because of what some believe to be a miscarriage of justice in the case of Honda and her group, yet the Corby chorus has no hesitation in slandering all Indonesia for the Corby verdict.
In what has become an embarrassing farce, with some Corby fans demanding the return of tsunami aid and calling for a boycott of Bali tourism, many are looking for reasons for the vitriol: racism, xenophobia, a feeling that Bali is an “Australian space”. But maybe there’s something deeper.
What lies at the root of the Corby hysteria is a Eurocentric view of the world - a view that ultimately celebrates the rise and triumph of the West over the East. At the heart of this idea is an attitude that, broadly speaking, the West is dynamic, intelligent, rational, free, tolerant, honest and civilised, while the East is stagnant, ignorant, superstitious, enslaved, intolerant, corrupt and barbaric.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the truth is the world is a global network of rich and poor countries. Only by ditching a Eurocentric perspective can it be possible to see that the world today is a result not only of European advances, but massive contributions by the East. What’s required is perspective and respect.
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