On the day of his execution in April 2015, Myuran Sukumaran was furious.
But it wasn’t his own fate that he was angry about. Instead he was furious about the treatment of the other death row prisoners who were about to face the firing squad with him.
Myuran’s close friend, mentor and Archibald Prize winner Ben Quilty, has told news.com.au that the other inmates, who did not understand Indonesian, had been denied sufficient interpreters by Indonesian authorities.
“Myuran was very angry about this,” he said.
“The guards spoke a bit of broken English but all of the directions were given in Indonesian, and they [prisoners] relied on those people having a translator.”
“Myuran and Andrew were translating Indonesian into English to try to help them understand what was going on,” he added.
Some of the prisoners, who were Iranian, Nigerian, Brazilian and Filipino, had very little understanding of what was happening.
Quilty said this was part of the reason that Sukumaran, Chan, and some of the other Bali Nine were the go-to guys in Kerobokan prison.
“If new inmates came in and they couldn’t speak the language the men would be summoned and they’d help and negotiate their way through, right until the end.”
It’s been less than two years since Sukumaran and Chan were executed by a 13-member firing squad.
On the day of the execution, Sukumaran and Chan, were marched out of the prison with a guard of honour. The other prisoners shook their hands and said goodbye, a testament to the positive impact they had made on the lives of the inmates.
As the two men and the other death row inmates stood in a row, ready to face the firing squad, Sukumaran and Chan led them in singing Bless the Lord O My Soul. They never got to finish the song.
Quilty had met Myuran three years earlier, when he received a note asking him about art technique. They soon formed a close bond. Quilty became his friend and his mentor, and he witnessed first hand Myuran’s development as an artist.
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Angry.. This man was willing to import a disease into our society which rips families apart and destroys lives not just once but over many many years - for his own profit. The lives of other young Australians are destroyed as they now rot in Indonesian prisons as his mules. Rehabilitated- reconciled? The families of Heroin users and addicts are NEVER rehabilitated, they are left to pick up the pieces of their lives, because people like this import and profit of their husbands, wives and children. As others say about heroin users - their choice - their consequence.. But what about their families? We recently had his exhibition out here.. but where did the profits go? To odessy house or to scholarships for the kids devastated by their family's addiction? No back to his family for their loss..
Would you ask the same questions of a friend or relative who works behind a bar or the young girl who sells cigarettes at woollies. Drug dealers operate on the same logic as gun shop owners and car salesmen. These products kill and maim thousands every year, it's all for profit, just not illegal. These two were just boys them selves when they were arrested, not men. They were executed to make a political point, but far to late to have any meaningful deterrent value. They are dead and the drugs are more prolific that ever. If death were a real deterrent no one would ever climb a mountain, jump out of an aeroplane or take drugs, or sell them. Hard drugs are a scourge on society and a direct consequence of the long lost war on drugs. They were a product of the environment they grew up in, it's not an excuse, it's a fact. Prison was what they deserved and it changed them, how much we will never know. And I suspect it was the lawyers who got the profits, they generally do.