Last week I saw an uplifting and inspiring film called Les Chorists (The Choir, 2004). Set in 1949 in a rural French correctional boarding school for orphaned and troubled boys, called Fond d'Etang (literally, Bottom of the Pond), it showed how one passionate teacher could transform lives through music.
In their struggle for independence and self-expression, the boys defied authority -- especially their brutally unfair and abusive headmaster, Rachin. He ruled his school with an "action-reaction" principle: if the boys broke his rules, he would punish them -- harshly. Normal enough perhaps, but Clement Mathieu, a new teacher, adopted a gentler, more compassionate
approach. When boys misbehaved, he responded in unpredictable, unusual and funny ways, protecting the boys from Rachin as much as he could.
The magic comes when Mathieu introduced music into the boys' lives, forming a choir, with transformative effect. The boys calmed down and he discovers that the school rebel, Morhange, is a child prodigy with an exquisitely beautiful voice. Through song he can express himself, earning the love and attention for which he yearned, and his rebelliousness is tamed.
Then Mondain arrives, transferred from the local detention center. His blatant disobedience causes the boys to slip back into old ways, so when money is stolen from Rachin's office, it's immediately pinned on Mondain. The police arrest him, but the school janitor finds the money stashed away with a mouth organ belonging to Corbain, another pupil. He stole it, Corbain said, because he dreamed of buying a hot-air balloon and flying away ...
Mondain was innocent, but had been presumed guilty and he eventually takes a terrible revenge for this injustice, setting fire to the school. Rachin fires Mathieu for negligence, but the whole debacle causes other teachers to testify to the school foundation against Rachin, who is fired. Morhange wins a scholarship to the Lyon School of Music, eventually becoming a world-famous conductor. And Mathieu? Well, he continues doing what he always did, teaching music, inspiring students and keeping his achievements to himself.
As I watched this moving film, it struck me that Indonesia was Fond d'Etang, the bottom of the pond. We have many prodigies like Morhange (mostly undiscovered) and no shortage of dreamers like Corbain. And while we also have (pitifully) few selfless inspirers like Mathieu, we have a surplus of tyrants like Rachin, and a legal system that is based on his "the action-reaction" principle -- and reflects its injustice.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono once made the statement "we can only say that someone is guilty if the law says so". But can we be sure even then? Take wrongful convictions, for example, which are common all over the world. The Innocence Project in the U.S. claims that around 15-20 percent of all convictions in that country are mistakes. Imagine what the figure must be in Indonesia, where the legal system is notoriously dysfunctional. It's like a cobweb, catching the trifling and powerless, while heavy, "connected" criminals cause the flimsy threads to break and they fall through. You all know who I mean ...
I saw this firsthand when one of my cousins was convicted of corruption and incarcerated on the prison island of Nusakambangan. A minor player at the end of a banking food chain, he was the fall guy, just the sort of kambing hitam (scapegoat) the government needed to prove it's serious about eradicating corruption. Never mind that big shots with political backing get away clean, as they usually do.
Since then, whenever I hear that so-and-so is accused of this-and-that, I always reserve judgment. Who knows what the real story is, given that the decision as to who gets punished is so often based on political exigency, rather than facts. My cousin, for example, was acquitted by the district court, only to find himself declared guilty by the Supreme Court four years later ... and one day before the 2004 general elections.
Getting it wrong may be standard judicial practice but, as the Innocence Project people say, it is a far more serious matter when the death penalty is involved -- like in the U.S. and Indonesia and most of our ASEAN neighbors. It's bad enough to send an innocent person to jail, but if they're executed, there's no one left to apologize to.
Perhaps as part of post-Soeharto reformasi hukum (legal reform) we should consider abolishing capital punishment. After all, it is fast becoming a global trend. In 1977, 16 countries had abolished executions but by 2005, the figure had soared to 122. Worldwide, now only 35 percent retain the death penalty. The death penalty has long been popular with undemocratic and
authoritarian states, where it is often a tool of political oppression. Today, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the U.S. remain the only developed democratic nations that still kill judicially. So which group do we want Indonesia to be in?
All the evidence shows that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent anyway: serious crimes keep happening even if offenders risk death. So why execute at all? Rachin has the answer: action and reaction. It seems that capital punishment is mainly an eye for an eye thing, a public "feel good" exercise in revenge, brutalizing the brutal. Yep, execution is a violent,
barbaric practice -- and surely it breaches the guaranteed "right to life" we borrowed from the Universal Declaration of Rights and inserted in Chapter XA of our new Constitution just a few years ago?
And given that our legal system is still internationally famous for being dodgy, political and corrupt, we have an additional -- and compelling -- reason to take the power of life and death out of the hands of our unreliable judges. Until we do, we'll keep bumping along the bottom, with
all the other pond life.
The writer is the author of Sex, Power and Nation. She can be reached on
jsuryakusuma@
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