Spared for now: from a Facebook support page for Mary Jane Veloso
The manufacture, distribution and onward supply of dangerous drugs is a scourge of society and affects most of the world.
No country should be pilloried for attaching huge importance to the need to combat the illicit trade and impose deterrent penalties on those who take part in it.
There's a but coming, of course.
Shameful as drug-trafficking is, it is a crime that pales into insignificance when compared with the act by the properly constituted legal authority of a supposedly civilised and mature nation in taking human life.
The countries concerned - and they're at it all over the globe - call it lawful execution; I call it state murder.
And when eight human beings are killed in this way in one go, it is what might rightly be called mass state murder.
That is what Indonesia chose to commit and that is what stains the name of the country and its ''shoot 'em dead" president, Joko Widodo.
Like Australia, two of whose citizens went before the firing squad, I respect Indonesia's sovereignty. I grudgingly respect the right to a view contrary to my own on the death penalty.
And like Austrialia, I deplore its pig-headed insistence on going ahead with the executions, described by the Aussie prime minister Tony Abbott as "cruel and unnecessary".
Indonesia emerges with zero credit from the bloodthirsty outcome of an arguably suspect legal process while the drug criminals themselves departed this world with dignity. A pastor present at the killings told the Sydney Morning Herald all eight refused blindfolds and were singing together in their final moments.
I hope the other two facing imminent death, a Filipina named Mary Jane Fiesta Veloso and the Frenchman Serge Atlaoui, stay alive, whatever the result of late legal manoeuvres. But I also hope the capital punishment lobby, from Far West to Far East, is soon defeated as loftier human values prevail.
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