Bali 9: The Untold Story (23 page)

At the end of her evidence, Mrs Stephens was asked if she wanted to make a statement. She gave the passionate response of a loving and caring mother who was watching the little boy she had given birth to now facing the fight of his life. Mothers everywhere could sympathise with her, and no doubt prayed that they would never, ever have to walk a moment in her shoes.

‘Martin has always been a truthful child,’ said Michele, ‘tells the truth, doesn’t lie. We are a very close family. If Martin had been threatened with his own life he would have told Andrew Chan or whoever
threatened him to go away, he wasn’t interested, but when he was told that myself and his father would be killed if he did not cooperate, that was different. He loves us, so he tried to protect us, and if I had any doubt that Martin was not telling me the truth, I would not have sacrificed a lot of stuff in Australia and come to live over here to give him my full support, if we did not believe in him 100 per cent.’

After her evidence, Martin Stephens said simply: ‘I love my mum. Thanks, Mum.’

As with the others, prosecutors demanded that Stephens be jailed for life. Stephens himself said later that, while he deserved jail time, he didn’t deserve to spend the rest of his days there. Soon enough he would find out how long it would be before he could take up Judge Supratman’s offer to ‘come to Bali any time’.

S
cott Rush was getting rattled. First he said it must have been the translator’s fault. Then he said perhaps he had just agreed with the falsehoods in the statement to speed things up. The prosecutor reminded him to be honest with the court.

Rush had good reason to be squirming in his seat as the prosecution and judges honed in on the reasons why he had told police soon after his arrest that he was promised $5000 to become a drug mule, but now he was telling the court it wasn’t true at all and he wanted it withdrawn. He wasn’t fooling himself, nor was he fooling anyone else.

Rush had just told his own trial, in his evidence, that when he entered the taxi on 17 April and headed to the
airport, he did not know the contents of the packages strapped to his body, he had not asked and he had no suspicion. Nor was he worried that he would get caught by the airport X-ray machines. Asked if he would receive any wage or fee for carrying the packages to Australia, he said no. Was he promised any money? Again he said no.

The judge wanted to make sure that Rush knew of his obligation to tell the truth in his courtroom. ‘Yes, sir’, came the reply. So, then, was he forced when he gave a statement to police? Rush agreed that he had made a statement but denied that he had been under any pressure. So what about that statement made on 21 April, in which Rush told the police that both he and Michael Czugaj had been promised $5000 by Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen if they successfully carried the packages to Australia? ‘No, no, I wish to reject,’ Rush said.

However, the matter was not going to be left at that. The questions were coming thick and fast. What about the fact that not only had Rush told police in his statement that he was promised $5000, he had even gone on to tell them what he intended to do with the cash—give some to his parents and use the rest to buy a second-hand vehicle to sell retread tyres? Rush disagreed that he had ever said that.

The eagle-eyed prosecutor noted that on the day of his police interview, at which Rush’s English-speaking lawyer had also been present, the official translator had been Dr Wayan Ana, the very same Dr Wayan Ana now sitting next to Rush in court and translating for him. The prosecutor pointed out that Rush had made the
comment in two different police interviews and that on 27 April the translator was Dr Ana.

‘Is it the translator who gave the answer or what?’ he asked, sounding almost perplexed.

Rush: ‘I am pretty sure it would have been something like that, yes.’

So mistranslation was to blame, apparently, but it wasn’t a very convincing answer. The original police statement had been too detailed for a translator to have made up. The prosecutor wasn’t buying it, and reminded Rush that being honest in the court would help him when the judges came to make their decision about him.

Q. So can you explain about the money promised to you in the amount of $10 000? So did you carry the package because of your intention or because Tan [Nguyen] promised the money to you?

A. The packages were strapped to me and the only reason I didn’t resist is because I was forced to—it’s not a valid question.

Q. So in the statement I was your interpreter at that time. About the fee that you would be given $10 000 by Nguyen if you were successful—is that true or not?

A. It’s not true.

Q. At that time you were assisted by your lawyer?

A. Maybe that’s because they asked if I wanted to keep all the papers the same from before and I would have said yes to quicken the process.

Q. So in this statement at that time you said yes?

A. I said yes to everything but there may have been things that were false in there.

The point was made and the questioning moved on. Not too many people were convinced by the suggestion that either the translator got it wrong or Rush signed a statement even though it wasn’t true. It was a way of debunking the defence case that Rush had come to Bali on a free holiday and had no idea beforehand that he would be called upon to become a drug mule or face death. It followed that if he had been offered $5000 and had already decided how to spend it, he must have had some idea what he was doing in Bali.

Rush’s mate, Michael Czugaj, had told police a similar story about being offered $5000. When he testified in Rush’s trial he followed suit and withdrew the statement, saying that he too had been misinterpreted. Interestingly, he was never asked about that at his own trial.

Rush said in his own case and all the others in which he testified that Andrew Chan had threatened him and his family with death. In addition, Chan had told him that he had a gun, but Rush said that Chan had never shown him the gun.

Later in his evidence, Rush was asked what regrets he had. His answer centred around his regret at having trusted Nguyen, who, he claimed, had ‘trapped’ him with the offer of the free Bali holiday. Prosecutors later urged the judges to disregard all this, including Rush’s
explanation for the $5000 issue, and said that his crime was deserving of life in jail.

Scott Rush’s parents, Lee and Christine, were a constant support to him and to the other mules. They lived in Bali for the entirety of the trials and were in the front couple of rows most days when Rush or the other mules were in court. They could easily have passed for members of the media, given the amount of notes they took during proceedings, especially Christine. Sometimes, in the early days, Lee tape-recorded the evidence, and they both took photographs. Notebook in hand, Christine would sit next to the Australian Consulate representative who would in turn be next to a translator. The translator would tell the Consulate staffer what was happening; the staffer would take notes and Christine then took notes from the staffer’s material. Some days Lee, his Akubra hat never far from his head when he was not in court, could be seen outside the courtroom, holding a tape recorder up to the loudspeaker.

It was not clear why the Rushes took so many notes; this behaviour was in contrast to that of other parents. However, if the families of some of the other mules were not in Bali, the Rushes would look out for their children as well, bringing food and drinks to their cells, visiting and chatting with them and generally providing support and a friendly face, posting letters and running other errands. Their attendance at other trials, however, was less frequent.

It was obvious that a bond of sorts had developed between some of the mules’ parents. Tensions were smoothed over and a newfound purpose meant that some of the parents formed an alliance, at least on the surface.

Throughout the trials, both Lee and Christine Rush appeared stoic, their emotions and pain not often on public display. They were very private people. It was on the day that Scott Rush made his personal mercy plea to the judges that Christine could not stop the tears which welled up in her eyes from spilling over.

‘I convey to my beloved mother and father,’ said her son, ‘as due to their love to me they are willing to leave their work and home to accompany me from the beginning up until now. And I do love you. Because of my behaviour you feel the misery and I promise not to make you disappointed while I am in jail, far from our beloved country.’

Lee Rush testified in his son’s defence case. He told how, upon discovering that his son was going to Bali, he had called his lawyer, who had then contacted the Australian Federal Police. He had done so out of ‘a father’s instinct that Scott was in trouble’, he said, but he was not asked why he had harboured such an instinct nor why he thought his son might have been heading for strife. Lee said he had been assured that Scott would be stopped from flying to Bali, and added that it was very strange that his son had gone overseas without telling his parents—at the time he was living at home with them. And he testified that for two
months after Scott’s arrest, they had visited him three days a week at the police jail. But Mr Rush said he had not asked his son why he carried the narcotics.

‘No, I did not ask that question, I was leaving that up to the responsibility of the lawyer that was engaged to look after Scott. We were there to give love and caring for Scott. Not to try and solve the case…Scott never told us the reason why and we didn’t want to interrogate him, that was the job of the lawyer.’

Lee Rush also revealed that, four to five weeks before his son was arrested in Bali, two Molotov cocktails had been hurled onto the front lawn of their home but he had not reported the matter to police. Asked why, Lee said he felt ‘I could handle this myself’. So potentially dangerous firebombs had been thrown at the family’s home and yet Lee Rush had not called in police, but when his son, who was by that stage nineteen years old, left on an unannounced Bali holiday, Lee Rush had felt enough of a father’s instinct to go to police, via his barrister.

Asked if his son had used drugs, Lee said no. And, curiously, when asked if Scott had ever committed any criminal acts for which he had been punished or jailed, his father also answered no. But almost twelve days after Lee Rush’s Bali court evidence, the Federal Court in Australia published its judgment in the case brought by Scott Rush and the others against the AFP—and in that judgment it was stated that the lawyer and family friend whom Mr Rush had first called to seek help to have his son stopped from going to Bali had acted for
Scott ‘on a number of minor criminal prosecutions, concerned, in the main, with dishonesty offences’. The judgment also noted that Scott Rush had ‘prior convictions’ and was on bail for offences at the time of his arrest in Bali. And, as time went on, details of Scott’s criminal history began to surface.

During his own testimony, Scott himself was never asked if he had criminal convictions or whether he had ever used drugs; Michael Czugaj was asked the same question. Rush’s lawyer, Robert Khuana, asked Czugaj whether Rush had ever used heroin. He said no.

Through their experiences in Bali, some of the Nine found God; others renewed fractured relationships with their parents and families. Scott Rush said that his arrest had brought him much closer to his parents and family, something which gave him great joy and which had comforted him.

‘We are normally not a close family, now we have definitely got more close. It is beautiful you know, I like it,’ he says one day during an interview at the court holding cell. He is in an unusually expansive mood, much more talkative than on previous occasions. He also reveals that his arrest had made him ‘get in touch more with myself’. Before that he had felt disconnected, living a party life, although he won’t go so far as to say it he had been a ‘wild’ teenager—more normal, he thinks, but he adds that he learned from his party life.

Several weeks later, during another interview, Rush is equally open, happy to linger and chat. On this day
he defends his claims that he was threatened and that he had no idea about the true reason for his trip to Bali. ‘Of course it’s the truth,’ he says when asked if he was being honest. What about the judges, does he think they believed him? ‘I hope so, because I never had anything to do with that heroin or anything, you know, especially to this degree, so that’s why I would have been an easy target, me and Michael.’

During this interview Rush at times appears older than his twenty years. But then at other times he seems so much younger. Sometimes he sounds like he is an actor, reciting lines; then he will be earnest, talking about his ambitions for the future. Mostly he hopes he has one.

Jail is a place for people to renew themselves, he offers. And he wants others to learn from his own bitter experience. ‘I am not out to make a worse world, I am out to make a better world,’ he says.

Rush regards everyone in jail as a potential friend. Is it easy to make friends in jail, he is asked. Yes, but it’s even easier to lose them, he explains. He’s met a lot of good people there, and their friendship, he opines, probably means more to him than it does to them.

He tries to socialise with Indonesian prisoners so he can learn the language, and he has started teaching some of the Indonesian prisoners how to play football. Some have never even seen a football before but, as coach, he thinks he’s doing a good job with them and they’re getting better; soon they’ll be ready for a game.

Rush is learning to cope much better now. And it shows—he looks less drawn, less afraid and healthier. It’s easier to cope, he says, if you look at the big picture, not the small one. And, yes, as a Christian he’s expressed forgiveness of the drug bosses. He doesn’t believe what they did is right, but that doesn’t matter—he has forgiveness in his heart.

He would soon learn whether the judges would be so forgiving.