Pubdate: Sat, 21 May 2005
Source: Indian Express, The (India)
Copyright: 2005 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.expressindia.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1980
Author: Amrita Shah
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Schapelle (Schapelle Corby)

SCHAPELLE CORBY, NATIONAL ICON

The Young and Attractive Stand a Stupendously Better Chance of Having
Their Stories Told Than Others

Amrita Shah Over the last several weeks the Australian public has been
mesmerised by the fate of a 27-year-old beauty trainee therapist from
the Gold Coast, Queensland. Schapelle Corby, an attractive young woman
was travelling to Bali for a holiday in October last year, when
Indonesian officials at Denpasar airport searched her boogie board bag
and found 4.1 kilos of marijuana in it. Corby insisted she had no idea
where the contraband came from but she was jailed. Her plight and the
subsequent trial exhaustively covered by the Australian media made her
a national icon overnight.

A search on the net yields 173,000 hits for Schapelle Corby, a woman
unknown till months ago. Campaigns of every kind have been floated to
support her. Ron Bakir, a Gold Coast-based businessman, took on the cost of
her legal defense. Others raised funds for her family during the trial.
There have been signature campaigns, yellow ribbon events, threats against
the judge, threats by Aussie holiday makers to boycott Bali if the verdict
goes against Corby so on and so forth. There is even a song called Song for
Schapelle (sung to the tune of Sting's Fields of Gold: "She can't feel the
wind she can't see the stars in the jail in Bali").

This moving story, of course, rests on a presumption of Corby's
innocence. There are weaknesses in the prosecution's case including
lack of video footage from the airport but much of the evidence in
Corby's favour is so far circumstantial. An inmate in an Australian
jail claims he overheard a conversation in jail about how drugs were
planted on Corby by accident. An ongoing enquiry into corruption among
baggage handlers points at another possible explanation as to how the
drugs landed in Corby's luggage. Yet judging by the language used in
discussions on Schapelle (a leading newspaper suggests she has become
so well known she doesn't "need a second name") throws up phrases
such as "innocent without a doubt", "a carefree girl next door who
enjoyed fashion, music and surfing" clearly suggesting that the
assumption stems substantially from a simple empathy for one's own.

This leads to a connected issue, which is the fear of the "other".
If one part of the gripping tale of Schapelle Corby is about an
ordinary Aussie girl trapped in a terrible situation by outside
criminal forces, the other part is her dependence on a system that
allegedly does not offer her the just deal she should be entitled to
by her origins. Much of the public discourse about the Corby trial has
been about the apparent inadequacies of the Indonesian judicial
system, the underlying assumption being that the latter is backward
and arbitrary. Many of these fears stem from ignorance and bias. So
much so that a legal expert, in a lecture discussing the myths about
the Indonesian legal system built up by the Save Schapelle hysteria,
at the University of Melbourne this week, was forced to wonder if
public reaction had revealed a core of racism among
Australians.

Indeed, as the verdict in the Corby case will be announced within
days, the Australian people will be forced to contend with the
emotions brought on by her fate as well as the truths their responses
reveal about themselves. For the rest of us, this offers one more
instance of the power of the media to build a mob frenzy around an
individual rather than an issue.

Is this a desirable trend? On the negative side there are many
dangers. One is the overwhelming trend in the media to focus on
physical appearance: it is a given that the young and attractive of
the world stand a stupendously better chance of having their stories
told than others. The other terribly dangerous tendency is for demands
to be routinely raised to give established procedures and rules the go
by in the interest of populism making it difficult for those in
responsible positions to formulate long term policy.

On the plus side, however, there is the potential for such responses
to sensitise governments and heads of state to human tragedies; to see
the people they govern as individuals not numbers. In the Corby case
the public put enormous pressure on the Australian government to take
a pro active stand. There is also the possibility of the outpouring of
empathy to embrace other worthy cases that might not have previously
received adequate attention. A pertinent example is the case of a
mentally ill migrant Australian woman wrongly deported by Australian
officials in 2001 that is now being avidly discussed.

For better or for worse, the increasing visibility of the media and
common people in public affairs is a fact of life. Its impact will
determine our future. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake