I

am one of seemingly very few Indonesians who think that Australian PM Tony Abbott'€™s request that two Australian prisoners on death row be handed over to Australia is not unreasonable '€” if we are prepared to set emotions aside and look at the request purely from a rational point of view.

After the tsunami of 2004, Australia donated an aid package of US$1 billion to assist with the aftermath and now Abbott is asking as a return favor that we send back the two Australians on death-row for drug offenses.

The $1 billion aid is a lot and at the time it was very much needed. It helped to save hundreds if not thousands of Acehnese lives. We would have been very hard pressed to find that amount of money in 2004.

Then again, we are sitting on a ring of fire, so it'€™s only a matter of time until we experience another devastating tsunami, earthquake or volcanic eruption.

So doesn'€™t it make sense to keep Australia happy? What does it cost us to give them two prisoners on death row? Nothing, really.

Think about it, we would save money on prison expenses and bullets and the poor soldiers who would have to shoot them would have one traumatic experience fewer to deal with. A billion dollars in exchange for two drug dealers sounds like a very good deal to me. Let Abbott have the two Australians. In fact, if Abbott wants the Nigerians and the Brazilian as well, I say that we should give them to him too.

It may be a bit of a puzzle exactly why Abbott desperately wants two convicted drug dealers and desperately doesn'€™t want any Sri Lankan, Afghan or Iraqi refugees who in all probability are perfectly law-abiding people who have never killed anyone or sold drugs in their lives.

Indeed, it'€™s hard to fathom this kind of logic but well, perhaps it'€™s a cultural thing, and as a multicultural society, who are we to judge another culture as long as it is not violent and does not hurt us?

At the end of the day it'€™s not like Australia is asking us to hand over an island or two (like some countries I could mention). Australia is not our enemy '€” they don'€™t have any territorial ambitions in our direction.

Australia provides us with lots of tourists, which is good for our economy, and when we are in trouble they try to help us. What'€™s not to like about them? So why all this hostility on our side?

Sometimes we react like a small country with a big chip on its shoulder. If we are a truly confident country on a par with Australia we can afford to be generous to our friends.

Now please don'€™t get the wrong idea from all this; I am not opposed to the death penalty. I support the death penalty for drug traffickers and I do note that Australia does not seem to get half as worked up when those sentenced to death are terrorists rather than drug traffickers.

In Indonesia it is common knowledge that many drug traffickers continue to ply their trade once they are released. Some even claim that they continue to do so while still in prison.

So putting them in prison seems to be an expensive and rather useless exercise whereas the death penalty is the only anti recidivism program that I know of with a 100 percent success rate.

However, if thousands of Indonesian lives can be saved by ensuring that we keep our friends happy enough to help us during natural disaster emergencies then yes, I am happy to exchange two Australian lives for thousands of Indonesian ones.

As for the Brazilians, do they get their chap on death row too? Well, I guess we need to think about that. How good a friend are they? What did they do for us during the tsunami? How much was it worth? Or did they do something else for us? In politics, national interest needs to come first.
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The writer is a former journalist with the BBC World Service.