Bali nine families make final desperate pleas after saying goodbye to Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran

In heartbreaking scenes played out live on television, the families of Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan last night begged Indonesian President Joko Widodo to spare the lives of their loved ones, following their final goodbyes.With the Bali nine ringleaders due to face the firing squad about midnight (3am AEST time), Sukumaran’s sister Brintha wailed with grief, begging for her brother’s life.Raji Sukumaran breaks down while pleading for her son’s life on Tuesday afternoon. “Indonesian people, show mercy. Please don’t do this to my brother. Please, please Mr President, Joko Widodo, I beg you please. Please don’t take my brother from me,” she said.Between anguished cries, Sukumaran’s mother, Raji, told journalists of her last moments with her son.”I just had to say goodbye to my son and I won’t see him again,” she said through tears after her return to the port of Cilacap.”They are going to take him at midnight and shoot him.”He is healthy and he is beautiful … I’m asking the government please don’t kill him today. Please don’t hold the execution. Please don’t kill my son.””I won’t see him again. They are going to take him at midnight and shoot him,” she said. “He is beautiful and has a lot of compassion for other people.I’m asking the government please don’t kill him today. Please don’t hold the execution. Please don’t kill my son. Please don’t.”In a brief statement as they disembarked at Cilacap port, Chan’s brother Michael said his family were extremely upset at the men’s ordeal.
“We are very upset as a family to have to go through this. No human being should ever have to go through this. It’s torture.”Anyone with a heart would forgive these guys for what they’ve done and show mercy.”Late on Tuesday night, Indonesia still had not formally notified the Australian government of the impending executions as a former ambassador warned the two countries were facing their most serious rift since the East Timor crisis.High-level ministerial meetings with Indonesia will be cancelled and senior government sources say all aspects of the diplomatic relationship are “on the table” in the fallout of the Bali nine case. Fairfax Media has also confirmed that the Abbott government will now almost certainly withdraw Australia’s ambassador.Earlier the families had arrived at the port for their last visit. It was the day Myuran Sukumaran has been painting. Paintings of hearts broken, literally and figuratively. Self-portraits of the artist with gaping black holes over his heart and lines of black blood, paintings of the life draining out of him in whooshes of thick paint. And on Tuesday, the day of final goodbyes, a portrait of a human heart. Inscribed was “Satu hati satu rasa didalam cinta” – one heart, one feeling in love. It was signed by all nine of those on death row whose hearts will be ripped apart by bullets.It seemed that Tuesday could not get any any worse for Sukumaran and Andrew Chan and their loved ones. But it did. At the eleventh hour the families learned that the men had been denied their choice of a spiritual counsellor who stays with the condemned until the bitter end.
As Michael Chan told Fairfax Media in an SMS: “Last bit of dignity denied.”Chan and Sukumaran had asked for Salvation Army minister David Soper and Bayside Church Senior Pastor Christie Buckingham to accompany them until their deaths .Both are old friends, both know the men intimately and their journey over the past decade since their 2005 arrest for smuggling heroin out of Indonesia.