T

he deaths by firing squad on April 28 of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, two Australians convicted of drug trafficking offenses, have brought a new chill to relations between states that have much to gain from cordial and cooperative engagement.

This was by no means the first episode of a Southeast Asian state having carried out a capital sentence against an Australian citizen, but it seems to have produced much more distress in Australia than earlier cases. And not only in Australia.

A mourner at Sukumaran'€™s funeral in Sydney recounted that the Indonesian guards on Nusakambangan island had apologized, hugged and saluted him as he went to his death. Many seem to have shared a sense that Chan and Sukumaran were executed at the very moment that their transition from drug traffickers to quite different people had been accomplished.

Those who were close to Chan and Sukumaran, and to the others who were shot at the same time, will reflect on what the lives and deaths of these young men can teach us; as will those who supported the executions.

But it is just as important to reflect on how relations between Australia and Indonesia can be eased back into gear. It is not in either'€™s long-run interest for relations to be stalled; but both states stand to gain from a frank evaluation of how relations have come to take a turn for the worse.

With the change of president in Indonesia in 2014, the prospects for Chan and Sukumaran were never that bright, but Australia'€™s handling of the bilateral relationship even before that gave cause for alarm.

Australia had a long and ugly history of imprisoning Indonesian children who had served as crew-members on people-smuggling boats; Australia'€™s unilateral moves to push asylum-seeker boats back to Indonesia, actively promoted by a boorish and arrogant immigration minister, rode roughshod over Indonesia'€™s expressed preference for a multilateral approach to the issue; and the news that Australian officials had boasted of a capacity to intercept the phone conversations of Indonesian public figures, followed by a refusal from Canberra to offer an apology, proved sufficiently provocative to prompt Indonesia to withdraw Ambassador Nadjib Riphat Kesoema from Canberra.
__________________

The lead here is best taken by skilled professionals rather than politicians.

While Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and her staff handled the Chan and Sukumaran cases with far more tact and skill, their efforts suffered near-fatal damage in February when Prime Minister Tony Abbott clumsily sought to link past humanitarian assistance to Aceh following the December 2004 tsunami to clemency for the Australians in 2015.

The lesson here is stark: Australia for too long had treated Indonesia'€™s concerns as subordinate to the domestically-driven concerns of the Australian government. When Australia came to Indonesia as a supplicant, it did not have enough diplomatic capital on which to draw.

There are some lessons for Indonesia too. Regarding the debate on the death penalty, the first lesson relates to the Indonesian public. The majority was quick to see the efforts to prevent the recent executions as '€œforeign interference'€, a perception fueled by the government'€™s rhetoric that it was within Indonesia'€™s sovereign rights to exercise its own law, including executing convicted criminals.

 Yet the essence of the debate was neither about foreigners interfering in Indonesia'€™s domestic matter nor about supporting crimes. Instead, it was about giving convicted criminals a second chance to rehabilitate themselves after paying for their actions. In an interdependent world, absolute sovereignty claims have less standing than in the past.

Meanwhile, the growing support among Indonesians for the abolition of capital punishment, despite still being the minority view, should be taken by the government as a signal to conduct a more comprehensive review of the use of death penalty.

Is the death penalty really an effective way to deter future criminals? Is taking the lives of people to set an example morally defensible? Is there really no chance for convicts to show remorse and to become better individuals? Is the death penalty really a reflection of our conception of justice, or is it merely '€” to quote a former Indonesian ambassador '€” a form of '€œexcessive populism'€?

These are questions that the Indonesian government needs to look into very carefully; substantial labor migration means that many Indonesians are working in states where capital punishment is accepted and systems of justice are weak.

Regarding Indonesia-Australia relations, although some observers have dubbed the crisis to be the worst since the Timor crisis, the relationship is not beyond repair.

Indonesia and Australia share some common interests perhaps more than Jakarta cares to admit. As Bishop mentioned, the two countries have more than 60 areas of formal cooperation. These shared interests, therefore, should be the basis for rebuilding ties between the neighboring countries.

While political cooperation is understandably postponed, cooperation at the lower level must be maintained, with the hope that it will help to rebuild trust between the two.

The results from a recent poll by Lowy Institute provide another reason for Ambassador Nadjib and the Indonesian Foreign Ministry to be optimistic about rebuilding diplomatic and political relations with Australia.

Although a vast majority of the respondents in Australia opposed the death penalty, around 51 percent believed that diplomatic engagements with Indonesia should be on hold only for a short period of time. Most respondents also saw that recent incidents would not make much difference to their preference of travel destination and trading partners.

Without any intention to undermine the grief felt by many Australians following the executions, these findings could be a basis for Indonesian diplomats to move forward and start anew. A possible challenge, however, is to overcome backlashes in Indonesia.

The louder voices seem to be the ones filled with nationalistic sentiment, partly triggered by the Australian government'€™s poor handling of the issue, notably through Abbott'€™s disastrous February remarks. A tactful public diplomacy directed at the Indonesian public could be a way to overcome such a challenge.

The lead here is best taken by skilled professionals rather than politicians. Indeed, the two most important figures in reconstructing the relationship are likely to be Ambassador Nadjib in Canberra and Ambassador Paul Grigson in Jakarta.

No one could possibly deny the traumatic effects of capital punishment on the families and friends of those who are executed. But there is another group who also deserve the deepest compassion, the diplomats in Indonesia and in Australia, tasked with providing consular assistance to prisoners on '€œdeath row'€.

To the sorrow that they can feel if they have come to know and like the prisoners can be added a haunting sense of professional failure. There is much more to diplomacy than cocktail parties.
_______________________

William Maley is professor of diplomacy at the Australian National University. Bambang Hartadi Nugroho teaches in the Department of International Relations at the University of Indonesia.