The Deaths of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran One Year on

A year ago Australia's Andrew Chan and Maran Sukumaran were each tied to a post in the Indonesian jungle and shot by a firing squad. The pair had met their end alongside Dutch, Nigerian, Brazilian, and French nationals after their appeals for clemency were repeatedly denied.

No one who knew them can still quite believe it happened. On Friday, the families held quiet gatherings in their homes. Andrew Chan's Indonesian widow flew in to be with them. Ben Quilty, the artist who formed a bond with Sukumaran instructed his agent not to give out his number.

The only people talking are their Indonesian counterparts. Hermanus Hertanto, a prison guard who knew Sukumaran, spoke to the ABC about their relationship, as did a former inmate.

Another was the pair's lawyer and famed Indonesian human rights advocate Todung Mulya Lubis. "I've known them for eight years," he told VICE. "I took up their case in 2008. They did not come from wealthy families. They went to hard schools, and had what seems to be problems in their youth which turned them to drugs.

"And it was only for a small amount of money. They did not realise the dangers of what they were doing."

The bullets may have killed Andrew Chan and Maran Sukumaran, but it was Indonesia's war on drugs that sent them to their deaths. At the time it happened, few outside the country could understand how Indonesia might shoot apparently reformed men.

But then Indonesia has some of the strictest anti-drug laws in the world. And while the deaths of the two men may have triggered a terse international exchange between Indonesia and Australia, their approach has been good for Indonesia's politicians who enjoy support for hardline policies.

It was a fact Indonesian President Joko Widodo, a.k.a. "Jokowi" caught onto when he approved their executions last year. Jokowi had been elected as a kind of Indonesian Barack Obama, a man who had promised to clean up the government and bring change to Indonesia. Only it didn't happen that way and before long he was forced to sit quietly back while being chewed out by members of his own party.

Refusing clemency to Chan and Sukumaran made Jokowi look tough on the streets of Jakarta and despite the international storm that followed, his popularity surged.

In February 2015 Jokowi declared a "drugs emergency" across Indonesia, saying that 40-50 people were dying every day from drug use, which others have said is probably bullshit. What is true though is that Indonesia has been swimming in crystal meth, or shabu, as the locals call it.

Indonesian society tends to see something immoral in drug use, which pushes users further underground. From local police rounding up lower-level addicts to parade them for the media, to its absolute insistence that the death penalty is a vital tool in fighting drugs, anyone who may be truly addicted is not going to be making themselves known to authorities.

Which is probably why a weird forced-rehabilitation program plan by the National Narcotics Agency (BNN) was always doomed to fail. The program gave drug users a chance to turn themselves into ineffective government-run clinics by January 2016 or face the justice system.

These are some of the reasons Indonesia's love of the death penalty was booed at UNgass, a United Nations conference on drugs policy. An Indonesian delegate was publicly booed when he insisted the death penalty was a "vital tool."

"Anti-drugs is still very, very tight and that policy is still popular among the majority of people," says Lubis. "I believe it's time for the governments to find a solution not to blindly execute people."

In the meantime, there are whispers the country is gearing up for another, larger round of executions in the coming weeks. No timeframe has been given and there is no official list for those to be killed, but they're all likely to be drug offenders. And this time around, authorities are reportedly hoping that there won't be so much "drama."

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