Praise for liberal Islam will bury the bad news

The Times, London


Asia

The Times
March 30, 2006

Praise for liberal Islam will bury the bad news
By Richard Lloyd Parry, Asia Editor


BRITAIN’S relationship with Indonesia has been one of indifference,
neglect and misplaced hope that everything will turn out for the
best. As Tony Blair flew to Jakarta for talks with President
Yudhoyono, the question was whether anything had changed.

Margaret Thatcher was the most recent British Prime Minister to
visit, and Indonesia has been transformed in the intervening 21
years. Then it was a stern dictatorship under President Suharto; now
it is a rowdy democracy. Then East Timor and the breakaway province
of Aceh were at war; now Timor is independent and Aceh peaceful.

“Indonesia... is not only a democracy but a democracy that is
championing and promoting moderate Islam,” Mr Blair’s spokesman told
journalists on the official aircraft. “It has changed from being a
dictatorship to a democracy. It has strong views on extremists
exploiting Islam.”

Indonesia is indeed a nation of relaxed, liberal and reasonable
Muslims, and it is to flatter and encourage them that Mr Blair is
stopping over in Jakarta on his way back from Australia and New
Zealand. But it is also a country in which security forces perpetrate
grievous human rights violations with near-impunity.

Ninety per cent of the 240 million people of Indonesia are Muslim —
the world’s largest Islamic population — but theirs is a mild and
flexible religion compared with the austere faith of the Middle East.

A natural empathy with the suffering of fellow Iraqi and Palestinian
Muslims is balanced by revulsion at violence and fanaticism. After a
slow and uncertain response to the first Bali bomb attacks, which
killed 202 people in 2002, most of them foreign tourists, Indonesia
has vigorously hunted down Islamic extremists.

Dozens have been arrested or handed over to the US for interrogation
or “rendition” to third countries. Despite the objections of an angry
minority (who were expected to demonstrate publicly their displeasure
with Mr Blair, as they did this month with Condoleezza Rice, the US
Secretary of State), disquiet over Iraq has not transformed into
hatred of the West.

This is a state of affairs that Mr Blair will want to encourage. He
will pay tribute to Indonesian democracy and diversity. He will most
likely ignore the darker side.

Dr Rice praised Indonesia as “a place that shows people of many
different faiths and many different ethnicities can live together in
a democratic system”. Last year, however, her State Department made
very different observations. “Security forces continued to commit
unlawful killings of rebels, suspected rebels and civilians in areas
of separatist activity,” it observed. The Government “largely failed
to hold soldiers and police accountable for such killings and other
serious abuses”.

If rights campaigners are correct this is going on now in West Papua,
where poorly armed tribesmen have been fighting for independence for
decades.This is difficult to confirm because the Government does not
allow foreign journalists to visit Papua.

“Terrorism takes many different forms and is committed by both state
and non-state actors,” Tapol, the British human rights group, wrote
in a letter to Mr Blair, asking him to raise concerns with Mr
Yudhoyono. It is safe to assume that it will be ignored.

Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.