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.

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