Dan EatonSat – Fury in Australia over the jailing of a young woman in Bali for drugs smuggling has puzzled ordinary Indonesians, and given the world's most populous Muslim nation a chance to display a new maturity, analysts say.

But a series of threats to Indonesian diplomats and missions in Australia following the 20-year sentence given to trainee beautician Schapelle Corby on May 27 could play into the hands of Indonesia's radical, anti-Western Muslim fringe, they said.

"Radical Muslims could use that to focus on Australian bullying... But most Indonesian people are moderate," said Arbi Sanit, a political analyst from University of Indonesia.

In Indonesia, where bombs, corruption and the simply bizarre are daily fodder for headlines, editors reserved little space for Corby, 27, when she was caught entering Bali last year with a stash of marijuana.

While Australian media descended on the resort island, turning the attractive young Queenslander into a cause celebre whom many of her compatriots believe is innocent, Indonesians have been preoccupied with other things.

That includes high-profile corruption arrests and a bombing that killed 22 people last month, the bloodiest since the 2002 Bali nightclub blasts that killed 202 people.

But the delivery of suspicious packages containing white powder to Jakarta's diplomatic missions in Australia in recent weeks has suddenly put the Corby case firmly on the front pages in Indonesia.

"What we have failed to understand is how Australians are thinking about this case in the last three or four months and the general belief there that Corby is innocent," said Daniel Sparingga, a sociologist from Airlangga University in the East Java city of Surabaya.

There are dozens of foreigners serving time for drugs offences in Indonesian jails, including some Australians, and most Indonesians see Corby as nothing new.

"The gap between how Indonesians perceive things and Australians perceive things is very wide... So it is very easily manipulated politically and even culturally."

Moral high ground

Showing what some observers see as political maturity, Jakarta has worked hard to control fallout from the Corby affair on often rocky relations with its southern neighbor.

"We don't want to reduce and lower our dignity as a nation by parroting what the Australian public has been doing through their emotional reaction," said foreign ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa at a news conference on Friday.

He said Jakarta would not issue a travel warning for its citizens in Australia following the Corby verdict, despite a string of such warnings from its neighbor following the 2002 Bali blasts that killed 88 Australians, and a bombing outside Canberra's embassy in Jakarta last year that killed 10 people. Gloating was left to the Indonesian media.

"It has brought home to us that some Australians are now beginning to emulate the actions of a few of our more deranged members of society, namely acts of terrorism," Desi Anwar, a prominent TV anchor, wrote in an article in the Jakarta Post in response to the threats to Indonesian diplomats after the Corby verdict.

Public reaction has been muted, with only a few efforts at anti-Australian protests which largely fizzled out.

"What I believe is that (bad) sentiment toward Westerners has for the past few years been associated with Muslim radicals, so people are reluctant to be associated with protests like that," said Sparingga.

Masduki Baidlawi, deputy secretary-general of the moderate Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia's largest Muslim group, said Indonesia's reaction could be put down to a growing maturity.

"I think its the same question we asked when we held the presidential election last year... There were fears of violence and all that, but nothing really happened. I guess we need to acknowledge that there is public wisdom."

[Additional reporting by Telly Nathalia and Achamd Sukarsono.]