The execution of the Bali bombers is due six years after the nightclub explosions that killed 202 people and 10 years after Indonesia became a democracy. Paul Smith, who has just returned from Indonesia, looks at where the country with the world's largest Muslim population is now.
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The imminent execution of the Bali bombers, regardless of views about capital punishment, is another step on the road for Indonesia as it seeks to attract the world's tourist and investment dollars.
But ask anyone not familiar with the home of the world's largest Muslim population what springs to mind when you mention the country's name and for many it will continue to be terrorism.
A senior Government official asked me that very question within hours of my arrival in the hot, congested capital, Jakarta. I danced around the answer for fear of offending him, though he knew it as well as I did.
Had I been asked a few days later, by then having more confidence that this is a democracy where you can usually say what you mean - unlike in many Islamic states - I would have been more forthcoming.
Because the first thing you do think about is the picture of the bewildered and bloodied tourists who survived those deadly blasts in 2002, and the second wave of bombings in Bali three years later which left another 21 dead.
Prod a bit further and some might recall the overthrow of President Suharto in 1998 after the Asian financial crisis.
Indonesia is just not a country with a high profile for much else. There are many other nations in Asia at least as able to grab our attention, whether it be the growing giants India and China or the powerful minnows like Singapore.
Umar Hadi, a senior diplomat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says he and his staff have been trying "to put Indonesia on the map" since the 1998 revolution. This, he says, is not about propaganda, "and I know about propaganda, because I learned how to do it under the previous regime".
It is instead, says Hadi, about getting out the message that Indonesia is genuinely democratic from the President down to local mayors, that it has a modern economy and that its model of Islam is a moderate one.
None of these is necessarily easy to convince people about, especially the last one.
Indonesia does not look Islamic in the way that Middle Eastern countries do. The mosques do not dominate the streets any more than churches do in the West and few women wear the hejab, or veil.
On the other hand, although alcohol is legal, you will not see any advertising for it and in restaurants there may be nobody drinking it except foreigners.
If you look closely you will find an arrow on hotel room ceilings pointing to Mecca, and the country's Parliament last week passed a law which bans anything considered pornography.
As the dominant of the five main religions, except ironically in Bali which is predominantly Hindu, Islam retains a grip on society and the two largest Muslim organisations claim membership in the tens of millions.
The Foreign Ministry is at pains to emphasise that huge effort has gone into tackling the minority extremist form of Islam that was behind the nightclub bombings, claiming success in targeting terrorist cells, improving intelligence and introducing anti-terrorism legislation.
That the threat remains is clear, though, from the stepping up of security at Western embassies before the executions and the Australian Government's warning to its citizens that they should think long and hard before visiting at the moment.
You would also have to ask if the reason my party of foreign journalists was accompanied by a police escort wherever we went in the northern province of Sulawesi was purely about helping us get through the traffic or partly because of security concerns.
Hadi is adamant that "just because we have the largest number of Muslims doesn't mean we have the largest number of terrorists. But, in fact, we have the largest number of terrorists in our jails".
Arguably as important as tackling terrorism in boosting Indonesia is developing the economy and the way it meets the basic needs of its people. This is not a failed state, like parts of Africa, but it is one where many people continue to live in very basic housing and GDP is just US$3600 (New Zealand's is about US$27,000) a head.
The economy is set to grow by about 6 per cent this year, healthy compared with our current negative growth, but not as impressive as China's 9 per cent, leading a Time magazine assessment to suggest it is not pulling its weight in Asian terms.
Newsweek, though, wrote a glowing appraisal last month, calling Indonesia the "new India" and a "beacon of stability" in Southeast Asia.
Whichever of these report cards is more accurate will be of little comfort to the millions still in dire poverty, either in the diverse rural areas of a country of 17,000 islands or in sprawling cities where many sleep under roofs of rusted corrugated iron held down with old tyres.
No one in power appears to deny this is a problem. Aurora Tambunan, in charge of community welfare for Jakarta, is blunt in placing poverty at the top of her agenda and gives the example of people living on river banks who are at risk from regular flooding but have nowhere else to go. "It is a very serious problem," she says.
One of the ways out of poverty lies, as many have worked out, in tourism. Those in charge in North Sulawesi are among the regional leaders to see what it has done for Bali (in the peaceful times when the Australian dollars and Japanese yen have been rolling in) and fancy a bit of it for themselves.
So, in Manado they are hosting a "World Oceans Conference" next May with the laudable goal of improving the quality and sustainability of the oceans, but also with the openly admitted goal by North Sulawesi Governor SH Sarundajang of making the region "the second Bali".
Aside from the convention centre that is barely started, the town does not look much like an international conference venue and is far from beautiful.
The surrounding landscape and beaches are, but major problems remain with tonnes of garbage washing up daily on the sand and an under-developed local economy which leaves rural homes pitch black at night from a lack of electricity, or inability to pay for it.
An idea to throw your region on to the world stage without a well thought-out plan of how to achieve it may do more harm than good as billions of precious rupiah go into white-elephant conference buildings and hotels.
Indonesia faces the same dilemma as its regions: how to make itself stand out from the crowd without falling flat on its face. It already has Bali as a success story, damaged only by the possibly uncontrollable actions of extremists, and a bustling capital which, having opened a branch of the upmarket London department store Harvey Nicholls, has plenty to offer international investors.
If the executions can help it move on from its reputation as a home for terrorists, that will do more than anything else to help Indonesia have its voice heard on the world stage.
But it will have to set aside a tendency in some quarters within the political elite for a complacency, which suggests it thinks it is well on the way to achieving the three aims of a terrorism-free country, a thriving economy and a fully embedded democracy.
The report card on all three should probably read: trying hard, making progress, but not there yet.
* Paul Smith travelled to Jakarta, Manado, Bali and Yogyakarta courtesy of the Indonesian Government.
