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Bali attack directed at
West, not Australia
By Sonny
Inbaraj
PERTH - Analysts are cautioning the
Australian government against theories that the weekend
bomb blast in the holiday island of Bali was directed at
Australia specifically.
"This was a message for
Western countries in general, especially to the United
States, that if you pursue Islam like [US President
George W] Bush has done, then they can kill its citizens
at any place around the world," said Arief Budiman, the
head of Melbourne University's Indonesian Studies
Department.
Budiman said the Bali blast at Kuta
Beach's Sari Club, which killed nearly 200, did not
appear to be the work of local Indonesian militant
Muslim groups. This theory has also been aired by
several analysts, including religious leaders, in
Indonesia.
Indonesian authorities confirmed on
Monday that 187 were killed and more than 300 injured,
including 110 Australians. A further 220 people remained
unaccounted for.
On Tuesday, police questioned
two Indonesian men over the blast and have found traces
of plastic explosive at the site of the Kuta attack.
Earlier, they questioned about 30 foreigners as
witnesses to the attack.
Shortly after the Kuta
blast, another bomb exploded near a US consular office
in Bali's capital Denpasar. Earlier in the day, a bomb
exploded at the Philippine consulate in Manado, on
Sulawesi island. No casualties were reported in either
of those blasts.
"Looking at the size of the
bomb blast, this is impossible to have been done by a
local militant group," said Budiman. "There isn't
sufficient professionalism among the local militant
groups to organize something like this."
Budiman
also dismissed claims that certain elements of the
Indonesian military were behind the blast in Bali's
tourist district. "The Indonesian elite itself might
have been behind earlier bombings, but it would not want
to hurt its own economic interests or turn a domestic
political struggle into a foreign-policy crisis by
killing foreigners. It would be unlikely to have come
from the military, to whom [Indonesian] President
Megawati Sukarnoputri is quite close at the moment," he
said.
Budiman also urged the Australian
government not to take swift punitive actions. "We know
many Australian lives were lost and it is a tragedy to
the country. But please don't make it too emotional,
because Indonesia lost a lot of people too in the blast.
Let us not forget many Balinese also died or were
injured on Saturday night," he said.
In the
aftermath of the bombing, Australian Prime Minister John
Howard signaled his intention to press Megawati to
ensure that the perpetrators are brought to justice.
Howard has announced that his own country will
complete a review of anti-terrorism laws by early next
week. The government-initiated review of terrorism
legislation is expected to revive a series of
legislative provisions rejected earlier this year by
parliament, including the Australian Security
Intelligence Organization Legislation Amendment Bill.
The provisions of the bill, shaped after the September
11, 2001, attacks in the United States, propose to allow
life sentences to be imposed on those directly or
indirectly involved with "terrorist" organizations and
allow "suspects" to be held without charge or access to
a lawyer for potentially extended periods.
"To
me it is the wrong focus to throw more law at the
problem. To think that we are solving anything after
Bali in passing more laws is like dancing on the deck of
the Titanic," said Hilary Charlesworth, director of the
Center for International Law Australian National
University.
Jakarta has come under intense
criticism from US Ambassador to Indonesia Ralph Boyce
for ignoring the threat of radical Islamic groups in the
country.
The coordinator of Monash University's
Global Terrorism Unit, Dr Pete Lentini, said the Bali
nightclub bombing had key similarities to other
terrorist attacks by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network
that were aimed at Western assets and citizens rather
than specifically Australia.
"We can certainly
say this is similar to other al-Qaeda-type terrorist
patterns, where you have a smaller attack such as that
on the French tanker in Yemen last week, followed by the
multi-attack spectacle in Bali. When we take into
account that we had multiple attack locations in Bali,
and other attacks on American and Filipino interests
throughout Indonesia, we can say it falls within the
pattern of the al-Qaeda network," said Lentini.
Dr Greg Barton, a senior lecturer in politics at
Melbourne's Deakin University, said the outlook was grim
as al-Qaeda takes the spotlight once again. "If the Bali
attack was independent of Indonesian elite-political
machinations, it is likely to be linked to a concern
among radical Islamists around the globe about America's
foreign policy. If that is the case, the bombers are
likely to become more, rather than less, annoyed with
Washington, especially if the push for regime change in
Iraq continues," Barton said.
While Australia
mourns the loss of lives of its young in Bali, many
Balinese face the grim prospect of enormous economic
loss as a result of the damage and the blow to the
tourist industry.
"The fanatics who destroyed so
many young lives in Bali on Saturday night were aiming
their hatred at Westerners. But the shrapnel from their
blast will badly wound Indonesia," wrote Tim Colebatch,
economics editor of The Age newspaper.
Writing
in Tuesday's edition of the daily Melbourne newspaper,
Colebatch said Bali had made a big contribution to
keeping Indonesia going in the past five years of
economic turmoil from the financial crisis sparking a
depression in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and
the world economic slump.
(Inter Press
Service)
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