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Bali fallout: Picking up the
pieces
By Bill Guerin
The
ramifications of the slaughter in Kuta, Bali, reach out
across the region and the globe, changing mindsets in
the West and the East, and giving cause for hope that
Indonesia will at last bite the bullet and join the war
against terrorism.
So far the signs are
encouraging. Less than 10 days after the blasts, Jakarta
implemented new anti-terrorism laws, arrested radical
Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, and ostensibly gained
the support of the leaders of the two largest Muslim
organizations in the country. Ba'asyir allegedly
received money from Osama bin Laden to buy the
explosives used in the Bali bombings, although he is
currently being detained in connection with other
alleged crimes: a plot to kill President Megawati
Sukarnoputri when she was vice president, and a series
of bombings two years ago.
Leaders from
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, representing an
estimated one-third of Indonesia's 210 million
population, have even urged the government to crack down
on Islamic militants suspected of violence and terror
and have rallied behind the new anti-terrorism decrees.
These two main Islamic groupings, the
Muhammadiyah and the NU, with a combined membership of
70 million, both believe in a pluralist democracy and
see Islam as a path to greater social justice. They have
often stated that they are not seeking a radical
transformation of Indonesian society and have long been
at odds, at least publicly, with the radicals.
Asked about misgivings by human-rights groups
that the new anti-terrorist measures could be abused and
mark a return to the repression of the Suharto era,
Syafii Maarif, chairman of Muhammadiyah, said: "It's
rubbish," adding: "If those so-called radicals did not
do anything wrong, they should not worry."
Two
new presidential instructions signed off by Megawati on
Tuesday night before jetting off to the Asia Pacific
Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Mexico empower the
State Intelligence Agency (BIN) to coordinate
intelligence operations across the archipelago and
authorize Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the coordinating
minister for political and security affairs, to head the
war against terrorism.
As well as this, Laskar
Jihad has sent more than 1,000 activists home to Java
from the Maluku Islands and the Central Sulawesi regency
of Poso, where they had been fighting local Christians
and have also claimed they would disband. This latter is
not being taken seriously, particularly in Ambon, where
much of the bloody fighting took place, but there is
relief that the "warriors" are on the run after almost
three years of refusal to compromise.
In Bali a
joint Indonesian and Australian investigative team was
quickly formed once it became clear that investigators
had so little to go on and that much of the evidence had
been destroyed or carted off by souvenir hunters during
the chaos for the first 24 hours.
These
investigators have now confirmed that the main bomb was
of a structure using a combination of C-4 plastic
explosive and simple ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer
widely available, that has been used before in bombings
in Southeast Asia that have implicated the Jemaah
Islamiyah, the radical Islamist organization Ba'asyir
allegedly heads.
In spite of claims that it was
an all too easy option to point the finger at Muslim
terrorists, Ba'asyir, who remains under care at the
Muhammadiyah Hospital in Solo, Central Java, is being
linked to the Bali blast as well as earlier bombings in
Indonesia.
Detained al-Qaeda runner Omar
al-Faruq is said to have told the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) that bin Laden sent US$74,000
to Ba'asyir this year to buy the explosives used in the
Bali bombings. Ba'asyir allegedly passed the money on to
his aides to buy three tons of explosives illegally from
contacts in the Indonesian military.
Former
president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, who remains in
high esteem in the NU, said categorically that Ba'asyir
is a terrorist and should have been arrested long ago.
But the Indonesian press and many Indonesian leaders
remain highly skeptical about the claims made by Omar
al-Faruq, whose confessions were outlined in a CIA
document published by Time magazine a short while before
the Kuta bombings.
Time admits the document was
given to it by "intelligence sources" in Southeast Asia,
and the US ambassador to Indonesia, Ralph Boyce,
complained of a struggle to "get the focus [in
Indonesia] away from the fact that the source of the
leak to the magazine was apparently [the US] Embassy,
and getting the focus on to the details of the
information in the report itself".
The Americans
now want "serious and decisive action", says Boyce.
The story was based on leaked CIA assessments of
the security risks in Southeast Asia, and very detailed
information about the links between al-Qaeda and the
Indonesian group, Jemaah Islamiyah. The information in
the report was obtained through a no-holds-barred CIA
backed military interrogation of Omar al-Faruq.
The Time story caused a furor in Indonesia.
There was widespread front-page media exposure, charges
of CIA complicity, and dispersions cast on any
information (read "black propaganda") emanating from the
United States or its intelligence services.
This, of course, was ample evidence, if any were
needed in the eyes of foreigners, that Indonesia had for
months been not only downplaying the possibility of an
al-Qaeda presence in the country but steadfastly
refusing to take preventive action by closing the stable
door before the horse could bolt, as it were.
It
was easier then, and much less dangerous domestically,
to allow various alternative scenarios to circulate that
several bomb incidents in Indonesia were the work of the
US or the CIA in an effort to scare Indonesia into
allowing the US to "enter" Indonesia.
The Bali
bombings have changed all that.
Singaporean
Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was the first to
seize the chance to blame the Indonesian government for
a surge in Islamic militancy after the fall of Suharto.
In a speech at an international conference he trotted
out the basics that most people understand anyway,
saying that after the dictator's downfall "the
subsequent Indonesian government abandoned Suharto's
long-standing policy of restraining political Islam,
thus opening Pandora's box".
Late last year
Malaysia and Singapore arrested dozens of alleged
militants with ties to the Indonesian network, and the
Philippines jailed a handful of alleged members of the
Jemaah Islamiyah. Singapore has long championed a strong
US presence in the region, which it believes would
promote stability.
Malaysian Prime Minister
Mahathir Mohammad is the de facto leading moderate
Muslim leader and, although his country has a Muslim
majority like Indonesia, he keeps an iron grip on
radicals through draconian powers similar to those of
Singapore.
Social, though not religious,
conditions in the Philippines are similar to those in
Indonesia, though the Manila-Washington relationship is
strong. Muslim insurgents in Indonesian have been
killing for decades.
Security officials in all
three neighboring countries say they have provided
Indonesia with transcripts of interrogations and other
evidence that have shown terrorists are at work there,
but little action has been taken.
However,
Jakarta may even now try to argue ingeniously that if it
had bowed to US pressure before and joined the crusade
against terrorism, there would have been many more
Indonesians in body bags than Westerners, ie,
Indonesians would have been targeted by the
perpetrators.
US Secretary of State Colin
Powell, though, has implied that the Bali strike might
have been aimed more at Indonesia than Australians. In
an interview Powell said, "This was Australia's
[September] 11, when you think of the scale of the
populations and when you think of the impact that it's
had within the country."
The relationship with
Australia, one of Indonesia's most important trading
partners, is once again edgy to say the least. After
months of diplomatic activity by Jakarta and Canberra
geared at putting the "boat people" and East Timor
issues behind them, the Kuta bombings have relegated
Indonesians yet again to the position they hate most,
second-best.
Australian Prime Minister John
Howard, boosted by domestic opinion polls and confident
of unqualified support from the White House, said this
week: "We have a right, and I have a duty, to push upon
and press upon the Indonesian government the need for a
cooperative effort [against terrorism] in the region."
Aristides Katoppo, editor of the mainstream
Sinar Harapan daily, emphasizes that the main priority
in Indonesia now is to maintain stability and to prevent
disintegration. Katoppo acknowledges the threat of
terrorism but also argues that there are many bigger
problems. "Many people are struggling just to get their
bowl of rice for the next day, and these problems of
poverty are also very important," he said.
This
seems eminently sensible given that violence, aggression
and wholesale terrorism cannot be separated from the
conditions that the vast majority of the world's poor
endure, even in Indonesia.
The prospects for the
Balinese having full bowls of rice are not good. Despite
trying to put a brave face on it immediately after the
tragedy, the government Tourism Office in Bali admitted
this week that tourist arrivals had plunged 80 percent
to about 1,000 a day. Not surprisingly, hotel occupancy
rates have also been decimated, with some falling to as
low as 38 percent.
The next meeting of the
Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI), due next week in
Yogyakarta, has been postponed, but this will give
Indonesia more time for a needs assessment on the damage
and social costs of the attack, and crunch the numbers
yet again in the budget sums.
On the other hand,
the breathing space will be seen by the major powers as
ample time for Indonesia to produce concrete evidence of
a firm and resolute commitment to fighting terrorism and
improving and maintaining security.
Though many
believe that the hardline groups such as Laskar Jihad,
the Islam Defenders' Front (FPI) and the Indonesian
Mujahiddin Council (MII) are in no way representative of
Indonesian Muslims as a whole, the fear remains that a
major crackdown, based on the new terrorism act and
motivated by the horror in Bali, will provoke a backlash
and beef up support for the radicals.
Can the
Megawati administration rise to the occasion, put
self-interests aside, and bring a new and believable
style of leadership to the world's largest Muslim
country?
Amid heightened security in major
metropolitan areas across Indonesia, and intense media
activity, the world awaits news and action that the
double-whammy stranglehold of domestic politicking and
the extreme sensitivity of the issue of arresting
radical Islam leaders has somehow been broken.
With exquisite understatement, Foreign Minister
Hassan Wirayuda, though sticking to the official line
that the country is no "nest of terrorists", said that
Indonesia needs an effective public relations campaign
to counter the negative fallout from the bombings.
The main dangers to Megawati and her people in
the short term are threefold: malicious and highly
dangerous politicking by the country's leading figures,
the white-bearded cleric lying in a Central Java
hospital, and the on/off scenario of a new war against
Iraq.
People's Consultative Assembly Speaker
Amien Rais, almost before Megawati's plane had cleared
Indonesian airspace en route for Mexico, slammed the
president, accusing her of failing to unite the people
in the fight against terrorism because of the
government's poor handling of the Bali bombing.
"Because of a lack of unity in handling, the
momentum to unite the nation is lost," Amien said,
adding that unity was needed to show the world that
Indonesia was against terrorism.
Vice President
Hamzah Haz may be even more dangerous, with his dogged
support for the radicals over the past year and his
overt support for various nationalist politicians who
accuse Megawati of selling out Indonesia for the
interests of the United States. Haz has often
intimidated the authorities by challenging them to
arrest him before any Muslim radicals, and a day after
Megawati left for Mexico visited the site of the Bali
bombings for the first time.
The effects on the
economy from the Kuta bombings are incalculable and it
is certain the accompanying massive layoffs and hardship
will ensure even more recruits for the radicals.
If US President George W Bush invades Iraq all
bets are off. The continual threats to attack Iraq
without authority from the United Nations Security
Council have caused deep anger in Indonesia and continue
to inflame passions even among the majority of the
country's estimated 170 million followers of Islam.
Should the bombings start in Iraq, Muslims everywhere
will feel morally bound to show solidarity. The Megawati
administration would be under great pressure to release
Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, setting him free to work behind the
scenes in an even more unstable environment spawned by
hatred over attacks by the West on a Muslim country.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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