Sidney Jones
Sunday October 27, 2002
In the aftermath of the 12 October bombing in Bali, Indonesians
are convinced they have terrorists in their midst. They're just
not sure who they are. Absurd, as it may seem, if talk shows and
media commentaries are any indication, the most likely
candidates in most Indonesians' minds are the U.S. government
and the Indonesian army. Al-Qaeda is a distant third.
Only these three, the thinking goes, have the expertise, the
contacts, and the motivation to carry out an attack on the scale
of the Bali attack.
The first theory, which has gained wide currency and not just
among conservative Muslims, goes like this: The U.S. embassy
issued a warning to its citizens to avoid public places in
Indonesia twelve hours before the explosion. The C.I.A. picked a
place that few Americans frequented. It supplied the materials
for the bomb. It then tried to blame al-Qaeda and radical Islam
in an effort to win support for a war against Iraq, and offered
to help with the investigation as a way of infiltrating American
troops into Indonesia so they can eventually establish a new
foothold in Southeast Asia.
The second theory, particularly prevalent among Indonesians
who live in conflict areas, suggests that the Indonesian
military (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, TNI) is the culprit. The
TNI has been trying since the fall of Soeharto to reassert its
role in government by provoking conflict and then coming in to
establish order, proponents of this theory assert. Look how the
army backed the creation of Laskar Jihad, the armed militia in
the Moluccas, they say, or at the involvement of the army
special forces in the death of Papuan independence leader Theys
Eluay. The struggle between the army and police for control of
internal security has become increasingly bitter and violent in
the last year, and a blast on the scale of Bali could swing
support in favour of the army. Acehnese and Papuan activists are
convinced that the new anti-terror decree will be used primarily
against them.
The al-Qaeda theory seems to have a much smaller number of
supporters for several reasons. The relentless U.S. pressure on
the Indonesian government to act against Indonesian nationals
linked to the shadowy Jemaah Islamiyyah network appears to have
convinced many Indonesians that their own security agencies
would be forced to accept the U.S. version of events. Thus when
an Indonesian team returned from interviewing Umar al-Faruq, the
man arrested in West Java in June this year whose startling
revelations, leaked by U.S. intelligence sources to Time
magazine, included a plot to kill Megawati, there was little
surprise that the team's information confirmed the details in
the Time article.
Likewise, many members of the liberal intelligentsia in
Jakarta are worried about the arrest of Abu Bakar Ba'asyir,
named by al-Faruq as a key figure in a series of bombings in
Indonesia and as a close associate of Hambali, the Indonesian
considered a top operative of al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia.
"All the evidence against Ba'asyir comes from people in
detention," one journalist told me. "We know all about
forced confessions in this country. Why should we believe any of
it?"
Another man is willing to believe in an al-Qaeda presence in
Indonesia but not in its involvement in the Bali bombing.
"Why would al-Qaeda want to blow up Bali?" an
Indonesian friend with an American PhD asked me. "They had
a safe haven here at a time when things were too hot for them in
Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Why wreck it all in
this way?"
The two sides of the popular Indonesian response - acceptance
of a terrorism problem but scepticism about al-Qaeda - present
some serious policy dilemmas for the Megawati government.
It will be politically difficult to use the anti-terror
decree to round up terror suspects unless it can present strong
evidence to the Indonesian public of their likely culpability,
and yet it will be under continued pressure from Western
governments, particularly the U.S. and Australia, to demonstrate
determination to combat terror. The easiest way to prove
determination is to make arrests; the danger is that the arrests
could become, or be seen as, arbitrary.
The pressure for quick results is already leading to a
restructuring of intelligence agencies. Better coordination
between the police and military is highly desirable, especially
with contradictory statements coming out of the two nearly every
day. (On Friday morning, an army special forces spokesman
announced that the identities of the bombers had been
determined, whereas a police spokesman in Bali said the
perpetrators were still unknown.) The danger is that the army
will take the lead role and undermine all the work that has been
done in the last three years to build up the police as a
civilian agency responsible for internal security. The more the
army benefits, the more the theory that the TNI was somehow
involved in the bombings in the first place will gain credence -
and the more the scepticism about an al-Qaeda role will grow.
As long as many Indonesians believe the U.S. was responsible,
there will be no incentive for radical Muslims attracted to
Ba'asyir-style teachings to disassociate themselves from
jihadist views. The horror at the casualties in Bali is deep,
and if it could be conclusively proven that a few Indonesian
Muslims were involved, condemnation of those individuals and
what they stand for would follow. But Western pressure on
Indonesia for results just deepens the conspiracy theory and
makes acceptance of Indonesian involvement all the more
difficult.
The presence of so many foreign police and intelligence
specialists helping with the investigation in Bali has been
received thus far with more gratitude than suspicion, but the
mood could easily shift. A war in Iraq in particular could
ignite all the nationalist fears that in fact, the Bali bombing
was only the precursor to serving a larger U.S. agenda. Before
Bali, the backlash in Indonesia of a war in Iraq was probably
manageable. Now, it could be much worse.
· Sidney Jones is Indonesia Project Director,
International Crisis Group
