Al-Ahram Weekly | International | Connecting the dots

		21 - 27 November 2002 Issue No. 613 International	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Connecting the dots
In the wake of last month's terrorist attack in Bali, are links to Al-Qa'eda being uncovered -- or contrived? Nyier Abdou finds Indonesia stuck between a rock and a hard place

When a car bomb blasted into the Sari nightclub on Indonesia's resort island of Bali on 12 October, more than 190 people, mostly Australian tourists, were killed. More than a month later, it is clear that these were the first casualties in the prolonged tragic aftermath of the terrorist attack. Almost simultaneously eliminated was Bali's thriving tourism industry, but shortly after, Indonesia's fledgling democracy began to take a few blows.
In the four and a half years since the abrupt departure of long-time dictator Suharto, Indonesia has had three presidents and grappled with the flaring up of ongoing separatist violence. While few are nostalgic for Suharto's iron-fisted rule, the relative stability it engendered is palpably absent. After the World Trade Center attacks, the US stepped up its calls for the Indonesian leadership to crack down on Islamic militants amidst fears that Southeast Asia was primed to become the new breeding ground for the Al-Qa'eda terrorist network. But Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri has tread carefully in this regard, since it is obviously unpopular locally to be seen as cowing to the West or targeting Islamic groups in the world's most populous Muslim country.
The days of Suharto are still fresh in the minds of Indonesians and invasive government is a sensitive matter. But since the Bali bombing, Indonesia has found itself caught between placating the West by showing it is aggressively pursuing militants and staving off local resentment. Days after the attack, the cabinet issued tough new anti- terrorism regulation which allows the government to detain suspects without trial. Although this legislation still needs to be passed by Parliament to be anything but temporary, speculation is already rife that the military and intelligence could regain their former notoriousness.
United States Secretary of State Colin Powell called the Bali bombing "Australia's 9/11", but this brazenly marginalises the devastating effect the bombing has had on Indonesia, not to mention the suffering of Balinese victims. Aside from shattering the idyllic calm of Bali, the attack has once again swung Indonesia into international focus as a possible terrorist "haven", and as the leadership scrambles to temper the damage from so perilous a label, ambiguity seeps into the cracks. Is the militant Jamaah Islamiyah -- widely believed to have perpetrated the Bali bombing -- the "Southeast Asian branch of Al-Qa'eda"? Is Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, the group's spiritual leader arrested under the new anti-terror decree, the "Asian Osama Bin Laden"? Are there plans to unify militant Islamic organisations in Indonesia, Malaysia and the southern Philippines and establish a sweeping caliphate?
A fact sheet on terrorism focusing on Indonesia by the New York-based Council of Foreign Relations states as its first question: "Is Indonesia a haven for terrorists?" The first word after this is "Yes." The CFR points to the porous borders of the archipelago, the weak central government, endemic corruption and militant separatist movements as prime factors in this assessment. But Harold Crouch, a professor with the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra and an Indonesia expert, warns that to brand Indonesia a terrorist "haven" is going too far. While worries about open borders and corruption are valid, he notes, it is also important to be more realistic about the groups involved. Far from being a formal organisation, Jamaah Islamiyah is a small group that has been working together for decades, he says. "It looks as if they have cooperated with Al-Qa'eda, but it is not obvious that they are just a branch of Al-Qa'eda and take their orders from Al-Qa'eda."
"It has become increasingly clear that in the past some Al-Qa'eda people have been slipping in and out of Indonesia, and also [the] Philippines and Malaysia," Crouch told Al-Ahram Weekly. "But the numbers don't seem to have been particularly high. The Indonesian security services are not really as hopeless as they sometimes seem. While small numbers might have been tolerated, the influx of large numbers of Al- Qa'eda members would ring alarm bells. The Indonesian government has no interest in allowing a foreign terrorist organisation to strengthen indigenous Islamic terrorism."
Sheldon Simon, chairman of Southeast Asian studies at the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle and an analyst specialising in Asian security, is equally sceptical of the ties to Al- Qa'eda. "If the question is 'Has there been extra- governmental violence in Indonesia post- Suharto?' the answer is, indeed, yes," Simon told the Weekly. Because Suharto repressed all dissent, his fall and the advent of democracy allowed repressed forces to "explode", says Simon. But whether there is a direct link to Al- Qa'eda -- "I think that assertion is yet to be proven," he says.
Simon maintains that there are "undoubtedly" transnational links among Islamic extremist groups in Southeast Asia and "sufficient evidence" to indicate that terrorists in Indonesia and the Philippines have received explosives training. "Some of these jihadists may have spent some time in Afghanistan, but whether they are instruments of Al-Qa'eda per se has not been established," he says.
Simon goes on to point out that this by no means makes them any less dangerous, and this touches at the crux of the issue. Until recently, Indonesia was unwilling to admit the possibility that Al-Qa'eda was active in the country, but now officials are at pains to show that the link to Al-Qa'eda is explicit. What has changed is Bali.
Before Bali, Indonesia resented the US for painting the region as the new Al-Qa'eda hotspot and chafed at the extrapolation from a small number of militant organisations to a hive of Al- Qa'eda operatives laying wait in "sleeper cells". But after Bali, the Indonesian leadership seems to have seized on the idea of a foreign infiltration of a powerful organisation, thus lessening the burden of responsibility for the attack, and shifting some of the weight onto the global "war on terrorism". Ultimately, there is something to be gained by branding terrorist groups "Al-Qa'eda", instead of simply a home-grown threat. But to do so may be to impede a constructive answer to that threat.
Targeting Islamic fundamentalism with harsh anti-terrorism laws may be temporarily effective, but, as with Suharto's regime, it may only last as long as the repressive techniques. "Part of the problem of radical Islamic violence in Indonesia is a result of the crackdown by Suharto in the 1980s," says the ANU's Crouch. In fact, he says, Islamic fundamentalism is "not a big problem" in Indonesia, with only a "tiny number" of fundamentalist organisations involved in violence. "I have always believed that the government could easily crack down on violent radical groups provided that it had sufficient evidence. The danger is that it might also crack down on ordinary fundamentalists who want an Islamic state but are otherwise quite law-abiding. That could cause a backlash." But Crouch adds that even then the fundamentalist constituency is only around 15 per cent. "The easiest way to cope with the fundamentalists is to put a few of them in the cabinet --which is what the Indonesian government has done under three presidents."
Asian security expert Simon concedes that the US has indirectly bolstered Al-Qa'eda's influence by assigning it so much power, but adds that a declaration of war on Al-Qa'eda was "essential" to obtain worldwide support for the US's efforts to eradicate terrorism. "It is clear that global cooperation is essential in suppressing this movement," says Simon. "Having said that, however, one must still acknowledge that suppression is not sufficient in dealing with the root causes of terror which, I believe, are a product of despair in much of the Arab world with respect to its political and economic future. Moreover, insofar, as the United States is seen as unilaterally attacking Muslim movements -- albeit extremist -- these actions will be used by those same extremists as a recruiting device for the next generation of terrorists. So, there is a kind of unending cycle in the current manner in which the West is dealing with the terrorist challenge."
Making the argument against Southeast Asia as a breeding ground for terrorism has become more difficult since Bali, but there could be a crucial misinterpretation -- that of an unambiguous link to Al-Qa'eda -- at work. Indonesia has a long and brutal history of militant resistance and terrorism throughout the archipelago. Whether the perpetrators of Bali were Al-Qa'eda or not in no way changes the depth of the tragedy or the reality of the danger of more attacks. What it does change is how they are dealt with.
A report broadcast on BBC by reporter Jane Corbin suggested in a broadcast that "We are discovering that Al-Qa'eda is not an army, nor even an organisation, but that most powerful and dangerous creature: a movement." While the loose, de-centralised nature of Al-Qa'eda and its dependence on a rhetoric of anti-Western sentiment does lend itself to this analysis, it could also be a dangerously self-fulfilling prophesy. To invest so much presumed power in Bin Laden and his organisation is to encourage smaller, unrelated militant groups to believe in that power -- to emulate it. By painting Al-Qa'eda as omnipresent and growing -- so potent a threat that the world's most powerful nation must summon all its resources to pursue it -- Western powers may in fact be digging their own graves.

Send a letter to the Editor Recommend this page Print-friendly