Indonesia's Homegrown Extremists

by Andreas Harsono

One Muslim preacher was heard to say on the radio, "We don't have such a powerful bomb. Why no Americans among the victims? Remember the 4,000 Jews who were absent when the World Trade Centers were attacked? The U.S. embassy on Friday asked American citizens not to visit nightclubs and bars in Indonesia. It was obviously a warning that CIA agents were going to hit Bali."

Others said it was a "great design" to break Indonesia apart and to pit the majority Muslims against the minority non-Muslims. The word "rekayasa," which in Bahasa Indonesia literally means "engineering," is widely used in those comments, on the streets and on the air.

Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country, but Bali is a predominantly Hindu enclave. Although many parts of Indonesia were wrecked by ethnic and religious violence since the fall of Suharto in May 1998, Bali remained untroubled and a major tourist attraction.

But isn't it fair to suspect that an underground Muslim group, namely Jemaah Islamiyah, with its spiritual leader Abubakar Ba'asyir, might exist and be involved in terrorist activities?

Ba'asyir, the spiritual leader of the radical fundamentalist Jemaah Islamiyah and head of the Indonesian-based Mujahidin Council for Islamic Law, conducted a press conference in Solo, a city 500 miles south of Jakarta where his operation is headquartered, to charge that the bombing was apparently carried out by "American agents." He offered no evidence to support the claim.

A spokesman for Ba'asyor said earlier that the Mujahidin Council was not involved in the blast.

Bas'asyir said more than 50 Muslim leaders in Solo had conducted a discussion and concluded that the U.S. consistently tries to back Indonesian Muslims into a corner and labels them terrorists, "including myself," he said.

"America uses whatever means, history has proven, to achieve its own objectives."

"We called on our Muslim brothers in Indonesia to unite, to believe in Allah, and not to be provoked by American terrorism," he said.

In Jakarta, his view is shared by some Muslim leaders, including Nur Wahid Hidayat, the president of the Justice Party, which has some seats in the Indonesian parliament. Hidayat also said at a rally in Jakarta that the bombing must have been done by American agents.

Fauzan al-Anshari, an aide to Ba'asyir and a leader at Ba'asyir's Mujahidin Council for Islamic Law, said that the council is not involved in the bombing. "It's impossible for the Mujahidins to do that as they don't even have a single bullet, moreover a bomb."

Al-Anshari said civilians in Indonesia are prohibited from owning arms, theorizing that the bombing is an effort to pit the Hindus in Bali and the Christians in Manado against the Muslims who enjoy a 90 percent majority in Indonesia.

"We know that terrorism is blamed on the Muslims. Now they created these scenarios," he said.

Singapore has called upon Indonesia to arrest Bas'asyir as a terrorism suspect, but Indonesian authiorities say they have no evidence against him.

But Fathur Rohman al Ghozi, a Ba'asyir student, was arrested in Manila in January with one ton of TNT. His code name was "Mike the Bomber," and his expertise is producing bombs. Agus Dwikarna, another Indonesian Muslim activist, with whom Ba'asyir works with in the shariah (Islamic law) campaign, was arrested in March with two C-4 bombs, also in Manila. Taufik Abdul Halim, a Malaysian citizen close to Ba'asyir's colleague Hambali, who is still on the run, was arrested in August last year for planning to bomb a busload of Christians in Jakarta. And that's not to mention dozens of Singaporean and Malaysian nationals arrested by their governments for their alleged role in the Jemaah Islamiyah campaign. Most of them are connected to Ba'asyir.

Much of the Indonesian media do not link those arrests to Ba'asyir, nor to the Bali bombing. For them, the CIA is a more interesting subject. Responding to the carnage, American ambassador Ralph L. Boyce said only, "It was completely outrageous." He said American intelligence had been warning Indonesia since last December that Al Qaeda terrorists, driven out of Afghanistan, would spread out across Southeast Asia. The U.S. embassy was also closed in September and the travel warning was issued last week exactly because of the warning.

[According to the Oct. 15 New York Times, American officials were urging Indonesians to move against an imminent terror attack, and Indonesians had been studying rekated intelligence data for two days, when the bombing occurred.]

There are some reasons for this public self-denial. Suharto's fall drove Indonesia to enter a complex and difficult period of democratization. Law enforcement officials lost their credibility. Rebellions broke out in several provinces. Instability appeared at many levels of government. New media appeared in the streets.

Many radical Islamic groups freely propagate their views and sow hatred against minority Christians and Westerners. Other groups have set up militias and used violence to achieve their goals, i.e., closing down nightclubs. Many new books are also published to reveal the involvement of American agents in Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s as oart of the bloody covert campaigns to oust the nationalist President Sukarno.

It is easy now to relate the Cold War experience to the current "clash of civilizations." Muslim preachers like Ba'asyir like to cite Harvard University Prof. Samuel Huntington's theory of the post-Cold War conflict between Western civilization and Islam.

Both left-leaning and right-wing activists are also well aware of the injustices that the U.S. government has done in many Third World countries on many issues, ranging from the Middle East to the Kyoto protocol. There is also a crisis of leadership. President Megawati Sukarnoputri is seen to be a passive leader.

Ironically, many other Indonesian leaders have aired odd statements. Vice President Hamzah Haz made headlines in May saying, "There are no terrorists in Indonesia. If they [terrorists] exist, don't arrest any Muslim clerics, arrest me."

Now the trend is more complicated and the self-denial is growing. People believe what they want to believe, just as Walter Lippmann argued in his 1923 book, "Public Opinion," about the power of the "pictures in our heads."

People believe what they want to believe, and the pictures in our heads can be more powerful than reality itself, even when that reality is staring us in the face.

This whole situation makes me feel so terribly sad. People who alleged that the bombing was done by Al Qaeda, like Defense Minister Matori Abdul Jalil, himself a Muslim leader, risk losing their popularity.

Maybe it is true that it is easier to be in the community that stands against an overwhelming power like Suharto than to stand alone against the community consensus. Whether Indonesia's fledgling democracy can survive this period of darkness is still a question mark. Whether Indonesia's newly-freed media can help put a vision and end this period of self-denial also is in question.