Bombers didn’t need al-Qaeda

by Jason Burke

It is tempting to see the bombs in Bali yesterday as part of the wave of attacks launched by the supposedly still omnipresent al-Qaeda. But Islamic militancy in Indonesia, and in the Far East generally, is not new. It certanly far pre-dates Osama bin Laden.

Islam was a rallying flag for resistance to Dutch colonisation in the 17th century. Frequent suicide attacks involved young men charging headlong into the enemy ranks to kill as many as possible before being ’martyred’.

After the Second World War, cells of radical Indonesian Muslims again fought to free their nation from Dutch control. Their aim was to create a Dar ul Islam, or Land of Islam, where strict Islamic orthodoxy would be enforced. Over the next 30 years Indonesian militants struck against central governments and were used by it to combat communists.

Even after democracy arrived in 1998, powerful interests in politics or the army used jihadis for their own aims. The new democratic government treated the militants carefully.

The Bali bombs of October 2002 which killed more than 200 people, many of them Australian and Western tourists, brought home to Jakarta how, following the spread of new Middle Eastern strains of radicalism through the Nineties and after 9/11, militant activity was a major threat.

Since then, under US pressure, there have been a series of crackdowns. All those responsible for those Bali bombs are in prison in Indonesia or held in secret locations by the Americans. Most radical local leaders have been rounded up.

So why has it happened again? And who is behind yesterday’s murderous attacks? The first Bali bombs offer clues. Then the plotters were recruited locally, a self-forming autonomous cell. They received some assistance from overseas, mainly cash, but did almost everything else themselves.

Now it is almost inconceivable that yesterday’s bombers could have been acting as part of some grand, co-ordinated strategy by a South East Asian group, let alone on the orders of someone up a mountain in Afghanistan. But the most important lesson of the previous Bali bombing comes from the target, chosen by the militants themselves. The tourist nightclubs they hit were obvious and vulnerable. Others were more emotional. As local people, the bombers were denied entry to the clubs, which they apparently resented. The clubs and the tourists were seen as alien intruders - ’dirty people’, one bomber said, and brazen about their ’adulterous practices’. In the bombers’ minds the attacks were a blow against moral pollution and a step to creating a Dar ul Islam.

The latest attacks will be born of the same feelings, probably fused with anti-Western, anti-Semitic nihilism. They show again that killing militants or jailing them can only be a short-term solution. They also demonstrate the fundamental moderation of most of the 270 million Indonesians, who have little sympathy for the killers in their midst.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1583070,00.html