The latest fashion: Scapegoating Iqbal Widastomo Research Associate School of Politics London School of Economics London

After something terrible has happened, people almost habitually look for someone to blame.

In these difficult times where there is a whole litany of manmade disasters, it is inevitably that such an environment will emerge.

It is often true that those who talk the most really have the least to say. But they may also talk the loudest and thus receive unmerited attention. In the aftermath of the recent sad events in Bali, the calls for action were loudly heard, and the public hue and cry was immense.

The arrest of Abu Bakar Ba'asyir came as a response to terror attacks in Indonesia. Police linked him to earlier bombing incidents but, to many observers in the West, the sight of the arrest of this "aged and frail cleric" had all the appearances of some side-show designed to appease the clamoring mob.

Scapegoats and figureheads to blame do seem to be a quite consistent feature of current world events. After Sept. 11, it was Osama bin Laden. Along with sundry other Afghan-born or based fighters, the world was lead to rather naively concentrate on figureheads for the al-Qaeda and Taliban movements; carelessly forgetting about the hundreds, if not thousands, of operatives and/or sympathizers who represent the greatest threat.

It has been reported that U.S. forces have been specifically assigned to seek out bin Laden but, as a series of his voice recordings suggest, they have yet to (in President George W. Bush's words) "bring him to justice or (have) justice be brought to him."

It seems that resources have been specifically set aside to target that figurehead, that leader. But meantime, equally evil terrorists may be slipping through the intelligence net. The world has already seen just how porous that intelligence net is with America's failure to intercept the Sept. 11 attackers and Indonesian intelligence's struggle to come to grips with the Bali attack.

Certainly, counter-terrorism intelligence is not at all easy to implement, and it may be fair to say that no intelligence agency could have prevented the Sept. 11 nor the Oct. 12 outrages. But an insistent search for scapegoats will only render the efforts to foil the terrorists half-hearted and weak.

America's apparent current obsession with Saddam Hussein also represents the naive pursuit of figureheads of evil. Of course, there could be few more guilty parties of spreading terror and war than Saddam. However, by building him up into a figurehead for enmity and even hatred, America is to a degree also creating a scapegoat. Creating an enemy for its own purposes.

Scapegoats are often created and used to cover up for other purposes or withheld goals. History is riddled with examples of people suffering unjustly because they were molded into scapegoats for the purposes of pariahs or conniving leaders.

In Indonesia, we have seen hundreds of thousands of people fall victim to scapegoating. What happened in the mid-1960s in Indonesia is still not entirely clear, but it is increasingly becoming evident that hundreds of thousands of innocent people fell victim to the anti-Communist purges of 1965 and 1966. As greater clarity emerges about the events of 1965-1966, the involvement of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is becoming more and more apparent.

Now we have the target of global terrorism, but do we have the same scenario that means thousands must suffer and die in the pursuit of this new enemy? Communism proved an illusive enemy and mostly it died a peaceful death; think of the collapse of the Berlin wall. Terrorism is similarly illusive.

By confronting an enemy, often one may harden that enemy and make it more determined and difficult to overcome. By creating figureheads for hatred and scapegoats, we might be cutting the head of a monster off, only to find that the monster has many other heads.

Justice demands that identifiable and guilty parties be punished. Yet we should all consider how we should tackle global terror and hatred. We should all think of our own actions and try to incorporate greater understanding and tolerance so that the prejudices that feed terrorism and extremism do not live on.

Perhaps we share some of the blame. Only by shouldering some of the blame can we truly hope to bring justice, solutions and peace to our world.