Who lost Indonesia? Too tragic to contemplate

Who lost Indonesia? Too tragic to contemplate

The Asian Wall Street Journal, Hong Kong

Bali is a peaceful, welcoming paradise that since the turn of
the last century has offered a spiritual escape to the Western
traveler. It has now be come synonymous with carnage. The fact
that Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim nation, but
practices a moderate form of the religion and is politically a
democracy, has put this resort island on the front line of the
war on terror.

For all these reasons, it is also too important to lose Bali
and the rest of the country. The terrorists who carried out the
weekend attacks on Bali, turning three crowded restaurants into
blood splattered ruins, taking at least 26 lives and wounding
122, rightly see religious and political tolerance as anathema.
That alone should convince us of how high the stakes are.
Indonesia's government deserves support from throughout the
world, not only well-deserved sympathy but also material help in
tracking down and destroying these killers and their network.

If the choice of Bali as a target, for the second time in two
years, demonstrates what the terrorists abhor, Indonesia's plight
in general illustrates the international nature of the struggle
we're all facing. The attacks bear all the hallmarks of Jamaah
Islamiyah, al-Qaeda's Southeast Asian affiliate. Aside from the
operational guidance it receives from al Qaeda's Middle Eastern
headquarters, JI and its Philippine sister organization Abu
Sayyaf also rely on funding from Arab financiers.

Al-Qaeda's goal is to turn parts or all of the moderate and
mostly democratic countries in the region into a unified
sultanate that adheres closely to the austere Wahhabi form of
Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.

This is all far-fetched enough, but it holds appeal to some
Muslims around the region to whom the present political
boundaries are meaningless. They are a tiny minority, but a
dedicated one that can and does cause havoc. Indonesia's top
antiterror official said yesterday that the two JI operatives who
masterminded Saturday's bombings and earlier ones were
Malaysians.

Indonesia's Maj. Gen. Ansyaad Mbai said Malaysians Azahari bin
Husin and Noordin Mohamed Top were probably also responsible for
the Bali bombing of 2002, which left 202 people dead at a popular
discotheque. The two fugitives were also behind the 2003 J.W.
Marriott blast that killed 12 people in Jakarta and last year's
Australian Embassy bombing in the Indonesian capital, which
killed 10, said Maj. Gen. Mbai.

The desire to maximize the number of Australian victims while
limiting the killing of their Islamic coreligionists may have led
the terrorists to return to Bali, a Jakarta-based terrorism
expert told our colleagues at Dow Jones Newswires.

"They saw the 2002 Bali bombing as their only true success
because it inflicted foreign casualties and the collateral damage
weren't Muslims," Ken Conboy told DJ. This refers to the fact
that though Islam is the majority faith of Indonesia, most
Balinese are Hindu, the religion of much of the archipelago until
Muslim' traders (from India also) converted the people of the
islands to Islam in the 15th century.

To Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Saturday's
60-some odd Indonesian casualties were compatriots who have
fallen victim to an alien and evil ideology, and we doubt that he
will make distinctions between Muslim and Hindu. The former
general, who defeated Islamist candidates in last year's
elections, should also quickly realize that he either targets
these terrorists now or they will target him soon enough.

Indonesia's government has shown more backbone in this fight
since. Yudhoyono's election than under the previous president,
Megawati Soekarnoputri. Last month's sentencing to death of a JI
leader involved in the 2004 Australian Embassy bombing, Iwan
Darmawan, better known as Rois, was a step in the right
direction. But Jakarta should also reconsider the case of JI
chief Abu Bakar Bashir, a 67-year-old cleric who's been given a
30-month prison sentence that is about to expire. The government
is kidding itself if it believes that its softly-softly approach
in this case will win it any domestic peace.

As for Indonesia's friends overseas, it bears repeating that
this gigantic new democracy of 220 million souls dwarfs all other
Islamic nations, especially the mostly repressive tiny kingdoms
of the Arabian peninsula. Mr. Yudhoyono is the first president to
be directly elected, an exercise that speaks for itself. Coming
to this nation's aid with funding, training and intelligence is
now of the essence.

The burden will be taken up mainly by the United States,
Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom, nations that have
already offered their help and who take their international
responsibilities seriously. If this sounds like the coalition of
the willing in Iraq it's because it is. The United Nations still
cannot even agree on a definition for "terrorism" while most of
continental Europe persists in treating this threat as a police
matter. A scenario where we would have to ask the question, "Who
lost Indonesia?" is too tragic to contemplate.