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.