November 20, 2002
AN elaborate purification ritual may have exorcised some of Bali's demons, but the killers still to face justice there are monsters on the loose. In Kuta, ERIC ELLIS talks to the policeman heading the investigation and examines the secretive world of 'Indonesia's Arabs."
INDONESIA’S President Megawati Sukarnoputri couldn’t find room in her diary to make the short 90 minute hop from Jakarta to Bali for last Friday’s Hindu cleansing ritual at Ground Zero Kuta, scene of her country’s gravest terror attack.
But Len and Pauline Neill, and 60,000 others from 20 nations did, the Neills trekking from Sydney’s southern suburbs to the ruins of the Sari Club another country away where their 29 year-old daughter Charmaine died on October 12.
And unlike the reclusive leader of what is now probably the world’s most dysfunctional nation – witness last Saturday’s Jakarta Post front page headline ‘Indonesia Mentally Ill: Experts’ - the 60-something Neills made the trip with quiet dignity; sometimes sobbing, most times comforting each other beneath a blistering midday sun.
As victims’ relatives, the Neills were entitled to sit shaded under the bamboo canopy Indonesian officials erected on Jalan Legian for VIPs like Megawati's millionaire husband Taufik Kiemas, who has business interests in Bali, to watch in relative comfort the moving three hour Pemarisudha Karipubhaya ceremony intended to “cleanse the danger of outside enemies”.
But instead the Neills chose to perch precariously on tangled rubble bulldozed into makeshift grandstands as Bali’s highest Hindu priests in white and gold robes exorcised the bombsite with holy water, prayers, trances and the sacrificing of 79 animals.
“They still haven’t found her yet,” Mrs Neill sobbed for Charmaine, who’d come to Bali to get over a broken engagement. “But she would have loved this.”
Secured by 5,000 police and soldiers, Jalan Legian was sprinkled with red and yellow petals, the almost unbreathable air choking with incense, and filled with gamelan music. Impromptu shrines ringed the gaping crater left by the alleged bomber Amrozi’s white Mitsubishi van; a montage of Southport footballer Billy Hardy’s 20 year life, a surf ski, oranges, a Snickers bar, a can of VB and a packet of Marlboro Lights, a Carlton Football Club beanie, a Sturt FC scarf, bananas, a ham sandwich, Smarties.
For a kilometre either side of the site, rows of chanting Hindus sat on the bitumen, raising arms in prayer, some limbs horribly burned and disfigured. Just a few metres away from where the Neills clung to the shifting debris, a man in a trance went into convulsions, his body contorted as priests spattered the blood of a freshly-killed buffalo on him.
But this was no funeral. As one Canadian onlooker put it, “the Balinese give good temple.” And they did, one of the most elaborate ceremonies ever performed on the island; devised to cleanse the scene and bring people back into a once thronging prescinct where surfshops, bars and restaurants are now boarded up.
The rituals seemed solemn, but the occasion was upbeat, a day for moving forward. Young girls in saffron sarongs danced while local storytellers told ancient tales about good overcoming evil. A sign draped over a blackened pylon in English and Bahasa Indonesia read “Bali Loves Peace. We Start Again.”
“We didn’t expect this many people,” said Made Suadika, a 28 year-old entrepreneur who owns the now devastated Hotel Sri Kusuma just 200m west of the blast’s epicentre. “"The world feels Bali's tears and will pray for Bali," the island’s Governor Dewa Baratha told the crowd.
The Balinese regard their spiritualism very seriously. In front of Paddy's Bar, where about 40 people died, worshippers pored over a small temple. The buildings surrounding the temple had been razed but the temple, despite being in the direct impact zone of the two massive bombs, was somehow intact. Indeed, it was barely scratched, tiny grassblades still growing from its grooves. “Asli! Asli!” young Hindus ululated, “(Its) Original! Original!”
BALINESE are also making much of the faith of Major-General I Made Mangku Pastika, the 51 year-old Balinese father-of-two leading the 200-strong international police investigation into the bombings. In the frenetic days after the bombing, the Australian-trained Pastika toured Bali’s holiest of temples in a simple sarong and udeng, a Balinese male’s ceremonial head-dress, seeking enlightenment and strength for the difficult task ahead.
It seems to have helped, - painstaking policing unearthed a fragment of the destroyed Mitsubishi chassis, that revealed an altered serial number, that led to Amrozi’s ownership, his arrest and the still tenuous link to his former teacher, the Islamist cleric Abu Bakr Bashir and, in turn, Bashir’s alleged stewardship of Jemaah Islamiah and its links to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda.
By Indonesia’s quixotic law enforcement standards, the Amrozi breathrough and the identification of 10 accomplices, is remarkable work. "I fully understand some people don’t believe what we have reached in a very short time.” he told The Bulletin. As the investigation progresses, Pastika has emerged as Bali’s Rudolph Guiliani figure, the safe hand who’s providing Indonesians some of the assurances that the remote Megawati seems unable, and perhaps unwilling, to give.
If Amrozi is not a key player in the bomb plot - as many Indonesians believe - then it’s a very elaborate ruse indeed. Pastika insists the evidence – and his confession – assures that he is. Several times a day, live on state television, an unruffled Pastika, fluent in six languages, patiently explains the latest twists and turns. He talks at least three times a day to his on-the-ground counterparts from Australia, Britain, Germany and the U.S, who rate him highly.
“We have our men working 24 hours a day. We don’t have any weekends, just hundreds of people working all across Indonesia.” He’s proud of his team. “I have the very best people for this investigation. I could choose the people from all of Indonesia. They have done very well.”
“We are building this case from the ground up. I always base my investigation from the crime scene, from the evidence, from the witnesses. The only thing we have based this investigation on is facts, simple facts and we test these things through scientific crime investigation. There is no other influence."
For the fewer and fewer Indonesians who still dare to believe that their country might yet emerge through the Suharto transition, the economic collapse, the endemic corruption and the instability of four presidents in five years as a moderate, democratic regional power, Pastika is regarded as their country’s best hope, and possibly their last. Says Denpasar housewife Komang Suwini “I feel safer with Pak (Father) Made in charge.”
But Pastika might also be Indonesia’s Giovanni Falcone, the straight-from-Central-Casting truthseeker in a judicial system Indonesians only half-joke is the best money can buy. The Falcone comparison is perhaps poignant for Italy's top anti-Mafia prosecutor was killed by a retaliatory carbomb in 1992 as he closed in on the Cosa Nostra. There are many lurking in Indonesia’s shadows who’d like Pastika similarly erased from the national picture.
One of Indonesia’s top cops, Pastika has two bodyguards but says personal security does not worry him. "I’m not that brave actually but I believe in God. When he wants to take me, he will take.”
“As long as I work sincerely and work on the side of the truth, God will protect me. I have a very strong belief in him. That’s very simple, that's all I can do for the country.
“I just do what I think is right, what is the truth. I just do my job professionally. Some people say I don't understand politics. Yes, I agree. Some people despise me because as a general I don't understand politics ... I just do my job."
An Interpol veteran, and a former United Nations security official who protected Namibian leader Sam Nujoma – “I was the special commander for black and coloured” - during that country’s violent transition to independence from South Africa in 1990, Pastika has angered many. He was instrumental in putting Suharto crony-in-chief Bob Hasan behind bars while head of the police’s economic crimes unit. He then headed Indonesia’s police liaison unit during the 1999 East Timor independence referendum, later pursuing the notorious militia leader Eurico Guterres. He then engineered Indonesia’s capture of the militia killers of three United Nations workers in West Timor in 2000, and of New Zealand soldier Leonard Manning’s murderer.
But before Bali, it was Pastika's work in Indonesia’s restive West Papua region, the closest Indonesian province to Australia, that most discomfitted powerful people, particularly in the Tentara Nasional Indonesia, the country’s military.
Pastika like to say his time in Jayapura was quiet. “I learnt to play golf quite well because there wasn’t much to do,” he says. But he’s being disingenuous. An East Timor-in-waiting, West Papua has been anything but quiet in recent years. In November last year, Papuan independence leader Theys Eluay was assassinated, most likely by the TNI’s elite Kopassus special forces unit (Pastika diplomatically says some soldiers are suspects). And on August 31 this year, three employees of the American mining giant Freeport McMoran - two Americans and a Papuan - were murdered near the mine in an ambush also linked to the military.
Kopassus has vigorously denied involvement in both killings, the investigations of which have now been taken over by the TNI, on the technical grounds that West Papua is now under military supervision. Pastika, who is no longer directly involved with the still unsolved matters, chooses his words carefully.
“I explained to them (the TNI) our findings. It depends on them. We cannot go further. If we want to make an investigation, we have to investigate the military personnel and we (police) don’t have the jurisdiction to do that – that is the problem. That’s where the case is now.”
The Bali case doesn’t involve the military, at least not yet anyway. But it does another potent force in Indonesia – Islam. Adds an Australian official, “if Pastika is removed from this (Bali) case, you will know that we are in trouble.”
Pastika says he hasn’t nailed a direct, causal link to the cleric Bashir over the bombing and he refuses to cast any stones ‘without solid evidence.’ But detectives say one group under discreet investigation and surveillance is Indonesia’s Hadrami community, the so-called “Indonesian Arabs,” named for the oil-rich Hadramout region of south-eastern Yemen of their provenance.
The Hadrami diaspora number about five million across Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia and, with some Hadrami clans claiming direct lineage to the Prophet Mohamed, helped import and secure Islam in the mostly ethnic Malay region from the 15th century.
Discreetly influential, the Hadrami presence in Indonesia is deep and ethnically complex. While officially Indonesian, their relationship with the archipalego’s indigenous pribumi is likened to that between South American indigenous community and the white descendants of Spanish and Portuguese colonists.
Their impact in South-East Asia has been been profound. Even today, Hadramis occupy important posts. Suharto’s former foreign minister Ali Alatas has an Hadrami background, as does Malaysia’s current foreign minister Syed Hamid Albar. Though eclipsed in wealth in recent decades by the overseas Chinese, Hadrami families were among some of the richest in Indonesia, owning large tracts of Jakarta’s upmarket Menteng enclave and, for a time, Singapore’s storied Raffles Hotel.
But its the Yemeni links that interest investigators. Militant Hadramis are believed to have been instrumental for radicalising and financing otherwise moderate Indonesian Muslims struggling through the country’s economic collapse, particularly in Aceh. The Yemeni connections to militant Islam across the archipalego are striking. Jaffar Umar Talib, the commander of the Laskar Jihad waging religious war on Christians in Maluku, has an Hadrami background. Though born in East Java, the cleric Abu Bakr Bashir is of Hadrami descent as, detectives believe, are many adherents of Jemaah Islamiah and the mirror Indonesian Mujahadeen Council.
And so too is Osama bin Laden, whose father emigrated to Saudi Arabia in the 1920’s from the Hadramout’s religious centre, Tarim. Last week, after a CIA drone killed six Al-Qaeda members, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh offered a Ramadan amnesty for Yemenis “entangled” in al-Qaeda. Little wonder then that Bali’s investigators want to know more about the Hadrami clans.
THERE’S an old operating adage about Indonesia, and South-East Asia generally. Its expressed in various ways - crude to academic - but it boils down to this; don’t assume a conspiracy when ineptitude is most likely the reason.
It sounds cynical, patronising even to the politically correct, but experience navigating this unpredictable country bears out a truth that might assuage angry Australians during these difficult times of laughing bombers, ambiguous leadership, cautious diplomacy and mixed messages.
It helps explain why people like Amrozi are interrogated before the world’s press by the country’s police chief, Pastika’s lesser-known boss Da’i Bachtiar. And possibly why Megawati didn’t make Bali last Friday, and why this odd woman is even president of one of the world’s most important countries, Islam's biggest. And why Indonesia consistently confounds those who try to understand her.
And right now, as Indonesia lurches from crisis to crisis and terrorists run free to kill again, its probably about the best explanation we can hope for.