March 5, 2003
Indonesian forces have historically sought ties with Islamic groups only to suit their purposes, as Eric Ellis reveals
American spooks and intelligence agencies call it "blowback": that phenomenon when good people go bad and blow back to take out American targets, like the World Trade Center. The Bulletin's investigations of last October's Bali bombings suggest that Indonesia may have experienced its own version of blowback.
No one is suggesting Indonesia's fractious armed forces are responsible for Bali, but there are old military fingerprints and curious connections linked to the bombing of the two nightclubs.
With democratic Indonesia's policefunctions now separated from the military, bombing investigators have been free to pursue inquiries without army influence. And some of the things they have unearthed are revealing. In safe houses used by the bombers, Indonesian military maps and other material, including army-issued weaponry, has been found. Experts investigating other bombings in the archipelago have also uncovered similar links.
In Solo, the central Javanese city where the Islamic fundamentalist Abu Bakr Bashir and his shadowy Jemaah Islamiyah group derives its influence, a donor to Bashir's religious school is reportedly the big local textile company, Sritex, which makes military uniforms for the Indonesian army, as well as for NATO. There are also reported business connections between former ministers of the disgraced Suharto regime, military intelligence officers and senior clerics of the Bashir boarding school.
Many of the links can be traced to Solo, which was a particular theatre of military manipulation during President Suharto's New Order regime from 1965 to 1998. Before Suharto came to power, Solo was a stronghold of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), the answer of the impoverished Javanese masses to the region's aristocratic – and occasionally despotic – heritage. But the PKI's emergence also spooked Java's anti-communist political elite, which actively promoted Islamist groups to counter the PKI's rising influence.
It was a strategy that required a delicate hand. Suharto's coup was right-wing and backed by a military that included many Christians in high-ranking positions who saw themselves as guarantors of state secularism. But for Suharto, who wasn't that religious and whose wife, Tien, was Solo-born, providing arms and other support to Islamic groups helped him remain in power. "He unleashed them when it suited him," says academic and Indonesia specialist Gerry Van Klinken, "and then cracked down when they either got out of hand or when it suited him to do so."
But Abu Bakr Bashir was one true believer who refused to be manipulated. He exiled himself to Malaysia in the mid-1980s, where he ran an Islamic school that police now believe was a training ground for terror. He returned to Solo in late 1998 and developed close links with local hardline Islamic groups. In 1985, the ancient Hindu temples of Borobudur were bombed by Islamist groups. Bali was next on the terror agenda but the plan was foiled when a bomber blew himself up by accident as he was heading to the Hindu island. Suharto jailed the terrorists but many in that group have since been released. Intelligence officials say quite a number of them were present at several JI meetings in Solo over recent years.
The most notorious example of blowback is the September 11 attacks. Osama bin Laden had been a valued ally of Washington in its proxy war with the Soviet Union during the 1980s when the Saudi-born holy warrior led many Islamic mujahideen into battle against Moscow-occupied Afghanistan. Financed by free-flowing greenbacks, directed by American advisers and armed with US-supplied materiel, Afghanistan's "muj" included non-Afghans like bin Laden outraged at the occupation of an Islamic land. The 10-year guerilla war eventually wearied Moscow into ignominious retreat in 1989, an end to a conflict now regarded as Moscow's Vietnam and one that helped trigger the collapse of the USSR