October 5, 2005

Hard-wired for hate

Indonesia’s suicide bombers are not fervent assassins but desperate boys from impoverished, communities, preyed on by the real murderers. Eric Ellis reports

A $100 note is often all it takes to ensure a successful bombing in Indonesia. First come the promises of virgins in heaven, and the opportunity to be forever honoured as an Islamist martyr. The chance to strike back at the putrid foreigners and their lackeys.

But a "C-note" - with perhaps a trendy mobile phone thrown in - is often the icing on the cake for Jemaah Islamiyah’s recruiters to persuade an impoverished Sundanese-Javanese-Madurese (insert any stricken region of Indonesia, and there are many) to don a backpack, breach a security cordon with a well-placed backhander and kill. Himself. And whoever randomly happens to be there, like 26 unaware beachside seafood lovers.

No matter how many times Indonesia says it is cracking down on terror, here’s the bad news. It’s not. Clearly.

Sure, Indonesia has arrested a few bad guys from this hydra-headed monster. And sure, the average hotel or public building in Bali and Jakarta has two to three layers of security around it, with musclemen in blue uniforms checking beneath cars for bombs. But those guys aren’t cops or soldiers - it wouldn’t matter if they were. And while most of them are probably honest, on a salary of $50 a month it only takes a well-placed banknote slipped by an Azahari 'The Demolition Man' Husin or his cronies to slip the cordon. Sad. But that's how it is.

And here’s more bad news. The desperate economic circumstances combined with an Islamic fundamentalist fervour that drove Arnasan, the West Javanese teenager who exploded himself in front of hundreds of Australian partygoers three years ago on Jalan Legian - and whose kindred brother detonated himself on the sands of Jimbaran last Saturday - are only going to get worse.

As the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings showed, Asia’s Islamic fundamentalists have uncovered a rich recruiting ground among Indonesia's poor and uneducated.

I met Arnasan’s family in the weeks after the 2002 Sari Club outrage. They lived in a shack the size of the average Western bathroom. They ate from the yield of a single over-farmed rice paddy they shared with a neighbour in similarly straitened circumstances. Though born into modern Indonesia’s existence as a nation, his parents could not speak the national language, Bahasa Indonesia. They spoke Sundanese, the patois of the paddy, their universe. They were so poor they could not afford the few rupiah it cost to get the most basic state education, which would’ve at least given them Bahasa. And a chance.

So when Bali 2002's dashing mastermind Imam Samudra came along, with his English and Arabic, his gripping stories of time in Osama bin Laden’s Afghan training camps and promises of nubile virgins, Arnasan was hooked. Samudra’s obscene strain of Islam offered paradise. Samudra picked his low-hanging fruit and trained Arnasan to become Iqbal - South-East Asia’s first suicide bomber, who murderously destroyed Paddy’s Bar and 202 lives, including his own.

Bali is an easy target for Islamic terrorists. Their thinking is that because the island is largely Hindu and frequented by thousands of affluent tourists, they limit the collateral damage to fellow Muslims. You can hardly call it logic. When the Indonesian economy collapsed in 1998, the Balinese tourism trade was one of few things in the region to continue to flourish. With no jobs available in Java, Muslims, too, turned to Bali for work. And so they occupy shelves in the Denpasar morgue, alongside Hindus, Westerners and other innocents.

I’m sure that when the forensic scientists have spent their weeks combing through Jimbaran’s bloodied sands, they’ll piece together a similar tragic Indonesian story to Arnasan's: of a family in Sumatra, perhaps, who haven’t seen their beloved son for months, of the debonair Malaysian who befriended him. And the one after that. And the one after that.

They’ll think, as Arnasan’s parents did, that when a posse of well-dressed bule (foreigners) arrive in their paddy they are bringing news of their boy. They’ll be horrified that he’s dead, killed himself in the cause of Islam in an event far away in their own country, that they had not heard of happening, news not being as important to them as scrounging for food.

And why can we expect more attacks? The day before peaceful Jimbaran was turned into Beach Zero by religious zealotry, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono - he’s the concerned avuncular looking one with the furrowed brow and strong rhetoric - more than doubled the average cost of fuel across his troubled archipelago, which happens to be a member of OPEC but which is squandering its oil bonanza.

That’s fuel not so much for the luxury of a car or even a motorbike that most Indonesians don’t have, but the kerosene to fire the average shanty’s kitchen, to eat, to live. Indonesians can’t afford the luxury of a national debate as to whether a Gold Coast party girl or an Adelaide underwear model are drug addicts. They are too busy surviving. Jakarta’s 200% price increase on kero, which doubtless pleased bean-counters in air-conditioned locations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, Washington and Canberra, sent thousands of people onto the streets in protest last week. Its a shame, and perhaps revealing, that unlike the Spanish last year after Madrid and the British after the London attacks last July, Indonesians were not similarly agitated to swell onto the streets to protest the terror that plagues and reduces their country.

The movement for terrorism to be stopped in Indonesia needs to start at the doors of the Istana Merdeka in Jakarta, the sprawling Dutch colonial palace where Indonesia’s presidents live and work.

Indonesia is the world’s biggest Islamic nation. It says it practises moderate Islam, but the world too often now sees little evidence of that. Instead, because of weak-willed politicians, it is seen as unable to condemn its most public of Islamists, Jemaah Islamiyah mastermind Abu Bakar Bashir, who has urged the faithful to nuke the unbelievers. Indeed, the state reduced the already modest sentence it handed to him for his role in Bali and myriad other outrages JI and friends have perpetrated, many of them long before 9/11 and Iraq.

A good Muslim, President Yudhoyono stands poised to lead that moderate nation. Time for action from Indonesia’s leaders, religious and political, against the enemies of Islam is long overdue. Instead of talking tough, it’s time to actually get tough. Shut down the schools that spruik the rantings of Bashir. Introduce harsher penalties and back it up with a judicial system that knows it has the support of government. Deny them the oxygen of publicity. Seek out the fundamentalists root and branch. Convince - and urge - the scholarly moderate groups like Muhammadiyah and Nadhlatul Ulama to issue fatwas against the enemies of Islam.

Western politicians, including John Howard, say terrorist attacks like those in Bali are attacks on democracy. But the real challenge now, particularly for Indonesia, is to reduce the politics within Islam, for leaders to stop playing political footsies with the extremists and their proxies, to stop giving them succour. Only then might the body count be lowered.

Saddened towns like Newcastle, Forbes and Busselton demand nothing less.

Eric Ellis won a Walkley Award for his coverage of the 2002 Bali bombings.