Bali: Who Stands to Gain from the Maiming of Indonesia?

Farish A. Noor
10:30am 17 Oktober 2005

Hardly a week has gone by after the bombings that took place in the Indonesian island resort of Bali, but already it appears as if the world’s media and the doyens of international affairs have made up their minds over the question of who was guilty, and more importantly why.

Four years after the events of 11 September 2001, it appears that we are none the wiser and the world has become a more dangerous place for ordinary people; the generation of consensus proceeds in earnest and shows no signs of abating in the near future. An enemy is in the making, and that enemy it seems has a name: Islam.

In scenes reminiscent of the hysteria and orgy of finger-pointing that occurred barely twenty-four hours after the Oklahoma bombing incident of 1995, a host of self-proclaimed ‘experts’ have come to the fore to grace our television screens and newspaper pages to inform us that – despite the obvious absence of concrete, irrefutable evidence – those responsible for the recent Bali attacks were ‘most probably’ members of the nebulous ‘Jama’ah Islamiyyah’ group.

From high-profile media-savvy pundits holed up in Singapore to previously unheard of academics based in London, the song remains the same. The thesis, if one could call it that, is simple enough: These Indonesian Muslim radicals want an Islamic state; they hate the West, all things Western and Westerners in toto; they hate Bali because Bali is somehow more ‘pro-Western’ than the rest of Indonesia; and they hate Bali because it happens to be predominantly Hindu. It follows from this thinly spread layer of platitudes and cliches that the Jama’ah Islamiyyah group could only have sprung from within the bowels of Indonesia herself, and that it is they who are guilty.

Should anyone care to spend more than two precious minutes to dissect the logic of this clumsy suite of assumptions, the argument begins to fall apart faster than one can stand it up:

For a start, any ‘hatred’ towards the ‘West’ today stems more from the foreign policies of some Western governments rather than the West per se. Nowhere in the discourse of even the most radical religio-fundamentalist group have we come across blanket condemnations of all things western, and indeed upon closer examination it is clear that many of these groups happen to admire the material, economic and educational advances of the Western world more than anything else. Anger at the foreign policies of the United States of America and its allies – notably Britain and Australia – should not be confused and conflated with generic anti-Westernism for the sake of a convenient argument; unless a convenient argument is precisely what the media pundits yearn for, which increasingly seems to be the case here.

Secondly the anger towards the major Western powers, primarily America, is certainly not the exclusive monopoly of Muslims. A cursory overview of the state of global affairs today would show that such feelings are widely shared and held by millions of ordinary people from all over the world, from Latin America to the Far East. America’s flaunting of global norms of conduct, its pollution of the global environment and its steadfast insistence that it should go on consuming and polluting more than any nations its size has angered environmentalists, anti-globalisation movements, NGOs, intellectuals, citizens groups from Brazil to Japan. So we need not jump to the conclusion that whenever there is a bomb going off somewhere in the world it is the immediate result of Muslims losing their temper for whatever reason, surely.

Thirdly, the so-called ‘terrorism experts’ who have thus far opined in a singular direction have failed to take into account the very real factors that dominate Indonesian politics today: Indonesia remains under the grip of a powerful pro-Western (or rather pro-American) elite who remain closely connected to the forces of global capital and who remain strongly supported by the armed forces, as was the case during the dark days of the Soeharto regime. Then, as now, these elites remain aloof, out of touch with reality (cocooned as they are in their fortified enclaves in the elite suburbs of Jakarta), feudal in their political manners and values, and Western-centric in their outlook. The parroting by Indonesia’s President Bambang Yudhoyono may go down well in Washington and serve a nifty soundbite for CNN, but it brings him no closer to the Indonesian people he purports to lead.

Under such circumstances, Indonesia’s current economic hardship (made worse by the recent dramatic rise in domestic oil prices) is bound to lead to instability, but of a local variety where the primary target is the government of Indonesia itself and not the precious lives of Western tourists who are obviously deemed more valuable than Indonesians.

And finally the claim that the attacks on Bali were somehow part of a larger anti-Hindu campaign being waged in the country rings hollow when we consider the affinity and affection with which most Indonesians have for their pre-Islamic past. Hindu monuments dot the Indonesian landscape till today, and should one be on the lookout for Hindu symbols to destroy, then one can begin with Jakarta itself rather than Bali. The Indonesian national airline is called Garuda, named after the winged steed of the Hindu deity Vishnu. Indonesia’s patriotic symbols include the Hindu monkey-God Hanuman and heroes of Hindu epics like Rama and Krishna.

No, the stories we have been fed of late do sound vacuous indeed when we take the facts on the ground into consideration. But this fact remains a certainty nonetheless: the recent bombings in Bali have provided the West with yet another pretext to extend the ‘war on terror’ longer and deeper into the region of Southeast Asia, which has been dubbed the ‘second front’ in this clash of ideologies.

Who, pray tell, stands to benefit from such an outcome? Indonesia’s Islamist opposition movements – who today happen also to be leading the country’s campaign against corruption and who are calling for the restoration of full democracy – or the neo-Con securocrats and strategists of the West?