Drawing The Wrong Lessons From Bali
By Patrick Seale
The car-bomb attack which devastated a crowded Bali nightclub last weekend, causing hundreds of dead and wounded, will have terrible consequences. Apart from shattering the already fragile Indonesian economy, it has aroused acute political paranoia in a great arc of countries, from Thailand to the Philippines and Australia.
It follows closely on the killing of a US Marine in Kuwait and a suicide attack by a small boat packed with explosives against a French supertanker, the Linbourg, off the coast of Yemen, exactly two years after a similar attack on a US warship, the USS Cole, in Aden harbour. There have also been other smaller-scale assaults on American and Western targets in Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.
Islamic militants have gone to war against the West in many parts of the world. It is not clear whether these are isolated operations -- individual expressions of fury -- or a coordinated campaign, masterminded by Al-Qa’ida or some similar organization, as the US administration wants us to think.
What is clear is that the violent epidemic of anti-American sentiment in the Arab world has now spread to east and south-east Asia, with grave consequences for America’s allies such as Australia, Britain and France, whose citizens were among the victims of the Bali bombing.
The United States and much of the West failed to draw any lesson from 11 September. Now they are in danger of repeating and compounding their political mistakes as they confront the expanding danger from Islamic militancy.
After 11 September, the US was guilty of a double error – an error in its analysis of the terrorist threat and an error in the nature of its response. Washington adamantly refused to recognize that the attack it suffered was a reaction to its Middle East policies, and particularly to its blind support for Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians. Although the link was obvious to any independent observer, it was vehemently denied in Washington, and continues to be so.
The US has systematically underestimated the tremendous impact on Arab and Muslim opinion of Israel’s daily killing of Palestinians, and the wholesale destruction of their society, graphically conveyed by satellite television. This is not a purely Middle Eastern phenomenon.
Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia are among the most devout in the entire ummah, and are as attached to Jerusalem as an holy site of Islam as are Muslims in Arab countries. The brutality of Israel’s response to the intifada has aroused passions far beyond the Arab world.
By seeking to crush the Palestinian national movement by force -- and thus defy world-wide Muslim opinion -- Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has shown characteristic folly. The Bush administration has shown far greater folly in letting him get away with it. Sharon’s visit to Washington this week – his seventh as prime minister -- illustrates the extent of US-Israeli collusion. It will be mainly Western civilians who will pay the bill for this relationship, which is being delivered in terrorist attacks.
In a recent article in the Jakarta Post, a highly-respected Indonesian analyst, Jusuf Wanandi, a founder of the Jakarta Center for Strategic and International Studies, warned that, unless the US was more even-handed towards the Arab-Israeli conflict, moderate Muslim leaders in south-east Asia would find it difficult to counter the influence of Muslim radicals on their domestic public opinion. ‘Every day,’ he wrote, ‘they see Muslims being oppressed, defeated, humiliated’. If America were to attack Iraq, ‘real hatred’ could result.
These views are echoed by Philip Bowring, one of the most perceptive observers of the Asian scene. In a report from Hong Kong this week in the International Herald Tribune, he wrote that Washington’s ‘policy on Iraq has few supporters in East Asia…the war rhetoric has done immense damage to the US image… It is hard to find Asians who believe Saddam is a threat to the United States, or that the United States has the right to impose ‘regime change.’ ‘Among Muslim Asians’, he continued, ‘there is particular animosity toward what they see as an overtly anti-Muslim campaign being drummed up by Christian fundamentalists and other pro-Israeli elements in Washington.’
Instead of recognizing the root causes of terrorism, most Americans have sought to explain the attacks by blaming Arab and Muslim societies, which they depict as ‘failed states’, inherently ‘evil’ because of their adherence to a ‘violent’ religion, Islam, and their opposition to the West and Israel.
As a result of this obtuse analysis, Washington failed to change its policies but instead turned its attention to changing Arab regimes.
The second error, which like the first continues to this day, was to respond to the terrorism by military means alone. Yesterday in Afghanistan, tomorrow in Iraq, and in the ongoing ‘war on terror’ around the world, America’s energies have been devoted to identifying and physically eliminating those who oppose it. The principal objective of President George W Bush’s foreign policy appears to be world hegemony imposed by military force. But, as history shows, any hegemonic ambition inevitably stimulates others to rebel against it.
It would be wise for the US to recognize that military force should be only one strategy – perhaps the least effective in the long run -- in an anti-terrorist campaign, which must include political, economic and diplomatic responses.
Quite apart from anger at Israeli policies, and American support for them, Indonesians have their own reasons for loathing American interference in their domestic affairs. The US manipulated the overthrow in 1965 of President Sukarno, the father of Indonesia’s independence from the Netherlands. He was the founder of an independent state, which he unified with creative brilliance from disparate and often warring ethnicities. Concerned to protect Indonesia’s natural resources from foreign exploitation, he was also a founder of the non-aligned movement, with Tito of Yugoslavia, Nasser of Egypt, Nkrumah of Ghana and others, and as such was a thorn in the side of American foreign policy.
The CIA was directly implicated in the horrific massacres in 1965-66, in which some 600,000 people are believed to have been murdered, which eliminated all dissent, especially on the left. General Suharto was put in power in Jakarta, inaugurating 32 years of army-backed one-man rule. He became America’s favourite dictator in East Asia, and the most corrupt and ruthless.
The CIA is said to have furnished the army with a list of as many as 5,000 alleged communist supporters who were then captured or murdered, and American officials are said to have ticked off the victims from that list when they were eliminated. The Australian historian Harold Crouch believes that the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, ‘had won widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organization defending the interests of the poor.’ It was the PKI’s stance that angered the Americans.
Suharto’s Indonesia, like many countries in Asia, benefited from an economic boom for a time. In 1984, Indonesia achieved self-sufficiency in rice production. But the 1997 financial crisis, which was in many ways the product of the cronyism of the Indonesian regime, and the misguided policies of the US and the International Monetary Fund in response, wiped out the economic gains of the previous thirty years, plunging over 100 million people – half the population – below the poverty line.
Suharto was finally ousted in 1998 after riots which killed more than 1,200 people in Jakarta alone. In the wake of the riots, thousands of ethnic Chinese fled Indonesia, taking some $85bn in capital with them. Under Suharto, Indonesia’s six million citizens of Chinese ancestry constituted only 3.5 per cent of the population but contributed close to three-quarters of the country’s wealth.
Today, under the presidency of Magawati Sukarnoputri, Indonesia is enjoying a shaky democracy but also suffering great poverty, now made worse by the Bali bomb’s blow to the vital tourist industry.
In a book published in 2000, Chalmers Johnson, an Asia specialist and professor at the University of California, showed remarkable foresight:
‘If Indonesia is allowed to stagnate’, he wrote, ‘it is quite possible to predict that Islam, which until now has shown its tolerant and broad-minded face throughout most of the country, will turn militant and implacable. This, in turn, would guarantee the end of American influence (much as it did in Khomeini’s Iran)… It is a direction which some in the Indonesian army would welcome…’
A former Indonesian air force officer has confessed to having assembled the Bali bomb and is now under interrogation.