[Here We Go File] Unless there is more justice in the world, Bali will be repeated

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The Independent At the time of last month's anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, an assessment of the state of the war against terrorism seemed horribly inconclusive.

Now we know why. Now we can understand a little better that this is what the "war unlike any other war" is going to be like: long periods of relative quiet punctuated by the horror of the deaths of large numbers of unsuspecting people. In fact, there have been several attacks over the past year that have been attributed to al-Qa'ida or similar organisations, but they have not struck at targets so familiar to us as office workers in Manhattan. Now we have holidaymakers in Bali.

As if ordinary grief were not enough, the tragedy of the bombing in Indonesia is that it may simply reinforce President Bush's resolve to take the war against terrorism to Iraq. The hawks will accept that Saddam Hussein was not responsible for 11 September – or for the bomb in Bali. But the analogy is clear: we must act pre-emptively to disable new threats to our security.

It is even possible to sympathise with the politicians' dilemma. The struggle against militant anti-Western Islam cannot be won within the kind of periods in which they operate. Rather than a chess game of tighter security, better intelligence and patient policework, combined with a resolute attention to the causes of Muslim alienation, it is easy to see the attraction of a short war against a widely hated foe.

Yet the true lesson of the weekend's awful carnage is quite the opposite. A war in Iraq would be the worst response to the sense that the war against al-Qa'ida is not going well. It ought to be obvious now that the inevitable focus of the war against terrorism on the person of Osama bin Laden was misplaced. Mr bin Laden may well be dead – that seems the likeliest explanation of his failure to record a video taunting the US for failing to kill him – and the main territorial centre of his organisation in Afghanistan has been overrun. But the deep hatred of Westernism that exists among Muslim extremists from North Africa to the Philippines can be, and is, mobilised by a range of overlapping networks, organisations and sects. Whether or not the one calling itself al-Qa'ida was responsible for the weekend's atrocity, it none the less seems the product of the same phenomenon.

Apart from the obvious response of taking precautions and of trying to bring terrorists to justice, the real issue is how to deal with the underlying causes. Of course, this is not easy; it may not even be possible. It may be that there will always be enough people in the world with irrational beliefs about the wickednesses of others to want to kill them at random.

But some of the pool of grievances on which al-Qa'ida draws are real injustices – in particular the failure of the US to use its influence to secure a fair settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. These injustices ought to be resolved anyway, but resolving them may well reduce the supply of potential martyrs to murderous causes.

A pre-emptive war against Iraq would have the opposite effect of increasing martyrdom. It is bound to heighten the sense among some Muslims that the US and its allies are engaged in a crusade against their values. It will make attacks like the bomb in Bali more likely.

The response of world leaders to this weekend's attack should be to act to ensure that there is more justice in the world, rather than to deepen the sense of injustice that is the breeding ground of terrorists.

-- Anonymous, October 13, 2002

Answers

Response to [Here We Go File]

[On the other hand}

Bali is the price of indulgence (Filed: 14/10/2002)

Will Saturday's atrocity in Bali, which has already cost at least 182 lives, finally prompt the Indonesian government to take decisive action against the country's burgeoning Islamist movement?

Compared with nearby Malaysia and Singapore, or even the Philippines, Indonesia's contribution to the war on terrorism has been feeble. Not all of these countries have succeeded in eliminating their insurgencies, especially in the case of the Philippines, but each of these governments has at least made an honest effort.

By contrast, some senior Indonesian figures semi-openly identify with the political radicals, as was exemplified by the visit of its vice-president to an imprisoned Islamist leader. Indeed, even after September 11, when wide swaths of the Islamist movement expressed support for the attacks on America and solidarity with the Taliban regime, the best that President Megawati Sukarnoputri could do was to administer a slap on the wrist.

The attack in Bali calls into question the underlying presumptions of Mrs Megawati's policy. Its essence is not to treat the Islamists as another political movement, whose main aim is to seize power, and then to take them on and defeat them. Rather, its essence is to tame them through indulgence.

It entails a measure of acceptance of the Islamists' colossal self-estimation: that they are the earthly embodiment of the will of Allah and thus of the whole Muslim population (which they most certainly are not). Therefore, it is claimed, to challenge them risks a mass cultural and religious backlash that would sweep away a far stronger political leader than herself.

The results have not been impressive. In consequence of this "softly, softly" approach, the Islamists have grown bolder at all levels, ideologically and militarily. Anti-American and anti-Western themes now dominate public discourse in a way that would have been unthinkable even two years ago.

Unfortunately, too many high-ranking American officials have bought into Mrs Megawati's analysis; one key member of the National Security Council staff with responsibility for the region is even a close personal friend of the Indonesian leader. This school of thought seems to think that the choice is between Mrs Megawati or the deep green [Islamist] sea.

Of course, the unhappy case of South Vietnam showed that America cannot be more committed to the preservation of a ruling political class against a hostile insurgency than that ruling class itself.

None the less, that precedent should not exempt the Indonesians from a set of sharp questions about their fundamentally defeatist view of the prospects for challenging the rebels face on. After all, the post-colonial Indonesian state has enjoyed more successes than failures in crushing subversives: President Sukarno finally vanquished the Darul Islam rebellion in 1962, as did President Suharto the Communists later in the decade.

The case of Indonesia raises a much wider issue. On the basis of poor advice from a friendly but weak head of government, too many American policy-makers accepted the idea that there is a great beast called the "Indonesian street".

Unless this beast is ceaselessly propitiated, so the argument runs, it will turn round and devour the West's only hope in the area. But the terrible events in Indonesia have proved that feeding this creature whets, rather than satisfies, its appetite. There is a lesson here, surely, for those who constantly seek to raise the spectre of the "Arab street" as a reason for Western temporising in the Middle East.

-- Anonymous, October 13, 2002


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