Jakarta's dark forboding
 Updated: 2004-09-17 08:39

The September 9 van bomb that killed nine Indonesians queuing to enter the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, and at least one suicide bomber, has revived fears that a potent mixture of Indonesian nationalism and Islamic extremism could ignite right on Australia's northern doorstep.

And while the tabloid newspaper-driven paranoia of the 60s, which routinely featured illustrations from Indonesian school atlases naming Australia as South Irian, or a southern province, has not quite returned, there is fear of a truck bomb in a road tunnel, or a backpack bomb attack like that in the Spanish capital, Madrid.

As in Spain when the March 11 bombs hit Madrid commuter trains, Australia too is approaching a national election, with the pro-US conservative coalition Prime Minister, John Howard, being challenged by Labour opposition leader, Mark Latham, in polls on October 9. Like Spain, Australia is going into its election with a government vowing to keep forces in Iraq and an opposition pledging to pull them out.

What is focusing Australian minds now is the organization believed behind the September 9 embassy blast which is not al-Qaida nor militants from the Middle East but the very local Jemaah Islamia.

This band of militants is already blamed by Indonesia for the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, which killed 202 people including 88 Australians, the 2003 attack on the Jakarta Marriott hotel and a string of bombing atrocities in Christian churches.

Translations of Jemaah Islamia documents refer to ambitions to create an Islamic super-state in South East Asia, incorporating parts of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and northern Australia.

While Australian and Indonesian authorities say there has been contact between al-Qaeda figures and Jemaah Islamia over the years, the latter's origins are distinctly home grown and in his sermons, the group's alleged spiritual leader, Abu Bakar Bashir, who has yet to be successfully prosecuted on any serious charge in Indonesian courts, repeatedly refers to the building of networks of Islamic communities in the region, under strict sharia law, as providing the foundations of an Islamic caliphate.

For the moment, just how much sophisticated thinking went into the planning of the September 9 blast remains an open question but the fallout does appear to have boosted the electoral chances of the Iraq withdrawalist, Mark Latham.

In March, when he promised to bring home Australian troops from Iraq by Christmas, he appeared to commit political suicide. Latham's Iraq withdrawal pledge was denounced as 'cutting and running' by Prime Minister John Howard, and as a disastrous weakening of the American alliance which underwrites the very survival of Australia in the event of a threat from Asia.

However, more recently, the political ground had begun to collapse under Howard's feet. The Age newspaper in Melbourne has discovered that of the remaining 850 strong Australian Defence Force contingent only 250 were actually in Iraq and that the government in Canberra was in fact bringing more than a third of them home well before Christmas.

Latham has stuck to his promise of withdrawal - insisting that it is in Australia's interests to shore up its regional defence capability to better combat the threat of terrorist acts occurring on its own soil rather than keeping resources in Iraq.

Just before the Jakarta embassy attack, an analyst at the independent Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Aldo Borgu, said he didn't want to "overstate" the functions of the contingent in Iraq.

"Australians aren't really playing a part in ensuring security for the Iraqi people in the short term," he said.

"Obviously you can make the argument that our training of the Iraqi armed forces will help to guarantee their security further into the longer term, but certainly we don't play a short-term role there, beyond protecting our own embassy."

But it was the embassy in Jakarta that was bombed, not the one in Baghdad.

Four days after the Jakarta attack Howard and Latham met in the only televised debate of the drawn out campaign.

Latham denounced the attack as "the act of barbaric people who should be hit as hard as we can hit them," and argued that the invasion of Iraq had little if anything to do with terrorism and nothing to do with the perpetrators of the Bali atrocity.

Although four weeks is an eternity in terms of Australian election campaigns, Latham's emphasis on real threats close to home seems to have rocked a government already battling to maintain the credibility of its involvement all those miles away in Iraq.

Excerpts from Observer News Service

(China Daily)

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