Bali bombings: Partnership born from the ashes
Twenty years on from the Bali attack, collaboration has forged a powerful weapon in the continuing fight against terror.
As a young Indonesian counter-terrorism officer, Marthinus Hukom remembers the hours and days after twin bombs ripped through Bali’s nightclub district as a blind and shell-shocked search for clues.
“Our intelligence at that time, let’s be honest – we had limited knowledge about terror,” Marthinus, now the country’s most senior counter-terrorism police officer, tells Inquirer.
“We were caught off guard and had no idea. We were looking to the left and right for who was responsible when they were right in front of us. That’s how ignorant we were. Our intelligence units were still using conventional measures when terrorism was already a significant global phenomenon.”
It has been a steep learning curve for Indonesia and for Densus 88, the elite counter-terrorism force Marthinus now commands, formed with international money and training in the aftermath of the 2002 blasts that tore through Paddy’s Bar and the Sari Club.
The 9/11 of our region – which killed 202 people, 88 of them Australian – marked the beginning of a wave of large-scale attacks in Indonesia that brought terrorism to our doorstep.
Twenty years on, Densus 88 is Indonesia’s formidable frontline force in an under-sung success story in the fight against global extremism.
The world’s most populous Muslim nation was no stranger to homegrown extremists by the time the Bali bombs went off at 11.05pm on October 12, first a suicide blast in Paddy’s and then, as revellers streamed out of that venue, a one-tonne car bomb parked outside the Sari Club.
An earlier generation of extremists, Darul Islam, had long been a dangerous thorn in the side of the state, occupying large parts of west Java in the 1950s and early ’60s and carrying out bombings, robberies and murders in Sumatra, West Java and Central Java in the ’70s.
The group and its offshoots staged numerous attacks through the years, including a 1981 hijacking of a Garuda flight, though under Suharto’s military regime it was the army, not the police, that dealt with it.
By Christmas Eve 2000, however, when co-ordinated bomb blasts struck 20 churches across the country, Suharto had been ousted and the military returned to barracks, leaving a police force – newly separated from the military – in charge of internal security.
The perpetrators melted away, only to return less than two years later to launch the biggest terror strikes on Indonesian soil.
The Bali bombings, a catastrophic intelligence failure, were the first major attacks in Indonesia to target foreigners. More would follow: on Jakarta’s JW Marriott hotel in 2003, the Australian embassy in 2004, a second Bali bombing in 2005 and a second attack on the Marriott, together with the nearby Ritz-Carlton hotel, in 2009.
Most were the work of al-Qa’ida-linked Jemaah Islamiah operatives, another Darul Islam offshoot, or a splinter led by Malaysian Noordin Top.
Although by 2010 JI had been largely decapitated by Densus, the Syrian civil war and the rise of Islamic State triggered a new wave of smaller strikes, including the horrifying 2018 Surabaya blasts in which ISIS-linked terrorists strapped suicide bombs to their children.
Still, there has not been a terror attack remotely on the scale of the Bali bombings in Indonesia in 20 years, despite evolving threats from homegrown radicals and the global jihadist movements of al-Qa’ida and ISIS.
How did Indonesia end its large-scale terror wave? Sidney Jones, one of the region’s most respected terror analysts, says the Bali attacks – and the training assistance the Australian Federal Police offered Densus 88 in their wake – transformed Indonesia’s counter-terrorism approach.
“The Indonesians did not have a police unit capable of responding. They were desperate and wanted help. The problem was, offers were coming from everywhere,” Jones tells Inquirer.
Barely a year after the 9/11 attacks triggered a global war on terror, and with victims from more than 20 countries, many countries wanted to help.
Australia stood out, not only for having suffered the heaviest losses but also because it was offering critical on-the-job training. At least 100 AFP officers flew into Indonesia to help with the initial investigation.
During the next five years twice that number would contribute to a joint covert operation to root out militancy that ultimately led to the Australian and Indonesian-run police training college, the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Co-operation in central Java.
“I think what the AFP assistance did in those early days was to give the police a sense of personal achievement,” says Jones.
The way the AFP went about that – without fanfare or self-promotion – “was a model exercise in how you build confidence with a partner outside your own culture”, she adds. “Those relationships quickly became so close in the months after the Bali investigation that AFP officers would ride in cars with Indonesian counterparts. These big Australian guys had to shrink down so they couldn’t be seen through the window in the Javanese villages.”
Taufik Andrie, a terror analyst and deradicalisation expert with Indonesia’s Institute for International Peace Building, agrees Bali marked a watershed for the country’s policing.
“The police couldn’t name a single suspect for the Christmas Eve bombings,” he says. “But after Bali they developed better technical expertise and have advanced to a point where they are actively preventing attacks from happening.”
Australia’s intensive but “low-key” assistance in the Bali investigation, and in building Indonesia’s specialist policing unit, also would contribute to the country’s democratic consolidation, argues Jones, by strengthening the power and capacity of the police in relation to its military cousins.
By the time the first Marriott hotel attack occurred in Jakarta the next year, Densus no longer wanted hand-holding, though Australia’s support role has continued behind the scenes.
Working together
For all the hard-graft diplomacy that now underpins Australia’s relationship with Indonesia, its counter-terrorism alliance, forged in the fires of the Bali bombing, has been the most reliable ballast.
The way Mick Keelty, AFP commissioner at the time, remembers the joint investigation, “We were sharing all this devastation and experience and wanting to work with each other to make it go away.”
A police relationship previously based on anti-drug and people-smuggling co-operation suddenly had to shift into high gear as Australian specialists in post-blast forensic analysis, intelligence and data crunching flooded in to help with the investigation.
Despite cultural differences, Indonesia’s willingness to provide “unparalleled access to data” to their Australian counterparts meant the two forces could work together, raking through piles of telephone records to triangulate the identities and whereabouts of the bombers who had left vital clues in an undetonated bomb outside the US consulate in Bali.
“No one could understand why we stayed there so long but (together) we were making arrest after arrest,” Keelty tells Inquirer, adding Densus 88 was a “perfect solution to the problem of the day”.
It had its own intelligence wing, and different strategies to the rough justice of the existing paramilitary police commandos. It not only had to prevent terror but it also to try to change the minds of those radicalised by fiery Islamic clerics such as Abu Bakar Bashir, JI’s spiritual leader, as well as divert those in danger of going down the same path.
The strategy has had successes, with some former militants now working with the government to help deradicalise terror convicts, even if Densus critics say it has lost sight of its original purpose to win hearts and minds.
Still, says Keelty, Indonesia’s success in controlling terrorism is “borne out by the lack of attacks”.
“The fact they have been able to suppress JI and to suppress the influence ISIS tried to have in Indonesia is a good example of just how well they have evolved in accordance with the threat.
“You never want to claim you’re on top of terrorism because the moment you do something will come out of left field. It’s such a hard thing to control but the Indonesians are much more alive to where the threats are coming from – including ISIS and online radicalisation – and better prepared to respond to it when they do find it.”
Islamic extremism has changed dramatically in 20 years. Where recruitment and fundraising in Indonesia once centred on JI’s hard-line Islamic boarding schools, social media has proved a more effective means of propaganda and recruitment for ISIS.
It took al-Qa’ida almost 20 years to recruit 20,000 sympathisers worldwide in the lead-up to the September 11, 2001, attacks, while ISIS attracted twice that number from 2014 to 2018.
With such rapid online radicalisation, Densus chief Marthinus says policing alone cannot keep the country safe and a society-wide approach is needed to counter the radicalisation narrative and catch the most vulnerable before they turn.
“We can’t deal with terrorism only by arresting and shooting because it will never end that way,” he says.
“In the past, terrorism was domestic but now it’s transnational. We can take down a Telegram channel today, but tomorrow morning a new account will have appeared because the servers are far away – in Russia, America or China – where they have their own laws.”
Indonesia’s own terror landscape, fractured though it now is by mass arrests and intensive cyber monitoring, is a jumble of groups linked by family, marriage, online friendships and common jihad experience.
“Extremist groups today are all connected – ideologically, structurally and emotionally,” says Marthinus. “Even if we break the structure, they remain connected through ideology. If we break the ideology they are still connected emotionally. This is the problem we face.”
Noorhuda Ismail, a former Darul Islam recruit turned filmmaker and activist, says countering radicalisation has been made a more difficult task by the fact millions of Indonesian Muslims have embraced a more conservative form of Islam in recent years.
Indonesia’s constitution enshrines the notion of unity in diversity, yet tolerance for that diversity is under strain, he says.
“Indonesia’s big success has been in understanding homegrown terrorist groups and their links regionally and globally. Before the Bali bombing there was no understanding at all. The fact they have managed to neutralise the most active and dangerous is celebrated.”
Hundreds of high-value terror-cell leaders and cadres have been imprisoned in Indonesia, including more than 30 JI members convicted for their part in the Bali bombings.
The three ringleaders, Imam Samudra, Ali Ghufron (Mukhlas) and his brother Amrozi were executed by firing squad in 2008, while others were killed in police raids.
But, says Ismail, “the real challenge now is the mainstreaming of radicalisation”. JI is not the violent threat it once was but its school network teaches a “cocktail of toxic Islam” from playgroup to kindergarten, primary to senior high school, while JI sympathisers have manipulated government loopholes to establish legitimate charities and foundations. “How do you combat that? We need an open society that embraces complexity.”
The next big threat
Most experts agree Indonesia is in a terror “lull”, though there is no clear picture of what comes next. Jones says the terrorism risk in Indonesia is lower now than it has been for much of the past 24 years.
New terror laws passed in the wake of the Surabaya bombings that empower police to make preventive strikes have resulted in more arrests in recent years than at the height of the threat in the early 2000s (though that has raised questions over whether imprisoning low-level cadres could fuel a fresh wave of retaliation against the Indonesian state).
More than 300 JI members alone have been taken into custody since 2019.
“JI is an organisation with incredible resilience and if you’re looking towards future threats in Indonesia, sooner or later you’re going to come back to JI,” says Jones.
The most immediate threat, however, is coming not from JI, she says, “but from people who were committed to ISIS and who are now likely rudderless”.
Those who took the oath of allegiance to ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his successors may still feel obliged to obey its 2016 instruction to supporters who could not join the Syrian war to wage war at home however they could.
“The question now is: what is the successor to ISIS? What is the next big global jihadist movement that could emerge with ramifications in Southeast Asia, because these things don’t get eradicated,” says Jones. “Indonesia still has a network of radical groups that can become the basis of the next movement, whether it’s inspired by a local leader or an international movement.”
This year, 134 terrorism convicts are due for release from Indonesian prisons, with another 170 next year, including prominent members of the ISIS-linked Jamaah Ansharut Daulah, responsible for the Surabaya bombings. Umar Patek, the “jihad junkie” who helped mix the chemicals for the Bali bombs, became eligible for parole in August, 11 years into a 20-year sentence, though authorities have yet to sign off on his release.
Despite strong protests from the Australian government and Balinese and Australian survivors and families, Indonesian prison authorities see Patek as a deradicalisation success story.
With a recidivism rate among Indonesian terror convicts of around 10 per cent – low but not insignificant – there is broad agreement more must be done inside the prison system and after release to help reintegrate extremists back into mainstream society.
Julie Chernov Hwang says Indonesia should take advantage of the current lull to address systemic problems within its prisons that contribute to the radicalisation problem.
The US academic, who conducted more than 100 interviews with 97 Indonesian extremists – including Patek – for her 2018 book Why Terrorists Quit, says what happens to terror prisoners in jail is key to whether they pose a threat on their release.
Her research suggests separating hard-core extremists from the general prison population, cracking down on prison gangs that force some to seek protection from prison jihadists – even improving food quality so they are not forced to rely on family or jihadist groups – could potentially reduce the terrorism risk.
“It’s too soon to say whether Indonesia’s new terrorism laws will create more problems than they solve,” Chernov Hwang tells Inquirer. “It depends on how people are treated in prison: whether they’re subjected to torture in police custody, which has a radicalising effect, or whether they are treated humanely.
“But in Indonesia, terrorism has never been an issue you can just arrest your way out of. You can’t arrest these groups into insignificance.”
Additional reporting by Dian Septiari
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