Indonesia Bombings May Fuel Regional Instability : Tension in Southeast Asia 
International Herald Tribune
December 28, 2000
Michael Richardson 

A bombing campaign designed to provoke violence in Indonesia and destabilize the government could inflame religious and ethnic tensions elsewhere in Southeast Asia, officials and analysts warn.

President Abdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia said that the series of bomb attacks Sunday was intended to foment violence among Christians and Muslims and halt his country's efforts for democratic reform.

"The motive is political," he said during a visit Wednesday to a Roman Catholic hospital in Jakarta, where he spoke to six people wounded in the attacks.

The 18 bomb blasts close to Christian churches in Jakarta and eight other Indonesian cities and towns on Christmas eve killed 15 people and wounded about 100. No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks and two Indonesian paramilitary groups that have been accused of sectarian violence in the past, Laskar Jihad and the Islamic Defenders' Front, have denied any involvement.

Two men suspected of making a bomb that exploded as they were taking it to a church are in police custody in hospital in Bandung, in the western part of the main Indonesian island of Java. The police said Wednesday that the men could not be questioned because of the severity of their wounds and that there was no indication so far who they were or what their motive was.

Mr. Wahid, a Muslim cleric, has repeatedly warned that his opponents were trying to exploit differences between religious and ethnic groups. Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country with 210 million people, has near 11 million Christians, many of them prosperous ethnic Chinese who have often been targets of attack in the past.

Religious differences have become a key point of friction throughout Southeast Asia, a region that has been hit by rising economic and political instability.

In the Philippines, for example, the government is waging a military campaign to crush Muslim minority separatists in the mostly Christian country's southern islands.

Tensions in Malaysia between moderates and fundamentalists in the majority Muslim Malay community, and between Muslims and non-Muslim Chinese, have also been rising — prompting the government in Kuala Lumpur to consider tightening its already strong internal security laws to check religious extremism, officials said.

"If there are any signs of attempts by any quarters to destroy our racial harmony by playing on sensitive issues like religion, the government will take firm action against them," Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, a Muslim, said in a Christmas message broadcast on national television. "The people should realize that in a multiracial country like Malaysia, unity and cooperation among the races is important to ensure the country's stability, progress and prosperity."

In Singapore, an island nation made up of ethnic Chinese, Malays, Indians and other ethnic groups that has long been considered a bastion of meritocracy, the government said recently that it was seeking new ways of encouraging the ethnic harmony following a call by some members of the Muslim minority for Malays to intensify self-help efforts separately from the government.

"Some Malays want to widen their own community space and narrow the common Singaporean space," Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said. "I think there are some Chinese and Indians who think likewise for their own communities. We must fight this tendency to segregate and instead seek to widen the common space to integrate our communities."

The increase in ethnic and religious tensions in Southeast Asia is deterring investment and economic growth — the very things that in the past have helped to promote tolerance, analysts said.

The Political & Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd., based in Hong Kong, said in a recent report that Southeast Asia was likely to be regarded by foreign investors as more dangerous and less attractive than Northeast Asia, although both areas had significant potential for social unrest.

"In the case of Southeast Asia, however, that unrest is likely to occur in a difficult economic environment in which foreign companies perceive there to be fewer opportunities," the report said. "All Southeast Asia needs now is Osama bin Ladin and his mujahidin, or some similar group of international terrorists, to start taking a more active interest in expanding their network by training and financing sympathetic activist groups in the region."

Some Western officials have warned privately that groups linked to Osama bin Laden, who is wanted by the United States in connection with the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa and other terrorist acts, are already working with Muslim extremists in the Philippines and Indonesia.

Political & Economic Risk Consultancy said in its report that Indonesia was in danger of fragmenting as different ethnic and religious groups sought independence or autonomy. It added that the inability of the central government in Jakarta to calm social unrest was also adversely affecting political stability in the world's fourth most populous nation.

A Singapore newspaper, the Straits Times, said Wednesday that if "foreign infiltration" was established in the latest bomb blasts aimed at Christian churches in Indonesia it would introduce a dangerous dimension to the Indonesian conflict.

"Given the festering social divisions and ethnic strife, it must be asked how much more Indonesia can take of these blows to the body politic," the newspaper said.

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune