JAKARTA, Indonesia, Nov. 3 — The American ambassador here, Ralph
L. Boyce, does not have to venture far from his
heavily fortified embassy to be challenged about who was responsible
for the Bali bombings that killed more than 180 people.
The perception among many of the educated elite in this largely
moderate Muslim country is that it was not,
as the United States has suggested, a radical Islamic group with
links to Al Qaeda. Instead, they blame the CIA.
Some have argued that the United States prompted the Bali attack
as a way of prodding Indonesia to join a
possible war against Iraq.
Yet again, Mr. Boyce told a news conference — this time in Bali
several days ago — that Indonesians
should stop "pointing fingers elsewhere."
"The country needs to come together behind the leadership here and address the issue of terrorism," he said.
For many Indonesians, and especially moderate Muslim leaders,
it is proving difficult to accept the idea that a
homegrown radical Islamic organization — Jemaah Islamiyah, headed
by a frail-looking cleric, Abu Bakar Bashir,
who lies ailing in a hospital bed in police custody — could have
had a hand in a terrorist act on its own soil.
But given the history of the United States in Indonesia during
the cold war, it is not illogical to blame Washington
for the Bali violence, some Muslim leaders said.
"People see the hand of the United States in the fall of Sukarno,"
said Nurcolish Madjid, the most prominent
Indonesian Muslim scholar. He was referring to the covert support
in 1958 by the Central Intelligence Agency
of dissident Indonesian generals ouster of Indonesia's founding
president in 1965 after he incurred Washington's
displeasure for many years.
Further, during the three decades of authoritarian rule under
Suharto, Mr. Sukarno's successor, many Indonesians
viewed the United States as supporting the government efforts
to repress Islamic expression, Mr. Madjid said.
"They take that as a precedent for this kind of thing," Mr. Madjid said in an interview.
Remarkably, there have been no strong stirrings against the arrest
of Mr. Bashir. The absence of protests is an
encouraging sign, American officials said, illustrating the idea
that the vast majority of Indonesia's approximately
180 million Muslims are indeed of moderate persuasion. Threats
by some Muslim leaders that Mr. Bashir's
detention would inflame emotions have not been borne out so far.
The police have said Mr. Bashir was being questioned about a series
of bomb attacks in Jakarta, including one
at the city's biggest mosque, in 2000. Mr. Bashir, who was arrested
in the days after the Bali bombing,
is not a suspect in that case, the police said. But while
the lack of public protests over Mr. Bashir's arrest is
a relief for Washington, American officials say they are dismayed
by the reluctance of moderate Muslim leaders
to discredit radical Islam in Indonesia and its connections to
terrorism.
The Americans ask why mainstream Indonesian Muslims will not say
in public what they say in private:
that radical Islam's connection to terror is un-Islamic. They
also wonder why conspiracy theories about the
United States are so prevalent in Indonesia. Is it ignorance
or arrogance, one American official asked this week,
that makes Indonesians blind to the threat of radical Islam?
Mr. Madjid, 64, a graduate of the University of Chicago who is
considered an elder statesman of moderate Muslim
thought in Indonesia, cautioned, "If the government, especially,
is too quick to point the finger to Muslims, that will
feed the radicals."
Americans should recall, he said, that initial suspicions in the
bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City
"were that Muslims did it," and that those suspicions "turned
out not to be true."
Mr. Madjid said it was not clear to him that a radical Islamic
group was the instigator of the Bali attack,
which hit a nightclub filled with Western tourists drinking and
dancing on a Saturday night. He doubted, he said,
that an Indonesian group would have "strong" links to Al Qaeda,
as the United States is asserting.
Rather, he said, he believed that the attack had more to do with
Indonesia's "internal politics." He said he suspected
that some elements in the Indonesian Army, anxious to take advantage
of the weak leadership of President
Megawati Sukarnoputri, might have been involved in the bombing.
"In an underdeveloped country like this, to be in power is everything,"
Mr. Madjid said. "The military is out of power.
For some of the military people to be out of power is unacceptable.
Military factions could have had a hand in this."
Another Muslim leader, younger and more politically involved is
Din Syamsuddin, secretary general of the Indonesian
Council of Ulama. He said he strongly objected to the American
focus on radical Islam as a source of terrorism.
He said he believed that the United States was behind the attack.
"There is no logic that it was done by an Islamic
group in Indonesia," Mr. Syamsuddin said. "Muslims don't deny
there are terrorists in this country. But there is no
fact that there are Indonesian Muslims doing it."
Indeed, Mr. Syamsuddin, 44, who has a doctorate from the University
of California at Los Angeles, said logic dictated
that the United States directed the Bali operation. He
said he based his conclusion on his interpretation of the following
events: the deportation of a Qaeda operative, Omar al-Faruq,
who worked with Jemaah Islamiyah, from Indonesia to
American custody in Afghanistan in June; the dispatch of Indonesian
police officials to see Mr. Faruq around the time
of the Bali bombing; and the arrest of Mr. Bashir, several days
after the bombing.
American officials have said the Indonesian police were sent to
question Mr. Faruq as part of an effort to persuade
the Indonesian government that Jemaah Islamiyah was indeed connected
to Al Qaeda. American officials dismissed
Mr. Syamsuddin's account as one of the "conspiracy theories"
now going the rounds in Indonesia.
Mr. Syamsuddin, who organized three meetings between Ambassador
Boyce and Indonesian Muslim groups this year,
said the United States could do one thing to show its sincerity
in determining who is responsible for terrorism in Indonesia.
He said there was "an insistence that al-Faruq should be brought
back from United States custody, to make a fair trial here"
for Mr. Bashir.
That would allow the accuser and the accused to face off in court,
he said, adding, "If Bashir is found guilty,
no one will support him."