WESLEY MISSION Sydney

Bali bombing is endemic to the new world of fragmented terror

For immediate release: 14 October 2002

The weekend's tragedy in Bali needs to be seen in the context of global violence and the nature of the new warfare state, Wesley Mission's Social Policy Consultant Dr Keith Suter said today.

Dr Suter, who is a leading academic on terrorism, said thousands of people had been killed in recent years in Indonesia by Islamic fundamentalists with little of these deaths receiving any significant media coverage in the west.

"There are conflicts raging across the country from Aceh in the west, the Moluccas (Spice Islands) in the centre and West Papua in the east," he said. "The Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975 resulted, as a proportion of the population, in one of the bloodiest wars of the 20th century.

"Second, there are various terrorist groups at work in Indonesia and the neighbouring countries. The Australian Foreign Minster on Sunday mentioned the Jemaah Islamiya (JI) as a possible instigator of the Bali violence. JI first came to notice in the late 1990s, with Singaporean police tracking down some of its members. It seeks to create an Islamic state consisting of Singapore, Malaysia, and the southern Philippines.

"Europeans created eighty per cent of the world's national borders during the last 500 years of European imperialism. JI does not recognise the European boundaries and seeks to fashion its own state.

"But JI is just one of several Islamic fundamentalist groups in our region using violence. The Philippines-based Moro Liberation Front and Abu Sayyaf, for example, have also committed terrorism, including the killing of foreign tourists. Striking at one group alone will not solve the problem because others will arise.

"Within each group, there are often cells at work. The IRA's experience in Northern Ireland was that in the early days of its campaign, the British army used to capture some of the senior people and then learned a great deal about the rest of the organization. The IRA then figured that it was safer to operate in semi-autonomous cells. The capture of one cell does not automatically lead to information on other cells.

"The disadvantage of this method is that when some form of peace agreement is reached, some cells may decide to fight on. This is the current problem in Northern Ireland. Most of the IRA has given up the struggle but some of the members are running with their own agenda.

"Third, the targets in Bali were not so much "Australians" as "foreign tourists", who happened to be Australian. Targeting foreign tourists is now a weapon of terrorism. Killing one's own population does not get much international publicity but killing a Briton automatically guarantees BBC coverage, an American CNN coverage and Australian deaths will guarantee Australian media coverage.

"The object of terrorism is to terrify. "Kill one and scare a hundred", as the saying goes. Thus obtaining international media coverage is an important part of a terrorist's agenda."