Bali bombings 20 years on: How has Indonesia dealt with Islamic extremism?

Twenty years since the Bali bombings, Indonesia is taking an increasingly hardline approach against conservative Islam, but one expert warns this could backfire.

Greg Fealy is an emeritus professor of Indonesian politics at the Australian National University and one of this country’s most seasoned observers of Indonesian affairs.

Fealy says while Indonesia should be commended for some of its anti-terrorism activities, recent crackdowns against Islamists in the political sphere may do more harm than good.

“Islamists are feeling that the state is … becoming very repressive,” he tells ABC RN’s Between the Lines.

“Why is this a problem in the longer term? Because it deters people from becoming involved in legal political domains. And it might push more people to say, ‘well, the only way we can get change is to resort to violence’,” he says.

“I don’t think the way to promote moderate Islam is to push down hard on conservative Islam.”

So how did Indonesia get here and why does it matter how it balances different Islamic voices?

Islam in Indonesia

Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country, with 87 per cent of its 270 million people identifying as Muslim, including its president Joko Widodo.

But Indonesia has no official state religion. Instead, religious pluralism is enshrined in the country’s foundational philosophical theory, known as Pancasila.

Fealy says when discussing Indonesia, it’s critical to understand that “Islamist is a very broad term”.

“It includes people who are involved in constitutional politics, people who want a more Islamic system in Indonesia, but are happy to do it constitutionally through the ballot box and the like. It includes people who are involved in education and preaching but who are not violent,” he says.

“A tiny subset of Islamists — extreme Islamists — are the sort of people who would join Jemaah Islamiyah or would join a pro-ISIS group.”
202 people murdered

The interpretations of Islam in Indonesia came into sharp focus globally on 12 October, 2002, when Islamic terrorists killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, in Bali.

“I was stunned … I had been looking very closely at radical groups in Indonesia and I had not been expecting this,” Fealy says.

The attack was undertaken by members of Jemaah Islamiyah or JI, a regional militant Islamic group with links to Al Qaeda, led by cleric Abu Bakar Bashir.

“JI was formally set up to create an Islamic state in Indonesia … That was really the long term goal,” Fealy says.

“‘Foreign infidels’ were the primary target [in Bali] … Australia was grouped in with the United States and Great Britain, as countries that were at the forefront of the supposed ‘war against Islam’.”

The anti-Western views of the jihadists appalled most Indonesians, who were shocked at what had happened.
‘A very good response’

Fealy says Indonesia deserves much commendation for how it dealt with the attacks, calling it “a very good response”.

“Once the bombs went off, Indonesians, like everyone else, like most other people in the world, were horrified at the scale of it and the degree of suffering it caused.”

Fealy says an immense amount of resources went into the subsequent investigations and “very significantly, the Indonesian government gave approval for opening up their security services to cooperation with foreign police forces and intelligence agencies”.

“[Also], they could have gone the American route and established a kind of Guantanamo Bay camp, which they could have put these people in, used rendition, all those kinds of extra-legal ways of doing things,” he says.

“But instead, they focused on normal police investigation processes, and prosecuting people through the open court system. And it was very important that everything was on public view.”

Three of the Bali bombers were sentenced to death, including the so-called ‘smiling assassin’, Ali Amrozi bin Haji Nurhasyim.

Abu Bakar Bashir served 10 years of a 15-year jail sentence before being released in 2021.

Detachment 88

The Bali bombings signalled a new era of counter-terrorism activities in Indonesia.

Fealy says the Indonesian police “is not an especially highly regarded police force — it has a lot of problems with corruption and low professional standards”.

But, he says one of the big exceptions to this is a special counter-terrorism group called Detachment 88, which was formed after the Bali bombings.

“That does have a culture of quite excellent policing standards — very rigorous policing and a very systematic pursuit of information and of leads that enable them to crack planned jihadist operations and successfully prosecute people,” he says.

“So they have an excellent record. The great majority of prosecutions are successful. And quite often the courts are handing out very severe jail sentences to people for relatively minor involvement in jihadist cases.”

JI after the bombings

So what became of Jemaah Islamiyah after the Bali bombings and does it continue to pose a threat?

“It still exists, but it’s much reduced,” Fealy says.

He says the group was “hit hard by the police crackdown” immediately after the attacks and was “really, literally decimated”.

“It then began to grow back again over the last decade, but [was] not actively involved in jihadism.”

Fealy says over the last year or so, there has been a “very thorough police crackdown on JI”, with a lot of people in leadership roles arrested.

“So the organisation is once again ravaged by a police crackdown,” he says.

“There are still groups in Indonesia that want to do bombings, but they are linked to ISIS. Groups like JAD [Jamaah Ansharut Daulah] is one of those. They are pro-ISIS, they are not pro-Al Qaeda. There’s still quite a divide between those two.”

The problem with Jokowi’s ‘crackdown’

The current Indonesian president Joko Widodo, who’s known as Jokowi, has been in office since 2014.

Fealy says Jokowi has been “very consistent” with “really full bore anti-terrorism programs”.

“[He] gives the police all the resources they need. And they’ve been very successful.”

But he says Jokowi’s record is much more mixed when it comes to dealing with Islam in politics.

Since taking office, conservative Islamists have become a big political force, with some voices questioning the president’s “Islamic credentials”.

Fealy says Jokowi has responded with repression, or what he calls “repressive pluralism” — and this is where the problem lies.

“I’m talking about the political dimension … [Jokowi] is cracking down on people who he thinks pose a political threat to him, people who can mobilise huge numbers of Indonesian Muslims onto the streets, which becomes a political problem for Jokowi.”

This includes banning the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), a hardline Islamist organisation, in 2020.

“What I would say is, if groups are active within the constitutional domain, if they’re not breaking any laws, if they’re acting as legitimate political participants, they should not be subject to prosecution,” Fealy says.

“And that’s what’s been happening — prosecution and intimidation by various state agencies.”

Fealy points to the example of FPI’s Rizieq Shihab who “was the only national leader to be jailed … for breaching public health orders relating to COVID”.

He says this could end up harming Indonesia in the longer term.

“In Australia, for example, people who hold conservative religious views here, a lot of the public may not like them, but we would say that people have a right to organise in support of those views and to speak out publicly,” he says.

“When people have been doing that in Indonesia, they’ve really come under a great deal of pressure, and that makes them antipathetic towards the state, and that’s not what you want for a healthy, inclusive, democratic system.”

Source: abc