Indonesia Update

By Kenneth Conboy

Yesterday's fatal crash of a Garuda airliner upon landing in Jogjakarta led several local media sources to question whether terrorism may have been involved. Already, in fact, the Indonesian government has said it will investigate whether the cause was due to anything other than mechanical failure or pilot error. Sadly, the safety record of Indonesian airliners in recent years has been abysmal (Garuda was the best of the bunch), with pilot error accounting for most incidents.

The Garuda crash aside, there have been two disturbing recent developments in Indonesia linked to terrorism.

First, residents of Jakarta in recent weeks have been plauged by a surge in phoned bomb threats purportedly from religious radicals. Two were sent to the U.S. embassy in as many weeks, both claiming to be from al-Qaeda. The British embassy, too, recevied an "al-Qaeda" threat. Other have been sent to the presidential palace, the central bank, hospitals, churches, and a mall in an ethnic Chinese part of the city. All have proven to be hoaxes. These calls appear to be the work of several different persons, one of whom has been captured (he was a native of East Java and did not apparently have any links to Jemaah Islamiyah).

The second development was a bomb that went off this past Saturday near the port on Ambon island. Ambon was the scene of prolonged communal violence between Christians and Muslims between 1999 and 2002; since then, the island has been remarkably tranquil. Thirteen persons were wounded in Saturday's incident. A second bomb was found outside an Ambon shopping center on Tuesday. Government officials believe that these incidents might be linked to January's spike in violence by Islamic radicals in Central Sulawesi. Jemaah Islamiyah was liked to the Sulawesi incidents, with JI members apparently intent on stoking a wider jihad despite several earlier failures. Thus far, the Ambon community has met the recent bombings with shock, and there are no indicatiions that hard-liners there have been gaining any ground.

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