Democracy and Islam in Indonesia

To the extent that extremist Islamic movements reject democracy or actively try to destabilize the state, they can become “veto actors” in young democracies. How governments respond to them can strengthen or undermine the transition process. In post-Suharto Indonesia, the only time these movements had the potential to unravel the democratic experiment was in the first two years of the transition, and, even then, it was only because some within the security apparatus tried to exploit them for short-term domestic political gain.

In general, the transnational links of some of these movements had little if any bearing on the severity of the threat they posed. At no time, for example, did Jemaah Islamiyah (JI, Islamic Group) or later splinter groups that at certain points looked to al-Qaeda for ideological inspiration and funding constitute a serious destabilizing force in the sense that their bombing campaigns weakened the government. If anything, their attacks strengthened it by leading to a greater professionalization of law enforcement agencies. Nor were those attacks ever directed primarily at weakening the state, undermining the economy, or punishing apostate rulers. The broader objective of JI as a movement was indeed to establish an Islamic state, but the attacks per se were aimed at avenging the deaths of Muslims at the hands of either the United States and its allies or local Christians.

The Indonesian government was completely oblivious to another set of developments that took place over the same period: the consolidation of the JI network inside and outside Indonesia; the graduation in Mindanao of the first class of JI’s military academy there; the adoption by some senior JI leaders of the al-Qaeda interpretation of jihad; JI’s establishment of a special forces unit; the dispatch of the first JI fighters to Maluku; the establishment of a JI jihadi offshoot, Mujahidin KOMPAK; and the return from Malaysia of many senior JI leaders.² Some JI members believed that Suharto’s fall meant the opportunity for an Islamic revolution was at hand or that at least there was a window of opportunity to build an Islamic state. The outbreak of the Ambon conflict for them was an unexpected bonus in this regard because it allowed JI to put its teachings on jihad into practice in a way that could serve these larger goals by attracting new recruits and giving them combat experience.³ However, JI, which claimed two thousand members across Indonesia at this time and some five thousand additional sympathizers, had no interest in joining forces with other radical organizations in Indonesia.⁴ Its members were not interested in promoting or seeking backing from political players; they were simply interested in how the political changes might facilitate an Islamic state. The type of government, the state of the economy, and maneuverings of the political elite—all were largely irrelevant.

It was very different for hard-line Islamic groups in Jakarta that depended on political patronage. The main political battle in the immediate post-Suharto era was over the legitimacy of Habibie as successor to Suharto. It took place in an atmosphere where tensions within the security forces were high and where, in the aftermath of the May 1998 riots, serious concerns over the ability to control Jakarta’s streets remained. Top political actors, such as Minister of Defense and Armed Forces Commander Wiranto, wanted street support; the groups that could provide it wanted political influence or funding or both.⁵

As a result, Wiranto and one of his allies, Jakarta garrison commander Djaja Suparman, together with the then national police chief Noegroho Djajoesman, became major backers of groups that had support among Jakarta thugs (preman). These groups included the Front Pembela Islam (FPI, Islamic Defenders Front). Formed on August 17, 1998 (Indonesia’s National Day), the FPI became one of twenty Muslim organizations that the military mobilized as “civilian volunteers” (pam swakarsa) to provide security for a special session of Indonesia’s highest parliamentary body, the Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat (MPR, People’s Consultative Assembly), in mid-November 1998.6 Salafi groups, normally apolitical, were also brought in for the first time.⁷ Trained by the army and equipped with bamboo spears, these Muslim militias, some thirty thousand strong, clashed with anti-Habibie protestors and caused far more mayhem than they curbed.

A decade later the idea of key state actors’ recruiting and training thirty thousand militia members in Jakarta would be unthinkable. But Habibie’s supporters needed a show of force against the students and middle class who had brought down Suharto, and the Muslim street could provide it. Many of the groups mobilized were conservative in the sense of being committed (at least publicly) to the implementation of Islamic law in some form; some were ultranationalists who later, after Ambon erupted, could be rallied to defend the homeland against “Christian separatists.”

The Habibie government had no policies against the more extreme edge of the spectrum, notably JI, because it had no idea of their existence. (With developments in East Timor, there were also other priorities.) The extremists in turn had no interest in Habibie or political patronage. They had been hoping for major conflict in Indonesia that they could turn into a jihad for an Islamic state, and when that did not materialize, the eruption of conflict in Ambon seemed like a godsend.⁸ The first JI contingent arrived there in June 1999; the need to get people into the field more quickly than allowed by the normal JI indoctrination period led to the creation of another group, Mujahidin KOMPAK.⁹ For both KOMPAK and JI (and some Darul Islam factions as well), defense of fellow Muslims was important, but even more so was the need to gather the combat skills and experience that could be put to use for a larger struggle.

It was during the presidency of Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur) that Indonesian democracy was in the most peril because of the president’s disastrous ineptness, his tensions with the military, and his opponents’ deliberate efforts to destabilize the country. It was during his tenure that the conflicts in Maluku and Poso escalated out of control and that JI reached its peak strength, with Maluku and Poso providing undreamed of recruiting opportunities and the justification for a bombing campaign because Muslims were dying at Christian hands on Indonesian soil.10 The bomb attacks included the attempted murder of the Philippines ambassador to Jakarta and the bombings of churches across eleven cities on Christmas Eve 2000. Gus Dur’s response to Islamic radicalism was to assume that any major incidents were the work of his political enemies, real or imagined, while his enemies in the military continued to make political use of mass-based hard-line Muslim organizations. There was still no knowledge of JI’s existence, and although Laskar Jihad (Jihad Militia) sent thousands of fighters to Maluku, there was little appreciation in the palace that they were anything more than army stooges.

Gus Dur came to power at the end of 1999 as the result of a parliamentary alliance that included the main Muslim organizations joining forces to prevent Megawati Sukarnoputri from coming to power. His incompetence convinced many in the military and some outside it that Indonesia was not ready for civilian government and would be better off with the military in power. Every step he took as president seemed to alienate the military more. The military was already deeply unhappy over the loss of East Timor and became more so in January 2000, when Gus Dur invited a Geneva-based nongovernmental organization to help solve the Aceh conflict. The invitation came as Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM, Free Aceh Movement) guerrillas, returning from Malaysia, had embarked on a serious recruitment and mobilization program in Aceh.

January 2000 had seen a huge rally in Jakarta to mobilize Muslims in defense of their fellow faithful in Ambon, financed in part by a well-established member of the political elite. That same month Muslims rioted in Lombok in a project that seemed to be orchestrated by a Wiranto ally. In February, Gus Dur sacked Wiranto, allegedly because of the latter’s responsibility for human rights violations in East Timor, and tensions escalated further.

In March 2000, as the situation in Maluku and North Maluku continued to deteriorate, the deputy Speaker of Parliament and the head of Gus Dur’s party, Matori Abdul Jalil, was attacked by a man with a machete. Police arrested the man and some of his accomplices but made no effort to understand the organization behind them, called AMIN (Angkatan Islam Mujahidin Nusantara, or Islamic Mujahidin Forces of the Indonesian Archipelago). If they had, they might have begun to understand the impact that Ambon was having on radical Islam: it was fueling or in some cases reviving a commitment to jihad. In this case, the attackers were members of a radical Darul Islam faction, who told police that Matori and by implication Gus Dur had not done enough to defend Muslims in Ambon and that Ambon was in danger of being taken over by Communists. There is some evidence that the group was approached by military intelligence officers and offered funding, which they said they rejected.11

Then in April 2000 Gus Dur very publicly failed in his effort to stop thousands of Laskar Jihad volunteers from going to Maluku to fight. This Salafi militia, led by the Yogyakarta-based Ja’far Umar Thalib, was backed by the army, received training from it, and, in the militia’s view, made common cause in defending a Muslim government from assault by Christian separatists.¹² Laskar Jihad fighters arrived to find a much smaller but better-trained contingent of fighters already present. This contingent included JI, Darul Islam, and Mujahidin KOMPAK and was collectively known as “Laskar Mujahidin” (Mujahideen Militia). Very few in Indonesia or, indeed, the outside world paid any attention to the smaller group, but unlike Laskar Jihad, its members were not interested in collaboration with the government; they wanted to topple it.

When a major massacre of Muslims took place in Poso, Central Sulawesi, in May 2000, many in Laskar Mujahidin shifted there to recruit and train local recruits. The point was not just to fight Christians; it was to use the jihad to establish the conditions for turning Poso into a base for the gradual expansion of an Islamic community. Again, the government, consumed by problems in Jakarta, made no effort to understand what was happening.

The first attacks by JI to cause fatalities outside Ambon and Poso took place in August 2000, when the Philippines ambassador in Jakarta was nearly killed after a remotely detonated bomb went off by his car as he was returning to his residence for lunch; two others died in the blast. Gus Dur suggested that one motive of the attackers was to show that he could not control security in the city; in fact, it was a revenge attack for the Philippine army’s “all-out war” on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front camp where JI had trained. No arrests took place, however, and the police investigation went nowhere.¹³

When a coordinated series of bombs went off on Christmas Eve, Gus Dur blamed a former top army officer and another official close to the Suharto family, saying the motive of the bombing was to destabilize his government.¹⁴ This motive was as plausible as any other, although it is clear that at least the Badan Intelijen Negara (BIN, National Intelligence Agency) knew who some of the real perpetrators were—a JI group led by a man known as “Hambali,” now imprisoned at Guántanamo. Very few saw extremist Muslims as responsible; most saw the army or the Suharto family as the culprits.15 The problem was that in a period of high political tension, there were just too many possible suspects and motives, and there was no reason to believe a serious terrorist group was involved.

If there was a danger to the state from radical Islam during this period, it was not from those who subscribed to the global jihad. Their numbers were too small, and they had no interest in playing politics in the sense of getting immersed in the day-to-day power struggles going on in Jakarta. The dangers were from elements of the security forces—Gus Dur was probably right on the main point if not on the details—joining forces with local players for their own political interests. The intensity of the communal conflagration that resulted proved far easier to start than stop and did serious damage to Indonesia’s efforts to present itself as a pluralist democracy.

It was during the early part of the Megawati administration that the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City took place and that Indonesia woke up to the terrorist threat at home from JI and its splinter groups. Three of the major suicide bombings in Indonesia were undertaken during her administration: the Bali bombing in October 2002, the Marriott Hotel bombing in August 2003, and the Australian embassy bombing in September 2004. The bombings had no impact on national stability, except, if anything, to reinforce it. What they did was to expose the police force’s limitations and the urgency of turning it into a more professional agency. With virtually unlimited amounts of counterterrorism funding from abroad, first the police, then other parts of the legal system, and finally even the deservedly maligned Attorney General’s Office became the focus of grants and training. The military received relatively little, which helped promote the police as the main internal security agency, as it was in law but not initially in practice. Thus, the silver lining to the bombings was the strengthening of key government institutions.

Until Bali, the government was inattentive to a possible threat from radical Islam. A JI bombing at the Atrium shopping mall in Jakarta in August 2001, where church services attended by Ambonese Christians were held, netted a Malaysian bomber (who blew his foot off) and one other, and a few members of the police criminal investigation squad began to connect the dots with the Christmas Eve bombings. They found more Malaysians who had taken part in a training course in West Java prior to embarking for Ambon. Other churches were bombed in Jakarta during the year, but no one paid much attention. Then the world changed with the World Trade Center attacks in New York, and the dangers of radical Islam suddenly seemed to enter a new dimension. Megawati was President George W. Bush’s first state visitor after the attacks and pledged to work with the United States in fighting terror. Neither she nor anyone in her cabinet, however, really believed that Indonesia itself had a problem.

The Bali bombings that killed more than two hundred people put things in a different perspective. Given the number of foreigners killed, Indonesia had no choice but to accept outside help, and some of the best local police investigators, who had begun to put some of the pieces of the puzzle together after the Christmas Eve and Atrium bombings, were brought into a new counterterrorism unit, Detachment 88. On-the-job training and access to state-of-the-art equipment was provided by Australia with additional assistance from the United States and others. It may not have been the donors’ primary aim, but by making the police rather than the army the main recipient of counterterrorism assistance, the role of civilians over the military in internal security was strengthened (and also probably worsened relations between them).

There was huge public curiosity about the bombers once they were arrested. They were tried relatively quickly in 2003 on the basis of solid forensic evidence in open trials that bore none of the preprogrammed characteristics of the political trials the previous year of Indonesians accused of human rights violations in East Timor.16 The courts used were part of the deeply flawed Indonesian legal system, but the evidence was so overwhelming and the defendants so defiant that it was hard to question the guilty verdicts at the end.

From the beginning, the bombers justified their attack as a revenge for Muslim deaths at the hands of America and its “lackeys.” They wanted to make clear they were playing on an international stage, not an Indonesian one. Efforts to undermine the Indonesian government never entered the equation. In his interrogation deposition, Imam Samudra, field commander for the bombings, said the main reason for choosing Bali was that it was “the gathering place of international terrorists—that is, Israelis/Jews, America, Australia, and other countries involved in the destruction of Afghanistan during Ramadhan 2001.”¹⁷ He said he had taken part in earlier church bombings because Christians had blown up mosques in Ambon.

Another bomber wrote: “We want to retaliate for the brutality of the leaders and armies of these states that have killed, annihilated our women and our children, but at the moment, we don’t yet have the capacity to attack and kill them. So we attack their people, whose religion is the same as theirs—that is, they are all kafir [unbelievers]—as a way of retaliating for their attacks against us.”¹⁸

In a way, the international attention to al-Qaeda and the sheer enormity of the Bali carnage kept the domestic focus on the crime rather than on the ideology behind it. There was a sense that if this group could be rounded up, the problem would be over. Bali thus generated little introspection about radical thought in Indonesia or about where JI, still a poorly understood group, had come from.

The mass-based organizations that relied on thugs bashing up karaoke bars and nightclubs to promote the application of Islamic law continued to have their government backers: in the trial of a senior JI figure in 2003, one prosecutor was so afraid that the man’s supporters would disrupt the proceedings that, with police help, he hired FPI to stack the courtroom with men in white robes and turbans who had been paid not to cause trouble.19 The FPI continued to enjoy near total immunity for its vigilante violence, as did Laskar Jihad. Even when the latter’s leader, Ja’far Umar Thalib, was arrested in 2001 for imposing a death sentence by stoning on a follower accused of adultery, pressure from other conservative organizations eventually led to his release.²⁰

The Marriott bombing in August 2003, which seemed to cause more domestic outrage than the Bali bombing because it was in the heart of Jakarta and all but one of the victims were Indonesians, was quickly solved. Evidence pointed back to some Sumatran-based members of JI, many of whom had links to Ba’asyir’s school in Ngruki, Solo, as well as to two Malaysians, Noordin Mohammad Top and Dr. Azhari Husin. Good police work continued, but the involvement of Malaysians in both this attack and the Australian embassy bombing the following year—which was an entirely Noordin-led, not JI, operation—led many in the Parliament to conclude that the root of the problem lay with Malaysia, not at home.²¹

There was ludicrous speculation in the Australian press that the embassy attack had been aimed at trying to influence the Australian elections or the Indonesian elections scheduled for September 25. But, again, the bombers had no interest in Indonesian politics. Their main aim, in the words of one of the bombers, was to “make Western nations tremble.”²²

The government continued to be oblivious to the connection between JI and the ongoing violence in Poso, nor was there much interest in the international community for any act of terrorism where only Indonesians, but not foreigners, were killed.

A few weeks after the bombing, three teenage Christian schoolgirls were attacked with machetes and beheaded in Poso. The government had largely ignored all the bombings and murders in and around Poso that had taken place since the 2001 Malino Accords; most were unsolved, and all were dismissed as “ordinary” crimes. The attack on the schoolgirls was so brutal and so risked reigniting communal conflict, however, that the government took action.24 The national police commander sent a crack team of investigators from Detachment 88, who reasonably quickly solved not only this crime, but most of the others. The perpetrators were JI members, and their stated motivation was revenge for attacks by Christians at the height of the conflict. Most were based at an Islamic school in Tanah Runtuh, Poso, run by a JI sympathizer named Adnan Arsal; some had been trained in Mindanao.

Led by Vice President Kalla, the government finally began to look beyond arrests to counter the radical message, trying to provide educational alternatives to radical schools and to co-opt local JI leaders through trips to Mecca and other perks. Some of these measures were constructive, such as the establishment of a state-of-the-art branch of an Islamic pesantren (boarding school) known for its progressive teaching methods, although it attracted fewer students than the government hoped. The school was built on a site just down the road from Adnan Arsal’s pesantren in Tanah Runtuh.²⁵

Other steps created an uproar, as when Kalla seemed to suggest that all students at pesantrens should be fingerprinted.²⁶ He claimed that he had only intended that there should be a better national identification system that would include everyone, including students, but the outcry probably set back any thoughts of such a system for years.

Poso brought out all the complications of the government’s stance toward radical Islam. In their anxiety to stop the Poso violence, police went back to their old friend, FPI head Habieb Rizieq, and sponsored a speaking tour for him across Central Sulawesi. (In a speech in Luwuk on November 29, Rizieq paid tribute to his sponsors, saying that in their commitment to law and order the FPI and the police were “like husband and wife.”)²⁷

The police were operating on the assumption that if young men could be turned into moralist thugs, this was at least better than turning terrorist. “The problem is to find out who the radicals will listen to. They’ll listen to Arsal, but he’s not always giving the right message. We brought Habieb Rizieq up here to talk to them because he may be hard-line, but it’s a different kind of approach: we thought it would be useful.”²⁸

The government tried a similar tactic in early January 2007, when officials sought support of Muslim leaders after police operations against JI-linked fugitives ended up killing fourteen militants. One of those summoned out of obscurity was Ja’far Umar Thalib, the former leader of Laskar Jihad, who had taken a low profile ever since Laskar Jihad disbanded in early October 2002.²⁹ Ja’far obligingly criticized Abu Bakar Ba’asyir and JI as heretics who had gone astray, but there was a distinct sense that officials had a sense of “bad radicals” and “our radicals”; Ja’far Umar Thalib and Habieb Rizieq were still on the good side.

But if FPI’s image was tarnished, elements of the security apparatus still saw the group as an ally when there was a perceived political need to play the Islamic card. In Aceh, the sudden prominence of FPI members in the lead-up to elections at a time when the government was trying to portray Partai Aceh, the party of the former rebels, as anti-Islamic, suggested that the partnership was still useful in certain contexts.30

By the end of the SBY administration’s first term, the threat of terrorism seemed to have declined substantially, due in part to the stepped-up law enforcement efforts that began in response to the first Bali bombing. Within the JI leadership, there was also a general consensus that the bombings had been counterproductive.³¹ No major bombings had taken place since the second Bali bombings; Poso and Ambon were quiet; and a police-led “deradicalization program” had attracted worldwide praise, although it was more an exercise in economic co-optation than in ideological counseling.³² In the aftermath of the November 2008 execution of the Bali bombers and the appearance of a rash of books glorifying their “martyrdom,” the government had even begun to look gingerly at the problem of countering jihadist content in radical publications.

Just as complacency was setting in, however, the calm was shattered. Noordin, in what would prove to be his last operation, emerged from hiding to direct the July 2009 bombings of two Jakarta luxury hotels, the Marriott for the second time and the Ritz-Carlton. Now calling his group “al-Qaeda for Indonesia,” he worked with a disparate collection of operatives, including a Yemen-trained cleric and several JI members. Police tracked down most of those involved and killed Noordin near Solo in September 2009.

Even as the hotel attack was under way, a different alliance of jihadis was setting up a training camp in Aceh, defining themselves strategically and tactically in opposition to both Noordin Top and JI. Noordin, they claimed, aimed only at weakening the enemy through bombings but had no long-term vision; his operations also caused unnecessary Muslim casualties. They argued it was better to have a secure base that could both serve as the nucleus of an Islamic state—the long-term goal—and be a place to retreat to after operations. They saw JI as having abandoned jihad and castigated some of its leaders by name in a video produced to raise funds for the camp.33

By 2010, police and other security officials had a very good idea of the jihadi network and how it had operated in the past. It understood the thug organizations because it had worked with them, but it had very little understanding of radical nonviolent mass organizations such as Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI, Indonesia Party of Liberation), whose stock in trade is not rent-a-mob violence, but intellectual input into Islamic advocacy organizations and the government bureaucracy. Dealing with purveyors of intolerance that use classic civil society techniques may be more of a challenge for the Indonesian government than fighting terrorism.

Although there are major ideological differences between the Salafis represented by Ja’far Umar Thalib, the Salafi jihadists represented by Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, and the utopian radicals represented by HTI, they have in common a deep antipathy to democracy. Their major argument is that democracy relies on man-made rather than God-given law.

All rely on different texts and interpretations. HTI, which advocates the restoration of a worldwide caliphate, points to how capitalism has failed and marshals economic arguments to show that the poor will be better protected and social justice better served under Islamic law.³⁴ JI and some of the Salafi jihadists now use the writings of the Jordanian radical Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi as their major reference, but they also cite others in the radical pantheon, such as Sayyid Qutub and Abul ʾAla Maududi.

On January 26, 2009, the quasi-governmental Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI, Indonesian Ulama Council) issued a fatwa that choosing a devout, honest leader who could meet the aspirations of the umma (Muslim community) was obligatory and that to choose someone who did not have those qualities or not to vote at all was forbidden (haram) under Islamic law.³⁵ The radical community immediately responded. FPI, mindful of its backers, welcomed the fatwa as being appropriate as long as it was interpreted to mean that “it is obligatory to vote if a leader is available who meets the conditions of leadership according to Islamic law.”36 HTI argued that without Islamic law, even the most well-intentioned leader cannot succeed. If MUI in an earlier fatwa (2005) said that secularism was haram, it followed that any secular system or any not based on Islamic law was also haram. In any case, the obligation to choose leaders did not rest with individuals, but with the community.³⁷

Ba’asyir’s new organization, Jamaah Ansharut Tauhid (JAT, Group for the Oneness of God Partisans), and others on the Salafi jihadi side stepped up public book discussions at mosques around Java related to the un-Islamic nature of democracy. These events were advertised in Friday mosque bulletins, short text messages, and JI magazines. A handout distributed at one such discussion outside Jakarta in mid-February said:

This is what democracy users say:

• We don’t have to reject everything that comes from kafir [unbelievers]; we can take democracy as an opening for our struggle.

• Democracy is policy formulation [ijtihadiah siyasah—by implication, with an Islamic precedent], so it’s okay.

• Democracy allows for dakwah [propagating Islam], including in Parliament.

• To vote is obligatory, to abstain is haram, according to the MUI fatwa.

• And many other reasons. …

But know you have been trapped; in fact, you’ve voluntarily trapped yourself by the poison of democracy. …

• Democracy is a kafir system that leads to NONBELIEF and APOSTASY.

• Going along with democracy may bring partial benefits, but it sacrifices the fundamental principle of being free from rule by anti-Islamic forces.

• Islam should be fought for through DAKWAH and JIHAD, not by punching ballots!³⁸

The problem was that democratic participation was too popular. Even Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, who himself abstained from voting, intimated to his followers that he would not forbid them to vote in the 2009 elections as long as they voted for parties or individuals committed to Islamic law. JAT, founded in September 2008, initially attracted many JI members who saw little point in being a clandestine organization when there was no jihad to fight at home and when it was possible to campaign openly for Islamic law.³⁹

Antidemocrats such as Ba’asyir constitute no threat to Indonesia’s democracy. HTI is more insidious because it has mastered the art of political lobbying, starting from issues that resonate with the public, such as the Ahmadiyya ban, and finding friends in government to press for policy change. The government’s reaction to HTI is one of guarded tolerance. It allowed an international conference in Jakarta in July 2007 that drew some seventy thousand people; its only intervention ironically was to put pressure on the organizers to disinvite Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. The police have little knowledge of HTI because its members do not commit crimes; it is known to the intelligence agencies not because of its message or style of working, but simply because it is an international organization, and in the xenophobic world of Indonesian security any local organization with international links is suspect.40

In Indonesia today, HTI appears to be growing rapidly, particularly on university campuses and in places such as Aceh where it never had a presence before the 2004 tsunami. It managed to bring under its thumb the health minister in SBY’s first term, who called for an end to immunization against certain childhood diseases on the grounds that she did not want Indonesian children becoming guinea pigs for testing by Western pharmaceutical firms. HTI is one of the hard-line civil society organizations that post-Suharto democracy has brought to prominence, but it is not a threat to the state. It is rather an effective advocacy group that has shown an ability to affect public policy.

The concern about radical organizations is not that they preach against a popular political system that they have no hope of changing, but that they foster hostility toward non-Muslim minorities, in particular Christians and Jews, and toward any group considered “deviant,” such as the Ahmadiyya movement. The government’s response to this hostility should be active promotion of minority rights and inculcation of pluralist views from elementary school on up. It is the one area, however, where all post-Suharto governments have failed.

Indonesians should be grateful that they got past the worst of their post-Suharto uncertainty and turmoil by the time the first Bali bombings hit in 2002. The phase of mobilizing thugs on the streets was over. The tension between army and civilians had been resolved in favor of civilians. If an attack of that magnitude had come while Abdurrahman Wahid was in office, the military might have demanded a greater role.