Paradise Lost

Saturday's terrorist bombing in Bali thrust the popular tourist destination into the middle of Indonesia's struggle with the U.S.-led war on terrorism, says a Tufts expert. Bali, Indonesia.

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [10.16.02] The explosion killed 183 people, but the full impact of Saturday's nightclub bombing in Bali is just beginning to surface. Torn between Western and Middle East interests, the popular tourist destination is at the center of a growing political struggle over Indonesia's role in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, says a Tufts expert.

"The Indonesians, caught in their bind of secularism and growing Islamic fundamentalism, thought they could continue to ignore the growing links between outside terrorists and the homegrown ones," Tufts' W. Scott Thompson wrote in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. "They can't now."

Targeting Bali - says the adjunct professor on Southeast Asia at Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy - was a direct attack on Indonesia's precarious position within the international community.

"Bali is a symbol of globalization from the point of view of international terrorism, despite the persistence of local Hindu culture," Thompson wrote in the Times. "To fundamentalist Muslims, it is already an excrescence: Not only is it full of rich Western tourists, it is not even Muslim like the rest of Indonesia. If you wanted to strike the sharpest blow against Western influence here, you would hit [the Kuta region of Bali] and kill very few Muslims in the process."

Saturday's explosion - which wasn't a surprise to many experts on the region - did just that.

"It is not just the CIA that has been preaching to Jakarta that terrorism should be a far higher priority," wrote the Tufts expert. "A number of Western scholars have been pointing out the dense networks existing among radicalized Indonesian Muslim organizations and less respectable ones in the Middle East."

But politics overshadowed the warnings.

"Indonesian elites don't buy the U.S. war on terrorism, no matter what they say publicly," Thompson wrote in the Times. "'It's a self-fulfilling prophecy,' one told me recently. 'Your obsession with Saddam Hussein while you let Ariel Sharon dictate your Middle East policy makes it impossible for us to work with you fruitfully. You don't get it.'"

Some Indonesian leaders may be changing their minds.

"The bomb in Kuta is a big incident. The Indonesian elites were in a state of shock," he wrote in the newspaper. "They were coming to accept that their American counterparts weren't bluffing in telling them of the intercepts revealing the intent to bomb Westerners [or] embassies."

And the price of the attacks, Thompson wrote in the Times, will be significant.

"[Indonesia's] claim to the International Monetary Fund that it could eliminate its deficit rested on assumptions, including the restoration of tourism after September 11," he wrote. "But Bali represents more than half of that."

According to the Tufts expert, the economic impact of the bombing - coupled with the resulting international pressure to address terrorism - may have been the final straw.

"Terrorists changed the whole game," Thompson wrote in the Times. "The ceremonial life of Bali will go on, but it will be a long time before the paradise lost is regained."