MGG Pillai Commentary View

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Are the Indonesian Muslims responsible for the Bali bombings?

TUN MAHATHIR GOT IT RIGHT. He did not apportion blame on the Bali bombings to Al Queda or the Jemayah Islamiyah or to other Muslim groups. But the ease with which both these organisations were blamed, and that this has been on the news particularly round-the- clock ever since the bombings last week, and the defensive posture of the Indonesian government followed by the British blaming the Australians for not letting it know of its 'early warning' to Australian revellers in Bali, and the constant berating of those who would listen that Al-Qaeda was involved, suggests something has gone wrong. The Western governments, or its intelligence agencies, are behind it, and keep at it because the people on the ground in Indonesia and elsewhere do not believe the events in Bali last week. The United States (and Australia, among others) created incidents in South Vietnam in the 1960s, blaming it on the Vietcong. There is no unanimity among Western reporters that Al Qaeda was involved, Jason Burke of the Guardian thought that Al Qaeda could not be involved, and the discordant voices in the Western media is matched by the ordinary people around the world, Muslim or otherwise, having doubts on the official story of the Bali bombing.

But it came at the right time. The Western nations led by the United Nations are caught in a bind in Iraq, Iran was refusing to be bamboozled by the Western powers over its nuclear plans, North Korea has caught flatfooted the six-nations that negotiatied an end to the nuclear controversy by insisting that the nuclear power plant it had planned was for peaceful uses, and asked the United States to continue to build it for it. But not after North Korea established the point that the United States was 'playing' politics with it. The people around the World, outside the West, cheered in their hearts for what North Korea has achieved. It has now asked the UN and other agencies to stop feeding its malnourish people, as it believes it is part of the West's plan for North Korea.

The ordinary people in the Muslim world did not believe in the world as dictated by the West, and it was affecting the West's relations with Indonesia, particularly its leaders led by its president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Australia has even offered its police and forensic teams to assist the Indonesian police in solving the Bali bombings. Or is it to ensure that the Indonesian police do not implicate it? The West has gots its reading right, even if it killed a few thousands of its citizens in a country it has long wanted to destabilise. In the matter of real politik, what does it matter if a few thousand of its citizens are killed? After all, its citizens have turned out to be its worst enemy. It can kill more of them and lay the blame on Al Qeada or its fraternal organisation. That appears to be what has happened in Bali, and the West is hoping that the people will eventually accept it as the work of Osama bin Laden or his fraternal cousins. It is not right, you understand, that the governments in the West are accused of killing its own citizens. It can killed Third World citizens with impunity, and keep no record of it as in Iraq, while it maintains the fiction that its own citizens are sacrosanct. Lyndie England is jailed for three years for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, while prisoners are kept in Guantanano prison for years for being a Muslim and are denied rights in a US court to challenge their illegal detention.

But it has got the Indonesian government on its side. President Yudhoyono and others have parroted the West's official version that the Al Qaeda or the Jemayah Islamiyah are involved in the Bali bombing. But the people, even those who watch CNN or BBC assiduously, do not believe it and begin to ask questions. President Yudhoyono as joined President Musharaff and, let us not forget, Pak Lah in Malaysia, are Muslim leaders in the forefront of anti-Muslim terror and prepared to work with the West against its own people. I do not agree with the current trend of turning people into Muslims, while ignoring their racial backgrounds, but I can see why it is done: the Muslims find comfort in a world religion, brought about by the events of 9/11. It is a direct reaction to the West's crusade against the Muslims. Today, Turkey will decide if it becomes a member of the European Union. Its foreign minister will not go to Brussels for the negotiations if it can only join the EU as a subsidiary state or as a junior state that would allow its poor to work in the EU. Supercilious talking heads have looked upon Turkey joining the EU as a moderate Muslim ally. But several countries in the EU are against Turkey being a member. But there are already Muslims in the EU, and they would also be put on hold by the decision taken today.

The war in Iraq has brought Al Qaeda into the country, and all Muslim fighters, most are from the ground, into the country. These people do not read newspapers, listen to pontificating statements on television or read 'think' pieces in the main newspapers in the West. And they do not accept Islam to be what they say it should be. In Arabia, Sunni Islam rules. In Iraq, it does not. The United States invaded Iraq and disbanded the Sunni Muslim from their posts in the government, allegedly for being a Baathist. But the Sunni rule in Iraq was ensured by the British, in a race with France for colonial hegomony in the Middle East. They ruled Iraq for 30 years, and lost out when its Sunni prime minister, dressed in a woman's dress, complete with the hijab, was flayed alive by the crowd in Baghdad when he was caught out. The subsequent rulers were Sunni, of which Saddam Hussein was the latest. In thumbing for Shia religious rule, Britain was dismantling its own creation, and turned, with American help, into a mess. Saddam Hussein was hated in the Middle East, but the ineptitude of the West in Iraq has allowed Saddam to be a Sunni martyr. He knows he will be hanged. But he will be hanged a martyr in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Iraq has become an ungovernable country, with the West, particularly the United States, making mistakes that will prove Samuel Huntington's thesis of a clash of civilisations,

The West, particularly the United States, is doing badly in Iraq. The insurgents, mostly Sunni, are in the ascendancy, and the only reports we receive are from reporters who are tied to the West and report the West is winning. But it is not. The Katrina and Rita hurricances in the United States, with reporting by CNN, showed how maladjusted the US civil servant is, like the US is keen to say that the Third World civil servant is after a tragedy. It turns out that the Hollywood version of the United States, which we in the Third World see, is not the United States that is. Those in power make full use of it to make a suffering of the people. So what the West does, with Hollywood and its journalists, is not what is. And those in the Third World know it already. The West must go a step higher and rope the people in the Third World, educated as he or she is, in. But the bombing in Bali last week is clearly the way to do it.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com