re: Homesickness and the Bali Bomb

["Tom O'Lincoln" <red_sites@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's interesting that Tony responds as an Australian.
And the media here have treated this as an Australian
event, although the majority of the casualties are not
Australians and the bombing happened in Indonesia. But
of course there is a sense in which Legien and Kuta
*are* "Australian", just as Baja California is an
extension of the USA.

The predominant assumption is that Al Qaeda is to blame
and it will be used to whip up pro-war sentiment etc.
But the ABC radio had Wimar Witoelar on this morning
alongside a rightwing American. Wimar is a liberal
intellectual who opposed the Suharto regime and was
censored as a result.

Wimar pointed out the obvious: that there have been a
lot of bombings over the past five years, "but nobody
paid attention because only Indonesians were killed."
Those who benefit are the military, because instability
drives people to want the military in power to "end the
chaos". The dead are mostly not Americans, so why blame
Al Qaeda?

(I remember myself the wave of bombings in 1999, which
moved around the archipelago and culminating in a
blast at the big Istiqlal mosque in Jakarta. An expert
on explosives appeared on TV, his face blurred, saying
indirectly but unmistakeably that only the military
had the expertise to do this.)

Wimar was just warming to his topic, noting that the
"people who committed human rights abuses in East Timor
are now out of jail, because of the American policy of
prioritising the war on terror" when they started to
interrupt him and say "we're out of time".

I tend to agree with him. We don't know who did the
bombings. But if I had to guess, it would be elements
of the military - trained by Australia. And if not
them directly, then people funded by them.




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