Island’s News Updates

The next time you walk along the Kuta strip in Bali, “Big Brother” will hopefully be watching you. Badung district has been pushed into action by locals who fear that the area could once again become a target for terrorism. It will mount 50 CCTV units in the popular tourist areas of Legian, Seminyak and Kuta, with the Bali Police monitoring them, presumably on a 24-hour basis.

While this will help, CCTVs are not of great use in preventing crime. They can help to identify perpetrators, but in the case of bomb attacks like the 2005 Kuta Square and Jimbaran blasts, the attackers died along with the bombs they carried. This is not to criticize the motivation of the local figures pushing for better security. Shortly before his election as governor last year, former regional police chief Made Mangku Pastika, a leading figure in the 2002 Bali bombing investigation and Time Magazine’s Asian Newsmaker of the Year in 2003, admitted that Bali remained a tempting target.

Current Bali Police Chief Insp. Gen. Teuku Ashikin Husein rammed the message home in comments at the end of last year. Bali’s reputation as a popular tourist destination made it high on the list of potential targets that any terrorist group would consider, he said. Protecting Bali is no easy task. There are dozens of small ports around its coast that are not monitored. It is believed that the explosives used in the 2005 attack came across the Lombok Strait from West Nusa Tenggara, home to radical communities that would be willing to provide a staging post for an attack.

Once on the island, the weight of traffic is such that finding a would-be attacker would be like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. Given the admission by the police chief at the end of last year, it was surprising that he felt it necessary to say only a few days later that a Mumbai-style attack could not happen in Bali.

Reading between the lines of reports on his comments at a press briefing, what he meant was that the police would not be as unprepared as the Indian police, although that apparently did not mean that an attack could not happen. Husein did say that it was impossible to smuggle weapons into Bali, a statement that does not necessarily stand to reason. He added that the public would immediately report seeing anyone carrying automatic weapons. That’s true, but by that time it might be far too late to stop attackers from using their weapons against the public.

Without being alarmist, Indonesia has been lucky over the past few years in maintaining security. The Web site that surfaced a few years back with detailed instructions on how to kill people made it clear that terrorist elements were considering direct attacks on people in their vehicles and the street. Such attacks haven’t happened, suggesting that the local terrorist movement doesn’t have the stomach for frontal killing. Still, that could change.

Just as important as CCTV and patrols on the streets is encouragement of the debate within the Muslim community about the meaning of jihad and the appropriateness of its use. Cutting the ideological ground from underneath those inclined to violence is an essential part of any counter-terrorism strategy.

Despite the continuing threat to Bali, Indonesians as a whole and the Balinese in particular might be glad to hear that they are not the world’s most popular island for terrorism. Britain takes the cake. Lord Stevens, former head of the Metropolitan Police, recently said that up to 4,000 terrorism suspects are active in the United Kingdom, a number that Indonesia would find hard to beat.

Written by Keith Loveard
Published on The Jakarta Globe - thejakartaglobe.com