Indonesia danger zone for Westerners

This time every year, Europeans emerging from the New Year festivities start to think about booking their Easter getaway. In the past, Bali figured prominently in the brochures as exotic and stress-free, a paradise for families and backpackers wanting to flee Europe's grey skies. No more.

This year, the resort island - and in fact all Indonesia - has been pinpointed by European Governments as a no-go area. In the past week, many European Governments have multiplied warnings to citizens about the risk of terror attacks.

"Attacks could occur at any time, anywhere in Indonesia and are likely to be directed against locations and buildings frequented by foreigners," the British Foreign Office says. "Terrorists have shown in previous attacks that they have the means and the motivation to carry out successful attacks."

Germany's foreign ministry says: "Places at risk are Jakarta and Bali in particular, which are frequented by foreigners or are identified with Westerners."

And the French foreign ministry says: "The extremist groups operating in Indonesia have especially murderous capabilities. In Bali, as in the rest of Indonesia, French nationals must show the greatest vigilance."

Similar warnings are posted by other Governments, including New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

European security experts say these warnings are entirely credible and that all the ingredients are there for another terrorist assault that could occur at any time.

There have been four major terrorist attacks against Western targets in Indonesia in the past four years, and specialists say the techniques appear to be getting bolder and more sophisticated.

The first and bloodiest operation was the Bali bombings of October 2002, which killed 202 people, most of them Westerners.

In August 2003, the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta was hit by a car bomb, with the loss of 12 lives. In September 2004, a car bomb outside the Australian embassy in the Indonesian capital killed 11.

In the latest operation, on October 1, three suicide bombers blew themselves up at Kuta and Jimbaran beach in Bali, killing 20 and injuring 90.

The attacks have been blamed on Jemaah Islamiyah, an extremist Muslim network reputedly linked to al Qaeda.

"Many leading members of Jemaah Islamiyah are still at liberty and they have a number of supporters and sympathisers and they are still continuing to recruit," says Paul Wilkinson of the Centre of the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

"Although there have been some successful police investigations, that doesn't mean the problem is over. Our reaction would be that the advice from the foreign ministries is well-founded."

Wilkinson suggests that those most at risk would not be business people attending a conference at a well-guarded venue, but backpackers and sightseers tempted to cluster in bars, discos and other tourist haunts. Such behaviour "would be unwise indeed", he says.

The Indonesian authorities heightened their security posture in November after Jemaah Islamiyah's reputed master bomb-maker, Azahari Husin, a Malaysian, was cornered and shot dead by Indonesian police.

The Indonesian intelligence agency said that documents found in Husin's hideaway in East Java indicated that extremists had been planning attacks at Christmas and New Year.

Husin's chief accomplice and compatriot, Noordin Mohammad Top, remains on the run.

Husin and Top had recruited an unknown number of trained militants who were "capable of carrying out their jobs without being ordered", says Syamsir Siregar, the head of Indonesian intelligence.

Alain Chouet, former head of security at the French foreign intelligence service, cautions against falling into the trap of thinking that terrorism in Southeast Asia is part of an al Qaeda masterplan.

"At the moment, the risk stems from domestic groups in these countries," Chouet says. "This is due to the local characteristics of these groups, which essentially have local interests and should not be confused with the jihadist internationalism of the Muslim Brotherhood and Arab-Pakistani groups in the al Qaeda movement."

In the case of Indonesia, violent radicals emerged because of deep local resentment at the country's wealth gap and social injustice, with Islam providing a kind of legitimacy for extremism.

Complicating attempts to root out the terrorists is the role played by Indonesia's "Muslim establishment", which during the anti-Communist post-war era colluded with the government and military in order to gain political clout.

After September 11, Megawati Sukarnoputri, then President, broke with that tradition. Consequently, the Muslim hierarchy lost its influence "and is now in a permanent tug-of-war with the Government", Chouet says.

The religious establishment, desperate to get back in favour, waits on the sidelines until the terrorist threat pops up, then steps forward to offer its services to try to "sort things out" with the radicals.

"We will have to get used to this kind of political violence in Indonesia because it will last so long as social problems are unresolved - and this is not something that will be achieved overnight - and so long as the Muslim establishment fails to recover the power it had in the 1980s and 90s," Chouet says.

The October 1 triple suicide attack in Bali dealt a crippling blow to the island's tourism industry, causing foreign tourist arrivals to plummet by 22 per cent.

The bloodshed brought an abrupt end to a tourism recovery that began last year as tourists looked for destinations in Southeast Asia that had not been hit by the Boxing Day tsunami.