THE EMAILS AND TELEPHONE CALLS I received after I wrote the piece yesterday led me thinking about the Bali bombings three years ago. I did not have the guts to write about it then. It remains a theory, as what I wrote yesterday is, but they remain plausible theories. It will be years before they are proved right, by someone looking at the causes of the Bali bombings. Historians, and journalists, looking for what happened miss the causes, often lie. They look at the dominant event, and interview people of their recollection of it, and miss the larger story, which is why it took place. If you read Patrick Keith's book, Ousted, the story of an insider's account of why Singapore was ousted from Malaysia in 1965, you get the impression that it was wholly Tunku's fault and Lee Kuan Yew was blameless. Much like the Iraq war, where the Americans are blameless and insurgents are guilty of invading their own land. But the two men represented two different points of view. Singapore would have remained in Malaysia had Mr Lee Kuan Yew behaved then as he behaves now. Patrick Keith, who left Malaysia for Australia forty ears ago, wrote the book, which is pubiished in Singapore and (not yet) released in Malaysia – the Special Branch has not cleared it for distribution) as a senior government official involved in the drama. But Singapore would have left Malaysia in 1965, because Mr Lee did not understand the Tengku, and it was the Tengku who held the cards. And he put in charge of the negotiations those who wanted Singapore to be out of Malaysia. All this remains a theory, although books are coming out by historians and journalists who suggest the Tengku's raison d'ete was correct and Mr Lee's wrong.
There is an Australian researcher in town looking at the early foundantion of ASEAN, and speaking to the people involved in it, and I have accompanied her on many occasions, the story she got was not what the printed records of historians and researchers reveal. So, which are theories, and which facts? Or do participants lose their objectivity 40 years after the event, and it is the historian and the book writer of the period who has the facts correct? There is a fetish about "correctness" of facts, but how historians and journalists get their facts correct is by going to who is in authority and take their word for it. They do not delve into events beyond what they cannot see. Four days after the Bali bombings last week, it is a replay of events three years ago at the Bali bombings, but the reporting is the same. There is no attempt at anaysis, except to blame Al Qaeda and its fraternal organisations. Indonesia is not allowed to conduct its own inquiries, Australia, like the Bali bombings in 2002, have offered to 'help' Indonesia to solve the 'crime". But is Australia coming in to help or to rub out its own involvement? We do not know if Australia is involved, but reporters were quick to blame Al Qaeda and its fraternal organisations. And they would not blame Al Qaeda and others if the Western embassies do not say so. (I have worked for Reuters, and I could not write a story until a Western embassy 'confirmed' it.) It has to do with the war in Iraq and the war on terror. It is not going well, as any invasion would not, but it is going worse than in Vietnam. Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country, and it was important to the 'West' it is on board. So pressure is put on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyone and his governent, and the result is conflict between the Indonesian people and its government, just as there is in Pakistan.
But making Islam an enemy is a mistake. Islam as we know it is as told us by Western or Western-educated scholars or politicians. But this will be accepted by the Western educated, and those who think that the West is always right. The great unwashed, or the hoi polloi, does not accept it. They go on their lives by referring to the Koran and Islam as they have been told or taught in the mosques or madrasahs. As we saw in Vietnam, the people believed in Ho Chi Minh and those who supported the West believed in money, and villas in the West. It was an uneven fight. Those who supported the West had a bolt hole they could escape into if their prescriptions failed, and the lnationalist, like the Vietnamese people, had to stay and fight. In Iraq, it is different than in Vietnam: the senior ministers in the US-led government are all Iraqis in name, but hold Western, mostly American or British, citizenship. In Austraiia, you cannot be elected to parliament if you hold dual citizenship, but in Iraq you are welcomed if you do!. But the war in Iraq is not going well. Even its erstwhile supporters now turn against it. Western journalists are now writing whether there is an end to the Iraqi tunnel.
The war in Iraq is an information battle. The collapse of the two towers in Iraq is blamed on the Moslems, but, as we learn, how why were the Jews and others moving away from the twin towers a week before the attack? They knew something the rest of the world did not. In Britain, an Algerian pilot is arrested while he is resting from a regular flight because his name mistakenly appears in the American records on the 9/11 disaster. But it is the West that controls the information. So it thinks. But the people around the world, Muslims and others, see a West cracking up, plugging information hole after another, to see that its press releases get pride of place around the world. But education is a great leveller, and the great unwashed are mostly educated, though not in Western universities, and certainly not in the Western tradition, and they think for themselves. The Al Jazeera reporter in Spain is jailed for interviewing Osama bin Laden. It puts out a dangerous signal for Western media reporters, especially if they are caught by the insurgents. It is a de facto statement that the Western reporters are bedded with the Western governments all over the world. I have always had a suspecion this is true, but the Western governments, by its action, confirms it.
The West is angry with Burma and North Korea, for they do not follow the Western dictates of what is good for them. But it is these countries that prepares itself for the years ahead. They do not fit in with the world as the West sees it, but it is preparing itself for the day after the West is defeated. Somewhat like Malaysia on the defensive when Singapore's progress is discussed vis a vis its northern neighbur. But come 2061 or thereabouts, Singapore would form part of not Malaysia but of Johore. The Malay does not pluck the durian but wait for it to fall. I had thought, and one of the reasons for which I was banned from Singapore, that Singapore would take Johore. Not now. The Singaporean belief that Malaysia would not attack the island because of US troops in the island is misplaced. Singapore thinks in months, Malaysia in centuries. This would be a theory, as of my belief in Vietnam in 1966 that North Vietnam would win. It was a theory then but not now!
So let us go back to the Bali bombing three years ago. It had the desired effect because a large number of Westerners were killed. But could the Isamicists have done it? This is one of the emails I received from London: "Take the last Bali bombing, the big one that killed 300 people. If you ask how a bearded computer technician, a scooter mechanic and a couple of other jokers could have put together explosion material killing hundreds, destroying dozens of buildings, hundreds of cars, and leaving a sizable crater in theground, the answer cannot but run counter to the Al-Qaida-islamist line of attack taken by western and ultimately the Indonesian governemnts. ... A blast of that magnitude would involve professionals, and military explosives such as C4, which only the establishment miltary (including the Indonesian) have stockpiles of. Bearded civilians touting the Koran do not normally have free access to such things. ... Maybe it wasn't C4, but something much worse...? But that could only have been developped in the richcountries, not in poor ones like Indonesia, let alone in the homes and hovels of local islamists." But this is, as I said, an information war. The West must be seen to be winning. So it is all right for the United States to ask countries to join the 'war on terror' in Iraq, but not all right for foreigners to fight on the side of insurgency in Iraq. But there are alternate forms of information, and Al Jazeera provides that for the people. The Al Jazeera statement that its reporter, sentenced for interviewing Osama, remains on its payroll for the duration of his sentence, is not well known, but it shows that the Western governments have a long information war ahead of them in which they are the loser. If Osama bin Laden and his fraternal cousins have the wherewithal to bomb as governments do in distant lands, then the West is really in trouble.
M.G.G. Pillai
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