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DEATH PENALTY-INDONESIA: Bali Bombers’ Reprieve Likely To Be Brief

Stephen de Tarczynski

MELBOURNE, Feb 15 2008 (IPS) - Lawyers for the three Islamist militants sentenced to death for their roles in the 2002 Bali bombings have succeeded in winning an execution delay – but their last-ditch effort to save their clients from a firing squad is likely to be only temporary.

Amrozi, Ali Ghufron, and Imam Samudra were sentenced to death in 2003 for their roles in the 2002 bombings in Bali that left 202 people dead. Eighty-eight Australian holidaymakers on the Indonesian island were among the victims. The execution date for the bombers was set in 2006, but has been delayed by appeals.

On Jan 2, the three officially learned that the Indonesian Supreme Court had dismissed their final appeals and they faced imminent execution. The 30-day period for seeking mercy from Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono which began then has now expired, although the three had always vowed they would never seek pardon.

But earlier this month, it was learned that their defence lawyers had successfully applied for a last-ditch procedural review by Indonesia’s Supreme Court. “It’s really only a hearing to determine the appropriateness of the judicial process. It doesn’t actually go to the question of the sentence,” Damien Kingsbury, Indonesia expert and associate professor at Australia’s Deakin University, told IPS.

The review was expected to delay the execution date by at least three to four months. “I wouldn’t expect it inside of that. It could be longer,” he said.

Kingsbury expected that the capital sentence would be carried out after the review. But he cautioned that absolute certainty was impossible as the Indonesian judicial system was “enormously malleable and inconsistent”.

Experts remain divided over whether the eventual executions of the Bali bombers would result in a backlash by Islamic extremists, something the bombers themselves have forecast.

“(The executions) would become the light for the faithful ones and burning hell fire for the infidels and hypocrites,” the bombers said in a joint statement written last September.

Former Bali police chief, General I Made Mangku Pastika, has warned of militant Islamists wanting to avenge any executions. This would damage Indonesia’s broader counter-terrorism campaign.

“Are we capable of coping with the backlash? Are we ready to have the execution inside Bali or outside Bali?” he asked in an interview published by a Sydney newspaper in 2005.

But Kingsbury was sceptical whether many in Indonesia would find inspiration in the bombers’ martyrdom. The number of “like-minded people” was less than before, though these “could stage further bombings in protest at the executions”.

Some kind of public, non-violent display of solidarity was certainly possible, he said. But the organisation Jemaah Islamiya (JI) had been seriously weakened over the past couple of years and its capacity to carry out attacks diminished.

JI, which the three bombers admitted to being members of, during their trials, is an organisation purportedly linked to al-Qaida. It is believed to have been behind a series of bombings in Indonesia and the Philippines. JI’s professed aim is to establish an Islamic state in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and southern areas of the Philippines and Thailand.

Sidney Jones, a senior advisor with the International Crisis Group’s (ICG) Asia programme, agreed that there could be a public show of anger over the executions of the convicted bombers. But she doubted whether this would escalate into planned violence.

“I think that there are likely to be demonstrations or large gatherings of their supporters in their home town, especially if the bodies are returned home for burial,” Jones told IPS.

“But I don’t think we should necessarily assume that there will be a backlash in terms of some kind of terrorist actions in retaliation towards the police or toward the Indonesian government.”

She added: “The general assessment, particularly within JI ranks, is that they’re too weak to carry anything out.” This was the view of Abu Dujana, a JI leader arrested in June 2007. Also, the rank-and-file who had called for retaliation for their losses in police operations in Poso in central Sulawesi had been told each time that the time was “not favourable”.

Noor Huda Ismail, a Southeast Asia analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S.-based think-tank, believed that the capture of Abu Dujana and other supporters was “a major blow to the network”. But he warned that JI remained a threatening force. Executing the Bali bombers could be followed by violence unless there were “meticulous” counter-terrorism measures beforehand.

“Experience in the last seven years has indicated that JI is a resilient clandestine organisation and it has the ability to adapt to external rifts and crackdown efforts by the authorities,” Ismail wrote in the foundation’s magazine, Terrorism Focus, last year.

“The continual arrest of JI members suggests that its numbers are consistently greater than most security analysts speculate… Indonesia and other countries may still suffer from new terrorist attacks, though possibly not large in scale …,” he warned.