Taking Action — page 2

Mahathir may have good reason to be concerned. Abubakar spent 13 years living in exile in Malaysia, a time when he is believed to have formed a partnership with the man intelligence agencies describe as Southeast Asia's most dangerous terrorist: Riduan (Hambali) Isamuddin. "Hambali is Abubakar Ba'asyir's vice chairman," Indonesian Defense Minister Matori Abdul Djali told reporters on Saturday. "Hambali has always been mentioned by those who did bombings in the past as their commander." Hambali, who has been on the run since early last year after being implicated by Indonesian police in a string of bombings that left 12 dead and scores wounded, is alleged to have links to al-Qaeda stretching back to the early 1990s. With Osama bin Laden's disciples seemingly back on the attack in recent weeks everywhere from Kuwait to Bali, Hambali's strong connections to al-Qaeda have redoubled fears about what might be in the works. "They still have the capacity for a spectacular operation," says a U.S. counterintelligence official. "In fact, that's what we're expecting next or in the near future. We don't have a clue where."

Another potential source of trouble are demonstrations by Abubakar sympathizers, a possibility that has already led to the posting of riot police outside his hospital in Solo. Some Indonesian leaders are confident, however, that the reaction will be calm. "I don't buy the backlash-fury argument," says Amien Rais, chairman of the country's highest legislative body, the People's Consultative Assembly. "Whoever the perpetrators of Bali are, the Indonesian people will be happy to see them caught."

For now, at ground zero there is little encouragement to be drawn from the investigation of the Bali bombings. A joint team of Indonesian and international police—by far the largest contingent were drawn from Australia—combed for evidence through the wreckage spread over hundreds of meters of once bustling storefronts. Nearly a hundred witnesses and a few suspects were questioned. Despite a welter of confusing and often contradictory claims, however, by week's end their efforts had gleaned only a handful of concrete facts:

•The composition of the bomb, initial test results suggest, was a cocktail of C4 plastic explosive, TNT and the fertilizer ammonium nitrate, tons of which regional intelligence services say has been purchased in the past year by Jemaah Islamiah militants;

•The bomb was planted in a Mitsubishi L-300 van;

•The fact that three bombs had been detonated in succession in a sophisticated operation, security sources said, was reminiscent of an IRA tactic which is called a "come on," designed to cause maximum casualties by driving the victims into a confined killing zone.

Otherwise, there was little sign of progress by the end of the week following the blasts, a situation best summed up by National Police Chief D'ai Bachtiar: "We haven't even reached a stage of identifying suspects," he told TIME, "let alone which group he or she belongs to"—an assessment echoed by Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty. "This could take months, even years," Keelty says. "But what the investigation already shows is that this was a sophisticated and very well-organized attack, not the work of an amateur."

At least Megawati is beginning to look a bit more presidential. Rizal Mallarangeng, a political analyst who doubles as a speechwriter for Megawati, says she was already leaning toward firmer action following months of U.S. pressure that included a call from President Bush in September and the visit of a high-level U.S. delegation a few days later lead by Karen Brooks, Asia director for the National Security Council. But the explosions in Bali changed everything, according to Megawati's husband, influential businessman Taufik Kiemas. Megawati is now committed to the fight against terrorism in Indonesia and once her mind is made up, she "never turns back," says Taufik. "She is not afraid and wants to finish the problem."

Megawati's decisions in the wake of the atrocity were certainly uncharacteristically swift. The Sunday morning after the blasts she called together her top security advisers to discuss what to do. The meeting was followed by a brief press conference, one of only a handful since she took office in July 2001. The President then flew to Bali where she toured the site barely 12 hours after the bombings and visited victims in hospital.

At an emergency Cabinet meeting the following day, Megawati dropped her usual passivity and pushed the assembled ministers to agree on a rapid issuing of an executive order that would allow law enforcement officers to detain suspects for up to six months in jail without charges or ironclad proof of wrongdoing. Overriding objections from Vice President Hamzah Haz—who leads a staunchly conservative Islamic party and has repeatedly expressed his support for radicals like Abubakar—Megawati insisted that the decree be "finished in days, not weeks." After much delay and wrangling among her ministers, Megawati finally signed the decree at midnight six days later.

Whether the law will be a panacea for Indonesia's terrorism plague, however, is open to doubt. The new legislation will give police "a big stick," says a source who works closely with law enforcement officials in Jakarta. "But they'll just thrash around, arrest a lot of people for show and then quietly release them later. The intelligence services have been so weakened and politicized in the past couple of years that they simply aren't effective anymore. They haven't been tracking these groups, and even where they have, institutional rivalries can cripple them."

Whatever institutional reforms are put in place, few dispute that the ultimate fate of all such moves depends largely on one person: Megawati. And that, even her supporters acknowledge, could be a problem. "She's valuable as a symbol and provides a sense of stability," says one of her advisers. "But she really doesn't like to manage or even talk to her ministers very much. And this kind of a problem that we have now, the terrorism issue, needs close attention to detail. We just hope she can change in this crisis." On that hangs the future not only of Indonesia but of Asia's war against terrorism.

— With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington, Zamira Loebis/Jakarta, Andrew Perrin/Denpasar and Kuta, Nelly Sindayen/Zamboanga and Jason Tedjasukmana/Jakarta

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