ABSTRACT
Although the events of 9/11 were appropriately noted and deplored in Indonesia, they were not the defining moment they were in the US.1 Their impact, halfway around the world from ‘Ground Zero’, stemmed less from the events than their aftershocks, which were three-fold. First, incidents and movements once considered largely local came to be perceived, and sometimes actually were, global. Journalists, scholars and politicians – particularly in the US – looked for and often found links with al-Qaeda in what might previously have been described in more parochial terms. Anti-American Islamist groups, coincidentally, became increasingly aware of and connected with similar organizations around the world. Second, the response of the US to 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, produced a backlash in public opinion. In what Zachary Abuza (2007: 56) calls the ‘Al Jazeera effect’ Indonesians began ‘identifying more with the plights of their co-religionists around the Islamic world, especially the Iraqis and Palestinians’. Hundreds of young Indonesians rushed to join their Muslim brothers as volunteers in Afghanistan and Iraq where some received training in unconventional warfare. A Pew Global Attitudes poll (Pew International Center for People and the Press 2005) found that the percentage of Muslims in Indonesia who believed that Islam was under siege almost doubled from 33 to 59 between 2002 and 2003 before falling to 46 per cent in 2005; 80 per cent felt more solidarity with the Islamic world than they did in the past. Finally, the US and some other Western democracies tilted the emphasis in foreign policies more toward security and away from democratization. The shift to a ‘war on terror’ significantly changed the context of interactions between the governments of the US and Indonesia, in ways that some saw as reminiscent of the American’s 1965 Cold War backing of the anti-communist coup that helped bring the Suharto dictatorship into power.
