Terrorism in Indonesia

"As Sidney Jones has argued, “The threat of terrorism [in Indonesia] is real, yet only a few Muslims are radicals, and even fewer advocate violence.”"

"Put simply, eradicating terrorism in Indonesia is not as straightforward as it is in many other jurisdictions. Anti-terrorism policies must recognise the peculiar Indonesian context and background."

"The details of the massacre of somewhere between 250,000 and 600,000 Indonesians in 1965 are only now beginning to emerge. After a failed coup d’état in 1965, the Indonesian army (with at least tacit approval from the United States) took its revenge on the Communists. The army encouraged nationalist and Muslim youth to settle old scores; gangs of Muslim youths massacred Chinese peasants in the most horrific manner. “ ‘No-one went out after 6 pm, recalls a Chinese whose family fled East Java. ‘They cut off women’s breasts; they threw so many bodies in the sea that people were afraid to eat fish. My brother still had to serve in the shop. In the morning young Muslims would come in swaggering, with necklaces of human ears’ ” (Guardian Weekly [23 September 1990]). In Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, at least two hundred thousand civilians were killed."