As the tenth
anniversary of the 2002 Bali Bombings will be on Friday 12 October 2012, I have
decided to blog about the terrorists who were involved in the mass murder. Let
me first start by introducing Joni Hendrawan A.K.A Idria before reading this
article from Michael Bachelard: ‘Bali bomber shows no remorse 10 years later’.
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| Idris |
Joni Hendrawan, also known as Idris
is an Indonesian, who after escaping conviction for his role in the 2002 Bali
Bombing, was convicted for the 2003 Marriott Hotel bombing.
Early Life:
Hendrawan grew up in the town of Pekanbaru
Indonesia, and then went on to complete his Islamic studies at Pondok Ngruki The
religious school founded in 1972 by the 'spiritual head' of Jemaah Islamiah, Abu
Bakar Bashir, and Abdullah Sungkar.
2002 Bali Bombing:
Idris played a key role in the 2002
Bali bombing in both the planning and execution stages. He attended most of the
key planning meetings for the blast, and helped secure the safe houses and the
vehicle used. He scouted the targets, taught the Sari Club suicide bomber how
to drive and he even detonated himself the smaller of the bombs outside the US
consulate.
A report released on August 2005 by
the United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO) described the events as follows:
The
investigators were thus able to recreate the bombers activities. Amrozi, Idris
and Ali Imron had simply walked into a dealership and purchased a new Yamaha
motorbike, after asking how much they could re-sell it for if they returned it
in a few days. Imron used the motorbike to plant the small bomb outside the
U.S. Consulate. Idris
then rode the motorbike as Imron drove two suicide bombers in the Mitsubishi to
the nightclub district in Kuta. He stopped near the Sari Club, instructed one
suicide bomber to put on his explosives vest and the other to arm the vehicle
bomb. The first bomber headed to Paddy's Pub. Idris then left the second bomber,
who had only learned to drive in a straight line, to drive the minivan the
short distance to the Sari Club. Idris picked up Imron on the Yamaha and the
duo headed back into Denpasar. Idris dialed the number of the Nokia to detonate
the bomb at the Consulate. The two suicide bombers exploded their devices.
Imron and Idris dropped the motorbike at a place where it eventually attracted
the attention of the caretaker.
Idris confessed his part in the
attack, however he successfully appealed conviction over the attack arguing
that to Indonesia's constitutional court that the terrorism charges were
applied retrospectively.
Arrest:
Idris was arrested in 2003 after
attempting a bank robbery to fund a new terrorist attack. He was arrested in Medan
in Sumatra after he and 10 other suspected members of Jemaah Islamiah killed
three bank employees in the robbery which netted $20,000.
Release:
He was released quietly in 2009 after
5 years of his 10 year sentence. In his first interview with Australian media
after his release, Hendrawan stated he; "would willingly wage jihad on
Indonesian soil again,"
Bali bomber shows no
remorse 10 years later
By MICHAEL BACHELARD, INDONESIA CORRESPONDENT
Oct. 1,
2012, 1:30 p.m.
IDRIS was
12km away on a motorcycle with his fellow terrorist Ali Imron when he felt as
much as heard the Bali bomb go off. “It's as if it came from underground,” he
recalls.
That
enormous explosion 10 years ago changed everything. It brought Australia
emphatically into the war on terror, it shocked Indonesia into a sustained
crack-down on the Islamic radicals multiplying in its midst, and it killed 202
people and injured hundreds more — ripping their bodies apart, burning the
flesh from their bones.
But that
night, as the subterranean rumble reached him, Idris did not spare a thought
for the hundreds of victims. His thoughts were only for himself.
“The
feeling of fear dominated,” he said in an exclusive interview in his home town
of Pekanbaru.
“[Ali
Imron and I] went to a restaurant. There was rice in front of us. We couldn't
finish it, not even a quarter of it. Even water tasted bitter … No-one talked.
We heard the sirens, ambulance, we felt really afraid.”
Idris is
a big man. One of his numerous aliases, Gembrot, means simply “fat”. We
interview him over two days in the company of another jihadi and terrorist
convict, Muhammad Rais, who sits beside him, occasionally prompting him.
Idris
speaks slowly and deliberately.
“I'm not
extra intelligent, and also not extra stupid,” he says.
But he is
extra lucky. Idris escaped conviction for the Bali bombing on a legal point
when Indonesia's constitutional court ruled that he could not be convicted
under laws passed after the bombing took place.
He was
convicted, though, of another bombing — this time of the J.W. Marriott hotel —
which killed 12 people. Idris was jailed for 10 years but released after just
five.
Now he is
a free man — by far the most important of the six Bali plotters who are out of
jail. He lives with his family and looks after his sick mother, but does not
work.
When
asked about events 10 years ago, it's clear he is still thinking largely about
himself.
What
torments him most is the question of whether he will go to heaven — whether
helping plant more than one tonne of explosives amid revellers on a holiday
island was proper “jihad,” as authorised by the Koran.
“I have
never felt glad, happy or gay about this affair. In my heart I keep hoping that
what I did was right and that I will be rewarded,” he says.
“However,
I'm always worried that it was wrong and that Allah will punish me.”
In case
he is wrong, he says, he has asked forgiveness.
“So what
I did is this: I repented to Allah and I apologised … I sort of pile it up —
that's the way it should be done in my understanding.”
Idris was
a simple country boy from a village in Sumatra when his neighbour showed him an
advertisement for scholarships to an Islamic boarding school called Al-Mukmin
at Ngruki, in Solo, Central Java.
This pesantran
was set up in 1967 by the notorious preacher, Abu Bakar Bashir, the now-jailed
spiritual leader of Indonesia's terrorist fringe.
According
to Idris: “That school was where jihad was taught”.
The man
who interviewed him for the scholarship, Abu Husna, is now in jail. Idris's
conversation about his alma mater is peppered with the names of students and
teachers imprisoned or executed for terrorist offences.
He
graduated in 1993 and went to Aceh as a teacher — part of the deal to repay his
scholarship. But in Idris's mind it was not until 1999 that his lessons about
jihad began to mesh with reality. The trigger was the nasty sectarian conflict
between Christians and Muslims which sprang up that year in Ambon.
“Among
the Ngruki alumni, this sort of news spread quickly,” Idris recalls. “I wanted
to go [to Ambon] but I didn't know how to get there. It's not like you register
yourself for a course or apply for a job. It's very secretive.”
In 2000,
the door swung open when he was introduced by another now-imprisoned
schoolmate, Tony Togar, to two of the most important jihadis in Indonesia,
Amrozi and Mukhlas — then the supreme leader of Jemaah Islamiyah in Asia and
another alumni of Ngruki school. Later in 2000, Jemaah Islamiyah conducted its
first successful operation, a wave of Christmas Eve church bombings which
killed 18 people.
Then, in
June, 2002, Idris attended a meeting in a little house in Solo, not far from
the school where his jihad training had begun. At that meeting, plans were made
for a big attack on “America and its allies” in Bali - - what they viewed as a
nest of infidel hedonism. The attack was intended to coincide with the first
anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York.
Idris was
appointed project manager.
“My role
… was to provide logistics and to prepare various things, such as providing a
house, car, surveying the target, and also preparing food,” he says. “Basically
anything my friends might need at that time.”
He
insists that everything he did was because he was ordered to do it. Mukhlas,
who was executed in 2008 for his role in the Bali bombing, was indisputably the
one giving the orders.
“I
couldn't think about if it was justified or not justified. If the senior
commander ordered us to do it, we had to,” Idris says.
What
about conscience? Humanity?
“I didn't
think, I simply followed what Mukhlas said.”
Idris's
friend, Rais chips in: “We felt at the time that Mukhlas's knowledge of Islam
was beyond us, that he had a higher access to knowledge.”
We return
to this point a number of times over two days, and Idris makes heavy weather of
it each time. He veers close to remorse, but in the end, he always comes back
to Mukhlas, Allah and the Islamic law in his defence, rejecting personal
responsibility.
“It's a
really difficult thing. What we did was not about constructing a building or
knocking down a building. It was about killing people … The heaviest burden for
us at the time was our feelings, because we didn't have pleasure doing that …
And by doing that you will have problems here and also when you die, your
spirit will also have problems … But Mukhlas said, 'You will not have a
problem'. So we just did it.”
Later,
Idris's internal debate is on full view.
“The plan
was to kill Americans and its allies. That is the target which Mukhlas decided.
Talking about the targets then, we think it's achieved. But still, if you're
talking about just Americans, it's not really achieved [7 of 202 victims were
American] … so that is why I felt personally guilty.
“Because
the targets we aimed at weren't really there, so I conclude that perhaps that's
the reason why we were arrested … but there was no way that we could tell
whether there were Americans or Russians or Australians there, because they are
all white.”
There
were three bombs in Bali that night. The smallest of them Ali Imron had placed
outside the US Consulate and was code-named “small house”. The second was in a
vest which suicide bomber Feri walked into Paddy's bar. The third, and by far
the largest — more than one tonne of explosives — was packed into 12 filing
cabinets in the back of a Mitsubishi L300 van which Idris had bought and then
escorted to the street outside the Sari Club.
That bomb
they code-named “big house”, and it was wired to detonate in three ways — the
first was attached to the handbrake, which suicide bomber Arnasan, could pull;
the second was geared to blow if someone opened the door of the van from the
outside; and the third, in case Arnasan lost his nerve, was a remote device
triggered by a mobile phone placed among the explosives.
That part
of the plan, however, did not go smoothly.
“When I
tried to call it, the phone rang in my pocket,” says Idris.
“I took
the phone from my pocket and asked Ali Imron, 'What's this phone for?' He said,
'That's big house'. As we were talking we heard the boom. I think the guy
pulled the hand brake.”
Ten years
after the Bali bombing, most of the perpetrators are either dead or in jail.
But a number are free. The four men who financed the attack by robbing a gold
store have been released, with the consensus being that their contribution was
more or less unwitting. Another who is free is the “local boy”, Maskur Abdul
Kadir, whose only involvement was to find the house where the bomb was made.
Idris is
different. He was deeply involved in the plot from start to finish. Is it fair
that he is a free man when, for example, Schapelle Corby is serving out a 15
year sentence in Bali for smuggling cannabis?
“It is
the state who created the law … I have served the sentence given to me,” Idris
simply says.
“Whether
it was fair or not I cannot say, because it is the state that applied the law
to me.”
But Idris
says his prison term was long enough for him to change forever his
understanding of jihad. Now he believes it should be carried out only in a war
zone. Asked if Indonesia is a war zone, he says that only places such as
Afghanistan are legitimate fields for jihad.
It's a
similar point now used by radicals across Indonesia, including the current head
of Jemaah Islamiya, Abu Rusdan, and Bali bomb-maker Umar Patek at his recent
trial.
Idris
says he has neither the money nor the connections to go and fight with the
Taliban, but he admits that he would join the battle if sectarian violence
broke out once again between Christians and Muslims in Indonesia.
“If there
is such a zone in Indonesia, of course I will go there,” he says.
This
suggests again that he is still prepared to kill for his religion.
So, late
in the second day of the interview I return to the point of personal
responsibility. I show Idris pictures ? taken in 2002 of maimed and burned
bodies, of the wreck of buildings and the remains of the van he bought to
contain the bomb.
Idris
looks at the photographs impassively then talks about vehicle types and the
“semi-permanent” nature of buildings in Bali.
So I ask
him directly how he felt on seeing the images.
He pauses
for thought.
“When I
saw the pieces of bodies I just thought something like, 'Wow,' or 'Oh my God',
because I know there isn't any Islamic law about this,” he says. “It's like,
'Look how much damage I did'.”
COMMENTS: Abolitionists claim that criminals, in this case, terrorist might have
a bad childhood that lead them to way of crime so they do not need to be put to
death and may get a chance to learn from their mistakes. They also claim that
executing a terrorist makes them become a martyr and therefore they should be
kept alive.
I personally recommend
them to speak to a terrorist like Idris and ask themselves these questions:
1. Can you truly rehabilitate a terrorist?
2. Does life without parole really mean what it is? Why is Idris out of
prison?
3. Some of those Bali Bombers have either been executed or killed by
military action. What use is it to keep some of them alive?
4. If terrorist do not fear the death penalty, why is Idris so happy to
be alive and even out of jail?
Idris was lucky enough
to escaped the death penalty, unlike Amrozi.
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