Losing Friends in Indonesia

A major casualty in President Bush's "war on terrorism" has been the good will of moderate Muslims toward the United States. Nowhere is this more evident than in Indonesia. "The bottom has indeed fallen out of support for the United States," note the American authors of "Changing Minds, Winning Peace," a policy paper distributed to US embassies in October. "In Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, only 15 percent view the US favorably, compared with 61 percent in early 2002."

This precipitous drop--the largest in the world, as one US diplomat in Jakarta points out with sadness--is twisting policies and politics in Indonesia, a fledgling democracy already struggling with a shaky economy, rampant corruption and internal separatist movements. "The genius of the radicals is that their aims have been augmented by Bush's policies," said Nurcholish Madjid, a highly respected Muslim scholar and a presidential hopeful. "Indonesians are not happy with the war against terrorism, despite the success of their police in fighting it, primarily because they don't trust the US government," said Sidney Jones, southeast Asia project director of the International Crisis Group (ICG). "They don't want to be a part of a US-led campaign. On this, there's virtually no difference between the moderates and the fringe radicals."

Indonesians criticize Bush's conflation of Arab terrorism with Islam, and complain that his policies demonstrate a double standard, chief among the examples being the US failure to respond to human rights abuses against Palestinians by Israel and visa policies that make it extremely difficult for Indonesians, no matter what their religion, to enter the United States. They condemn his disregard for the United Nations and worry about his unilateral war in Iraq. "The situation in Iraq today bears momentous implications on the global war against terrorism," Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda warned at an international conference on security this month, adding that the "arbitrary pre-emptive war" against Iraq has set a precedent for other nations.

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