Why would a suicide bomber bother to leave the vehicle bearing his bomb? I ask this question to convince myself that it was not a suicide bombing. Amid the global terrorist threat, my friends and I have found some comfort in the thought that our homegrown Islamic extremists seem to enjoy life too much to think of suicide. Our local terrorists kidnap, rape, pillage, mutilate and murder, but they dont kill themselves.
The motorcycle rider, however, was reportedly checking something in his bike when the bomb exploded. Its possible that the bomb had gone off prematurely, so its still possible that he was a suicide bomber.
But even if the Zamboanga explosion was a suicide bombing, I still cling to the hope that the madman must have been a foreigner, or at least had lived too long abroad where he got his crazy ideas. Reports said he was in Zamboanga simply to renew working documents for Malaysia.
Both the police and military have tagged the Abu Sayyaf as the culprit, with authorities pointing to a four-member urban terrorist squad affiliated with Jemaah Islamiyah as the bombing team. Normally I would dismiss these early pronouncements from investigators as mere efforts to please the commander-in-chief and calm a jittery public. But based on details about the explosion, it doesnt appear to be the handiwork of communist rebels or rightists out to destabilize the administration. There was some talk about a personal grudge against the owner of the karaoke bar. Do Filipinos bomb packed restaurants to settle a personal grudge?
And you thought the Abu Sayyaf had been neutralized. This is one dramatic comeback.
Yet I have always felt a sense of detachment from the Islamist threat. I thought if terrorists came here, it would be chiefly for R&R.
Years ago when intelligence agents gave me details about the Malate explosion and the flight of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, I thought the agents had simply seen too many spy thrillers. This year I finally started believing after reading the same details about Yousef and his terrorist plots code-named Oplan Bojinka in Simon Reeves book The New Jackals.
When police rounded up men in a Muslim community and blamed them for the LRT bombing, I thought we had been treated to the usual suspects. My suspicions turned out to be true; the suspects were subsequently released. But the cops werent entirely off the mark: Jemaah Islamiyah has since been held responsible for the bombing.
Other books and articles have discussed Bojinka and the road to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 last year. Meanwhile, suspected terrorists being interrogated in the United States have since provided information about the operations of Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia particularly in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.
These men and their other cohorts have been identified and their pictures disseminated, but the Jakarta government appears powerless to go after them. Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri is no Asian Iron Lady; she dares not rile the Muslim fundamentalists in her country by going after Jemaah Islamiyah. If she goes after the Islamists, she risks a revival of the violent unrest that has rocked her country for decades, and the possible collapse of her government.
As we have seen in many instances in the past, unrest in Indonesia also pulls down the rest of the region. But if Megawati allows her country to become the new Islamist haven, I dont think she will maintain her hold on power too long either, unless shes willing to serve as a puppet president of the Indonesian equivalent of the Taliban.
The Philippines can intensify cooperation with Singapore and Malaysia to fight Jemaah Islamiyah. But if Indonesia, the worlds most populous Muslim state, will serve as the new base of al-Qaeda and the Islamists, the region is in for a long fight.
Earlier this year a Manila-based foreign journalist told me seriously he wasnt ruling out the possibility that one day Osama bin Laden would turn up in the Philippines, with a Filipina wife. These days Im so convinced or paranoid about the terrorist threat I cant even laugh at the journalist.