Deluded to the end
Stephen Fitzpatrick | November 10, 2008
Article from:  The Australian

BEHIND their backs, they were known as Huey, Dewey and Louie, or, in Indonesian, the "quack-quack trio", after the Disney comic book characters.

But in the closed world and shut-down minds of the criminals responsible for the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, there lay scant room for such amusement.

Not even in the taunting grin of Amrozi bin Nurhasyim - the smiling baby of the gang, whose early attempts at social disturbance went little further than defecating on the graves of ancestors in his east Java village of Tenggulun - could there be said to be any real joy.

Literalists to the end, by necessity incapable of drawing nuance in conversation, or of tracing the fall of light and shade in life, the three mass-murderers gloated over their horrifying achievement at every opportunity, gesticulating and hurling obscenities at any foreign audience they could summon.

The death toll of their endeavour was bewildering, then and now: it is baldly restated to every passer-by at the giant stone memorial erected on Jalan Legian, the pulsing thoroughfare in the heart of Bali's tourist district.

Two hundred and two dead in the terrible inferno, 88 of them Australian holiday-makers; 38 Indonesians, many of whom were Muslims, the rest mostly Balinese Hindus.

Now Amrozi, his older brother Ali Gufron bin Nurhasyim, also known as Mukhlas, and Abdul Azis, better known by the self-bestowed faux religious title Imam Samudra ("preacher of the oceans"), have finally been dispatched.

Each was taken to a secluded spot on the heavily guarded prison island of Nusakambangan in southern Java early yesterday and, at 12.15am (4.15am Australian eastern summer time), shot by a firing squad of 12 paramilitary police armed with high-powered rifles, led by two senior officers.

They were secured to wooden posts 5m apart. Nine clerics were on hand to offer whatever solace they could give to the condemned men.

They reportedly shouted "God is great", before being shot by members of the elite Brimob police brigade.

In the original Donald Duck tales, by adventure's end the trouble-prone nephews usually end up on the right side of the law.

And in their own twisted ways, Amrozi and co, as they are generally described in more mainstream Indonesian news reporting, were hoping to also wind up seated at their God's right hand.

They thought they were on some kind of spiritual quest, insisting afterwards that Australia was a particular target in their attacks for its mistreatment of Muslims in the US-led war on terror.

Except that support for their cause within Indonesia was entirely illusory: symptomatic, it could be said, of the sort of delusional mindset that planned and carried out the Bali atrocities in the first place.

Even in the home village of the two brothers Amrozi and Mukhlas, there remains bewilderment at the impact they have had on Indonesia's standing in the world, and in Australia's eyes.

"I feel some sadness," Abu Sholeh, the head of Tenggulun - population 2500 - where the brothers grew up and were buried, tells The Australian.

"Because they are my citizens. But hopefully it will never happen here again; hopefully it is only Amrozi who does (this kind of thing)."

Although the Muslim boarding school established by older brother Djafar Sodiq still operates in the village, most of its students are from elsewhere in Indonesia, not Tenggulun, according to Abu Sholeh. His people are not hardliners, he insists.

If the trio had any kind of afterlife experience on their prison island in the early hours of yesterday, it would have proved a disappointment, contrary to whatever had been proposed by the ramblings of preachers such as the hate-filled Abu Bakar Bashir as he gingered them up for their fates.

Bashir, a co-founder of the Jemaah Islamiah movement which produced and nurtured Amrozi, Mukhlas and Samudra as well as a host of other misfits whose prime motivation was essentially a religious xenophobia, has long engaged in the sort of resentful pedagogy that keeps grudges ticking over.

He established the al-Mukmin boarding school in the central Java city of Solo where so many of the Bali bombers were educated, including Amrozi and several of his brothers.

Bashir remains implacable in his insistence the only lives worth valuing are Muslim ones, although his fiery theological bluster has more lately masked a savage power struggle within his own former organisation, the Indonesian Mujaheddin Council, which sidelined him in recent internal elections.

The elderly Yemeni-descended cleric promptly announced the formation of a new religious lobby group, the grandly titled Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid (Supporters of Monotheism), which he seems to hope will siphon off the hardcore of the MMI, itself often merely a front for the grander pan-Islamic aspirations of Jemaah Islamiah.

But despite the almost overwhelmingly Muslim nature of much of Indonesian society, and the shrill calls of agitators such as Bashir, what support there may have been for the bombers' position, even among the hardliners, seems to be waning.

Even Hasan al-Jufri, from the usually strident Muslim Defenders Front (FPI), was dismissive of the trio's fate in a recent conversation with The Australian.

"I absolutely have no objection (to their executions)," the Jakarta-based activist said days before the executions.