ITN reports on the bombings at hotels in Jakarta, Indonesia on Friday morning:
Aljazeera English has a detailed interview with an eyewitness survivor:
The difference between Friday morning’s strikes and previous bombings in Indonesia some years ago is that there was initially a question of how stable Indonesia was after emerging from dictatorship. The bombers earlier in this decade hoped to bring down a government and perhaps to install a fundamentalist one in its stead. After various elections, it seems clear, however, that the new democratic government has taken root and cannot be so easily shaken. The tactic of terrorism can be a form of politics, as in Algeria in the late 1950s. Or terrorism can just be revenge or the result of crackpot dreams that are wholly unrealistic. If the Jemaah Islamiya or ‘Islamic Group’, an al-Qaeda affiliate, was behind this attack, it is just proving its own desperation and political irrelevance.
In Indonesia during the past decade, it is democracy that has gone from strength to strenght, and it is winning.
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