Bombs Away

The recent arrest of bomb makers in Palembang, South Sumatera, was an implosion in your correspondent's confidence level of the security situation in the country. In an ironic twist of development, the Australian government had earlier in the same week, declared the situation in Indonesia to be safer and had modified their travel advisory accordingly.

As this newspaper went to press, the details about the bomber and their deadly devices were still pouring out. Fingers are already being pointed towards cells of JI and links with OBL appear to exist.

While this newspaper applauds the dilligence of the SAS-trained 88th detachment special unit, questions linger on how successful have pre-emptive actions and policies been.

As it stands, clearly there appears to be similarities between people arrested in Palembang with other arrests in the rest of the world. These would be young-ish people disillussioned with the general condition surrounding them.

The root cause of such conditions are unemployment and a tendency to surrender to promises to leave behind the ills of the material world for in exchange for eternal happiness.

Clearly this is a classic textbook case normally outlined in standard texts on Economic Development for instance Michael Todaro's authoritative book with the same title. And as even more made clear, there is no one size fits all solution for the issue.

Nevertheless it pays for the government to be vigilant in identifying the trigger points early on and mitigate them accordingly. One of the best gift that the current administration can give to the incoming 2009 winner will be to ensure that the issue does not blow up in their face.