Imam Samudra's Revenge

On the evening of 12 October 2002 two suicide bombers detonated bombs inside Paddy's Pub and in front of the Sari Club in Kuta, one of Bali's main tourist districts. Two hundred and two people were killed including eighty-eight Australians and thirty-eight Indonesians.

The 'field coordinator' of this terrorist operation was the Bantenese Abdul Aziz alias Imam Samudra, who was later executed for his role in the attacks.

Imam Samudra's Revenge examines why Samudra bombed nightclubs in Bali paying due regard to the social and political context provided by both his experiences as a youthful member of the Darul Islam movement in Indonesia and Pakistan, and the outbreak of religious violence in Indonesia from 1999. Yet these same factors also influenced his colleagues within the extremist Islamist group Jema'ah Islamiyah, and they strongly disapproved of his actions in Bali. Therefore, it is also important to consider Samudra's personality; and, more particularly, his proneness to humiliation which led him via the vengeful ideology of global jihadism to embrace terrorism in Bali.

Angus McIntyre is an Honorary Associate at La Trobe University and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University. He is the author of The Indonesian Presidency: The Shift from Personal toward Constitutional Rule (2005) and has edited two other volumes: Aging and Political Leadership (1988) and Indonesian Political Biography: In Search of Cross-Cultural Understanding (1993). In the years 2009-2012, he worked with colleagues on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project concerning the origins and development of Islamic terrorist behaviour in Indonesia. His contribution to this joint endeavour eventually took shape as this work.