Indonesia's Police Surprise Cynics in Bali

Dec. 5 -- He beamed, he chuckled, he waved gamely at a bank of news cameras monitoring his every move through a glass wall — and he sent a chill down the spines of most Australians tuned in to the daily news.

Weeks after the devastating Bali blasts, the Indonesian police — with a little help from Australian, U.S. and British investigators — had nabbed a suspect in the Oct. 12 attack on a Bali nightclub, and they were sparing no effort to let the world know they were on the job.

Amrozi — a 40-year-old Javanese man who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name — was nabbed in East Java on Nov. 6, three weeks after a bomb blast ripped through the Sari Club on Kuta beach, killing nearly 200 people, many of them Australians.

According to the police, Amrozi had admitted to owning the van used to bomb the popular tourist spot and to buying explosives.

And amid mounting international pressure on Indonesia to crack down on the perpetrators of the worst terrorist attack on Indonesian soil, Amrozi was being questioned by police chief D'ai Bachtiar in Bali in full view — but out of earshot — of the international media.

In a glass-walled room, the boyishly handsome Javanese with a mop of soft dark hair framing his chiseled face seemed not the least intimidated by his high-level interrogation as he grinned at journalists and even coaxed broad smiles from the faces of the policemen questioning him.

But for Australians who had lost their loved ones — surfers, vacationers and honeymooners for the most — in the gruesome attack, the public relations display was not amusing.

Amrozi's smirking performance led to a huge outcry as local papers dubbed him "the smiling assassin" and Indonesian police officials were forced to defend the public interrogation.

Report a Missing Chicken, But Watch Your Cow

By all accounts, the Indonesian police have a lot to be defensive about.

"If you report a chicken missing, you are likely to lose your cow," goes a popular Indonesian saying, reflecting the widespread distrust of an institution ridden with corruption, burdened with poor funding and saddled with a reputation for brutality and incompetence.

"The Indonesian police force is probably the most hated institution bar none in the country," says Sidney Jones, Indonesia Program Director of the International Crisis Group. "It has done nothing in the past to lend it credibility among the Indonesian people."

A branch of the Indonesian military during the 32-year rule of Suharto, the police became an independent force after the fall of the Indonesian strongman in 1998. But the initial optimism over the much-awaited separation quickly dwindled when the police force seemed wholly incapable of overcoming its history of brutality and corruption.

Amid widespread domestic fears that Amrozi would be mistreated in detention — in keeping with a popular joke that the Indonesian police could make a corpse confess — many experts say the police felt compelled to show the world, and especially ordinary Indonesians, that their Islamist suspect was being well treated in detention.