THE Jakarta bombers aimed to destabilise Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's technocratic, mainstream, economically liberal government days after its landslide re-election, says one of Australia's leading Indonesia experts.

Tim Lindsey, director of Melbourne University's Asian Law Centre and chairman of the Australia Indonesia Institute, said yesterday that although the number of supporters of terrorist violence in the country of 240 million was "almost unmeasurably tiny", they could not be entirely eradicated.

Professor Lindsey said even Jemaah Islamiah's claim to have 5000 members was probably exaggerated. "But this group is incredibly successful, given their lack of resources and of support," he said.

"They have been there for 60 years, and over and over again their extremist views have been defeated at the ballot box. None of the presidential candidates was backed by Islamist parties.

"Nevertheless, they have been able to dominate foreign perceptions of Indonesia, and to drive foreign policy and security policy, in their aim to weaken governments. This time, as before, they have sought to give the impression the SBY administration has been caught on the hop.

"They are saying through the bombings, 'Here we still are, you haven't beaten us. You can have your democracy, but we are still fighting'."

The extremists tended to choose as targets places attacked before, such as the JW Marriott hotel and Bali, where security was stiffer, "in order to reinforce that message 'You can't stop us'."

Professor Lindsey said Indonesia had led a highly successful crackdown on the Islamists. "They have arrested 400, who have been convicted in fair and open trials," he said.

"A weakness, though, is that many will come straight out of jail and do it again. That's where intelligence comes in. But this is a very fragmented group, hard to track. It's not the Coca-Cola corporation."

The revival of democracy in Indonesia had gone tandem with a revival in Islam, he said. "This is absolute anathema to JI -- it's their worst nightmare."
The goals of JI and similar groups that had evolved from Darul Islam in Indonesia 60 years ago were "quite clear and unambiguous -- to destabilise the Indonesian state through terrorist attacks, causing it to lose face and to turn inward, and to set up instead an Islamist caliphate".
In the 1950s, 20,000 people were killed during Darul Islam's war with the state.

"Many of those involved in JI have kinship with those originally caught up in Darul Islam," Professor Lindsey said.

"They won't abandon what has become a family tradition. It can't be stopped, despite the spectacularly successful partnership between the Indonesian and Australian Federal Police. It is a feature of that society.

"The Indonesian government has been incredibly successful in containing it," he said. "But you only need a small number of followers to kill people."