The decision of the Indonesian government to expel Sidney Jones and other expatriate staff of the International Crisis Group is a clear attempt to put the clock back, and at the same time, as Jones herself noted in a recent interview, an exercise that is doomed to fail.
Indonesia's security authorities are reverting to Suharto-era tactics in restricting access to information and to whole geographical areas of the country in a bid to cut the lines of communication. The foreign media has been over the past few months increasingly hampered in going about its business in the country's troubled regions.
The theory now being put into place by the government appears to be is that if the world does not know about Indonesia's problems, no one will make a fuss.
The problem with this argument is two-fold. First, the extension of modern communications technology into all but the remotest corners of the country has made information very much easier to spread. Second, that Indonesians over the past six years have become much more used to speaking their mind.
That the expulsion of the ICG's expatriate staff, announced by means of a letter from the Directorate General of Immigration delivered by hand to the ICG's Jakarta office at 6 p.m. on Tuesday evening, should be occurring in the dying days of the current administration is even more pathetic.
Jones and her team at the ICG may be suitable scapegoats for the Indonesia world-view, but in ejecting them, the government is once more shooting itself in the foot.
Headed by former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, the ICG has made a name for itself for publishing deeply researched and well-analyzed reports on a variety of countries that are experiencing what the group has defined as crisis. The expulsion of the ICG team will attract far more criticism than its presence in Indonesia warrants.
The Jakarta ICG office's reports have centered on issues such as separatist movements that raise what is the essential question about Indonesia. Is it merely a line drawn on a colonial map that in reality has no adequate binding force and which is destined to splinter into a number of smaller states that adhere more closely to ethnic lines?
This is, of course, the red rag to the Indonesian national bull, determined to defend the territorial empire that it inherited from the Dutch.
Jones and her team have also performed admirable research on the issue of terrorism. They have laid out a map of terrorism in Southeast Asia that has cast a strong spotlight on the phenomenon, and which naturally has pinpointed the government's often half-hearted approach to it.
The Indonesian Government is most certainly opposed to acts of terrorism, but it has yet to prove itself opposed to the educational institutions and prayer groups that provide the recruits for terrorism.
The ICG's work has explained in very clear terms what those educational and religious structures are and how deeply they are entrenched in Indonesian society. It is because they are so deeply entrenched, reaching into every level of society, that the government is so reluctant to act.
Sidney Jones herself has done little to soften the blow the ICG's official reports have dealt. She has been a keen speaker at breakfast and luncheon meetings and has not hesitated to castigate the government for its failings.
Her regular talks at such meetings, both within Indonesia and beyond, may have done more to earn the ire of the government than the reports published by the ICG.
It is questionable, however, whether what Jones has said is any less vitriolic than many Indonesians are also saying. One example is the director of the Indonesian legal umbrella for ICG, lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis. The lawyer, who has combined a high public profile as a human rights campaigner with a very successful practice representing international corporate clients, has pulled few punches in his criticisms of the government.
The difference is not then one of style but substance. Jones has been far more careful in her research compared to Lubis, who shoots from the hip based on what he has heard and what his emotions tell him.
Indonesia should, rather than expelling Jones and the ICG, have welcomed its work as a valuable contributor to the work of its own intelligence agencies, which have demonstrated little real talent or ability for either research or analysis.
The failings of Indonesian intelligence are, admittedly, no monopoly. Australia's ASIO has been highly embarrassed by the evidence given by Muslim convert Jack Roche in his trial in Perth for plotting to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Canberra.
He has made it clear that Abu Bakar Ba'asyir is the effective leader of Jemaah Islamiyah. He recounted a chain of command in which Ba'asyir countermanded orders Roche received from Hambali, the known operations chief captured in Thailand last year.
Roche phoned ASIO on a number of occasions and over a number of years to tell the organization that he did not like what he was getting involved in, but on each occasion was brushed off and no attempt was ever made to contact him.
In this vacuum of intelligence, the ICG has offered solid research and sound reporting of the reality of both separatism and terrorism.
In effectively banning the organization in Indonesia, the government has reverted to the Suharto-era mind-set in which it is assumed that the truth can be buried ostrich-like.
The action does not accept however, that Indonesia was a far less prominent nation under Suharto than it is now. In the early 1990s, few Westerners had ever heard of Aceh, and bans on visits by foreign correspondents and other observers raised few eyebrows.
Today, there must be few perceptive people anywhere in the world who make a habit of checking the newspapers and listening to radio and watching television news who have not heard of Aceh, Jemaah Islamiyah and other realities of life in the Unitary State of Indonesia.
The act of expelling Jones and other expatriate ICG staffers suggests that the Megawati government, painfully aware of how unpopular it is among the electorate, is lashing out blindly at any convenient scapegoat.