Catherine Porter – John Rumbiak has a theory about the recent bombing in his native Indonesia. It wasn't the work of Muslim extremists in cahoots with the Al Qaeda terrorist network, the human-rights activist says.

If it was the work of Muslim extremists, it was only in conjunction with the Indonesian military. "The widely held opinion is that Muslim radicals were responsible for this," says Rumbiak, who is in Toronto on a mission to expose military brutality in his home province of Papua. "That might be true. But people have to look further and study the relationship between the military and this group. They couldn't do it themselves. "The military wants to regain its power. Since the fall of Suharto, they have been forced to go back to the barracks. This is their basic line to regain power in Indonesia."

What at first blush might sound like a ripe conspiracy theory has been gaining ground both inside Indonesia and out, among human-rights groups, non-governmental organizations and political scientists. "It's very popular among Indonesians," says Abagail Abrash, former director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights in Washington. "Everyone from intellectuals to grassroots community people believes it because of the well-documented history of military involvement in other acts of provocation and violence like this one."

The theory goes something like this: For 32 years, the military ruled Indonesia's 17,000 islands under the dictatorship of Suharto. Since 1998, when the vast country gave way to a shaky democracy, the generals have tried to regain that stature by covert means – by spurring civil strife in disparate regions. Hotspots have been Maluku, where fighting between Christians and Muslims has killed at least 5,000 people since 1999, and East Timor, where paramilitary forces killed more than 1,000 civilians in the run-up to a UN-sponsored referendum on independence. Once chaos is created, the theory goes, the military will be summoned to keep the peace.

"It's a pattern," says Rumbiak, who runs the Institute for Human Rights Study and Advocacy based in Papua. "Reflect on East Timor. It's a very good example the world community already knows. They [the generals] paid off the militias in order to justify their presence and regain their power."

Rumbiak, whose two-week speaking tour in Canada is sponsored by KAIROS, an ecumenical human-rights and environmental agency, says there has been similar intrigue in his birthplace. Papua, or what many Indonesians still call Irian Jaya, is the most eastern province in Indonesia and, arguably, its most remote.

Its resources were exploited by the colonizing Dutch. When the Dutch left in 1963, Indonesians from the ruling island of Java moved in, legitimizing their annexation with a 1969 referendum by about 1,000 hand-picked elders. The "Act of Free Choice" has since been denounced as whitewash by its original sponsor, the UN Since then, an independence movement has simmered. More than 100,000 Papuans have been killed by army special forces, Rumbiak says, including independence leader Theys Eluay, who was murdered last year after leaving a military-hosted ceremony.

Says Abrash: "We think of the military as a defence force that works to protect our borders. In Indonesia, it's the opposite. It's there to maintain internal order."

Another key piece to the puzzle is the military's funding. It comes largely from private security contracts with international companies like Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., which helps run the world's largest gold and copper mine in Papua. Two Americans and an Indonesian were killed at the Freeport mine in an ambushing August. The murders, which made headlines around the world, were blamed by the military on local independence guerrillas opposed to the mine's environmental and economic impact.

But Rumbiak's investigation points to the military. "Their message to international companies is: 'There are terrorists in Papua and we need your support to get rid of these people.'" Those arguments have landed Rumbiak into hot water. He says he's been threatened with a lawsuit by the army chief of staff, Gen. Ryamizard Ryacudu, who denies the allegations. His organization's Jakarta office has been ransacked. His staff have received ominous warnings. And the military presence has increased on the island. Rumbiak says the intimidation has worsened since the bombing at a night club in Kota Beach that killed more than 190 people three weeks ago.

The official view that the bombing was the work of terrorists stampeded the government of President Megawati Sukarnoputri into passing a bill that permits special military and police teams to arrest and detain suspected terrorists without trial for up to six months, provided a court agrees. "Under the new law, groups like ours fall into the classification of terrorist," Rumbiak says. "They will target us."

Andri Hadi, counsellor for public affairs at the Indonesian embassy in Ottawa, says theories are only theories until the bombing investigation is completed. "I can't say whether this is military or Al Qaeda or other parties because our government is still collecting evidence," he says. "People can speculate anything."

But Minister of Defence Matori Abdul Djalil and others have linked the act to the Jemaah Islamiah, a local Muslim extremist group, and the Al Qaeda network. And cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who was the first bombing suspect to be arrested by Indonesian police, was identified as a member of the Jemaah Islamiah.

Jeffrey Winters, a professor at Chicago's Northwestern University specializing in Indonesian politics, says Indonesia's linking Al Qaeda to the bombing supports Rumbiak's view. In fact, Winters says, the Al Queda network had nothing to gain from the attack.

But the tidy theory that the bombing was the work of global terrorists coincides with America's reinstituting funding to the Indonesian military, cut off in 1999 in response to the military's role in the East Timor massacres. Before the bombing, the country was loath to act against terrorists, despite American pressure. "The explosion in Bali makes it more likely that Megawati will finally act and Al Qaeda's easy access will end," Winters says in an interview. "This outcome serves the US far more than it does Al Qaeda."