Balinese police chief leads the way in fight against terrorism

Last Tuesday Inspector General I. Made Mangku Pastika left his office in the Balinese capital of Denpasar and drove to Singara, the rural village where he had grown up as the son of a poor primary school teacher.

It was a special day: the Hindu festival of Galungan, celebrating the triumph of Indra, the Hindu god of virtue and goodness, over the evil King Mayadanawa, a battle of good versus evil that has special resonance for Pastika.

Three years earlier he had swapped the uniform of a two-star Indonesian police general for the island's traditional sarong to pray at Bali's main temples. It was Pastika's job then to find the bombers who had killed 202 people - including 88 Australians and three New Zealanders - and injured 209 more at Kuta.

Pastika's success in tracking and convicting many of the terrorists won him national and international acclaim, including the Indonesian President's Medal of Honour and an honorary Order of Australia. He was also named Time magazine's 2002 Asian Newsmaker of the Year.

Now he is again at the head of an international investigation into last weekend's bombings, working with Australian and British experts to identify within days five key suspects, all Islamic radicals with links to the 2002 outrage.

Pastika has overcome international suspicion of Indonesia's notoriously corrupt police to cement an extremely close working relationship with the Australian Federal Police and other foreign agencies. He has become something of a hero to Balinese who have seen one of their own become head of the island's law enforcement for the first time, and to shine brightly at it.

Critics claim that for all the adoration heaped on Pastika since the 2002 bombings he remains a central part of a corrupt system and therefore tainted by it, and there are others who believe he was implicated in the atrocities leading up to East Timorese independence.

None of these allegations has been proved, and respect for the General remains high at home and abroad. His views are sought by foreign authorities, with speaking engagements at important forums in the United States and Australia.

It was a long road from his childhood in a devoutly Hindu household and his early days as a poorly paid officer in a police force he had joined in 1974. Working his way through the ranks of an organisation famous for its corruption - "I tried not to think of what was going on around me," he told Time - Pastika's rising star carried him to Interpol and Namibia, where as a United Nations official he was responsible for Sam Nujoma, the fledgling nation's leader during independence from South Africa.

At home he successfully prosecuted key figures in the former Suharto regime, and in the wake of the violent creation of East Timor, he captured notorious militia leader Eurico Guterres, the killer of New Zealand soldier Leonard Manning, and the militiamen who murdered three UN aid workers in West Timor.

His posting immediately before the 2002 Bali bombs was probably his most difficult, and personally dangerous. He led police in the rebellious province of West Papua, clashing both with powerful politicians and the Army, accusing members of the Kompassus special forces unit of kidnapping and murdering pro-independence leader Theys Hiyo Eluay.

During the first Bali bombings he again confronted political enemies, rejecting their attempts to influence the investigation, warning those who tried to deny the involvement of Indonesian nationals: "Don't poison our people's minds with your dirty minds".

More recently he has been less comforting for Australians, with overall responsibility for prosecuting convicted Queensland drug smuggler Schapelle Corby, now serving a 20-year sentence, and the nine Australians facing possible execution for alleged heroin trafficking.

But Pastika ties his faith to the job, telling Time: "My father taught me the importance of karma. If you do good you will get good; if you do bad you will get bad".