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Southeast Asia counts its
costs
By Richard S Ehrlich
BANGKOK - Two years after suicidal hijackers
slammed passenger planes into New York's World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, people on the other side of the
world fear that bomb-savvy, al-Qaeda-linked Islamic
extremists are advancing across Southeast Asia.
Thailand, a strong US ally, is worried about
protecting President George W Bush when he arrives next
month to meet regional leaders at an Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.
Police are
also tightening security for Thailand's notorious
monthly "Full Moon Party" on the isle of Koh Phangan,
which regularly attracts swarms of foreign backpackers
who have lunar-lit drug experiences amid techno music
and dancing on Hat Rin beach. The upcoming public rave
coincides with the second anniversary of the attack on
the US and may be a target for terrorists.
"We
have sought cooperation from [tourist] bungalows to help
monitor the activities of tourists from Middle East
countries, particularly those wearing untidy beards"
during the Full Moon Party, Koh Phangan's district
police chief, Colonel Komol Wattraporn, told Thai
reporters.
Last month this traditionally placid,
Buddhist-majority country stunned the international
community by helping the US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) capture alleged Indonesian terrorist mastermind
Hambali in central Thailand. As a result, Thailand
became a new front line in the US-led "war on terrorism"
in a region plagued by recent deadly bombings.
"I feel like a sitting duck out here," said a
United Nations employee in an interview about her work
inside the UN's large building in Bangkok, after the UN
headquarters in Baghdad was bombed in August. "We might
as well have a big target on us," the UN employee
ruefully added.
Thailand has agreed to send more
than 420 soldiers to Iraq. Most of the troops hope for
extra protection from lucky Buddhist amulets forwarded
to them by the military, but their assignment has not
pleased everyone.
"Why should our Thai
peacekeepers have to risk their lives in order for the
[US] 101st Airborne troops to go back home to their
families in the US?" an outraged Thitti Siamwalla,
director of the Islamic Social and Economic Development
Foundation of Thailand, wrote in a published opinion
piece.
Many Thais support "growing
anti-Americanism", especially because domestic media
publish commentaries "alleging that the US knew all
along there were no weapons of mass destruction and that
the only reason to attack Iraq was simply Washington's
desire to control Iraqi oil", said Kavi Chongkittavorn,
an editor at the English-language Nation newspaper.
Harsh laws stripping away civil liberties and
allowing lengthy imprisonment without trial - similar to
the US Patriot Act and other legislation - have been
hurriedly enacted in Thailand, Indonesia and other
neighboring countries amid jingoism about terrorism,
further alienating many Southeast Asians.
Embassies, tourist traps, shopping plazas and
other places have meanwhile upgraded security in
Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the
Philippines and elsewhere - with mixed results. In many
cases, guards diligently check vehicles and frisk
visitors for a few weeks after a bombing makes news, but
they then slack off as the tropical torpor and
easy-going nature of life in these developing countries
loosen discipline.
In Indonesia, the world's
most populous Muslim nation, security forces were quick
to name the extremist Jemaah Islamiya organization for
the October 2002 car-bomb attacks on Bali that killed
202 people, and for last month's car bomb in front of
the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, which killed 12.
But unlike the US network linking drivers'
licenses, credit cards, telephones and other data, much
of Southeast Asia remains mired in the 20th century's
reliance on typewriters, hand-written notations and
ink-smeared rubber stamps - which are difficult for
investigators to trace. Porous land borders and
thousands of kilometers of relatively unguarded
coastlines allow terrorists, criminals, gun smugglers
and others to sail from beach to beach similar to
pirates of yore, but now bolstered by motorboats,
assault weapons and corrupt officials who turn a blind
eye.
Investigators tracking Hambali, for
example, indicated he might have sailed north from
urbanized Malaysia to Myanmar's jungle-clad south coast
and then trekked north through anarchistic territory
where minority ethnic guerrillas have been fighting for
the past 50 years. He then may have crossed from Myanmar
into the rugged, isolated, opium-rich mountains of Laos
before skipping across the Mekong River into northern
Thailand.
Hambali, whose real name is Riduan
Isamuddin, reportedly chilled out in Cambodia earlier
for several months in a cheap guesthouse alongside
pot-puffing backpackers in the capital, Phnom Penh.
Muslims inspired by Osama bin Laden see much of
Southeast Asia as a would-be Islamic "caliphate" uniting
the Muslim-populated zones of southern Thailand and the
southern Philippines with Muslim-majority Malaysia and
Indonesia. They base their claim on historic Islamic
sultanates and other Muslim regimes that were crushed
when Christians and foreign colonialists seized partial
control of Southeast Asia during the past several
centuries.
Muslim nationalists, however, often
avoid mentioning that their religion arrived here from
distant Arabia and was not indigenous to Southeast Asia.
This area's ancient, original inhabitants held mostly
animist beliefs - which were repressed by Muslims as
deceptive superstitions.
Today, using widespread
Internet facilities and a sophisticated underground
industry producing forged documents, Muslim extremists
apparently hope to use Southeast Asia as a makeshift
substitute for Afghanistan, where countless Muslim
guerrillas trained throughout the 1980s while financed
by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and others,
and during the 1990s under the former Taliban.
Indonesia and the Philippines are of special
importance to Osama bin Laden. In his "Sermon for the
Feast of the Sacrifice", delivered in March and
broadcast on al-Jazeera TV, bin Laden called on Muslims
to "maintain the current jihad and support it with all
its might, which is very difficult, as we can see in
Palestine, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Indonesia,
the Philippines and other Muslim lands".
But
many of Southeast Asia's Muslim guerrillas were
struggling for autonomy or independence long before
Osama bin Laden became a household name, and they are
riddled by factions, rivalries and parochial concerns.
(Copyright 2003 Richard S Ehrlich.)
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