JAKARTA - The al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah
Islamiyah (JI) organization once again has its
footprints all over a series of suicide bomb
blasts on the Indonesian resort island of Bali.
This time bombers claimed 22 lives, while
injuring more than 100 in weekend blasts. Yet
Jakarta has still not designated JI as a terrorist
group or outlawed it. This means it is not illegal
for the network to raise funds, spread propaganda
and recruit new members.
Indonesian
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said when he
took office a year ago that he would need "proof"
before JI could be outlawed. In fairness,
Yudhoyono has been left to carry the
can for the
failure of the previous Megawati Soekarnoputri
administration to properly address core issues
that affected the well-being and security of
Indonesians. Acutely aware of the danger to her
presidency of being seen as a Western pawn by the
Muslim majority, Megawati consistently backed off
the necessary crackdown on radical groups.
Meanwhile, the carnage has continued.
"It is an underground movement. We can
only ban an established organization,"
presidential spokesman Andi Malarangeng told CNN
and other reporters after Saturday's blasts,
adding that the government would continue to fight
terrorism "under whatever name". Australian Prime
Minister John Howard, whose country lost 88
citizens among the more than 200 killed in the
2002 Bali bombings, believes terrorist groups are
actively working to undermine Yudhoyono's
government because he represents a "threat to
Islamic extremism".
"There's nothing the
terrorists want more than to destabilize Indonesia
and what Indonesia represents as a moderate
Islamic country and bulwark against the perverted,
obscene version of Islam which is represented by
these terrorist attacks," Howard said.
Still, he downplayed Jakarta's stance on
JI, saying outlawing the group would make little
practical difference. "I do not believe that
outlawing Jemaah Islamiyah is going to make an
enormous practical difference," Howard told radio
listeners. "It is not the be all and end all of
tackling terrorism in Indonesia."
The
latest JI connection The media have
reported that Indonesian police are searching for
five men from the Javanese province of Banten with
links to Imam Samudra, who has been sentenced to
death for his role in the 2002 Bali bombings.
Police say the five suspects, who have served time
for possessing explosives, disappeared after
Saturday's blasts.
Samudra has been linked
with a shadowy figure called Hambali - reputed to
be the leader of the militant Islamic JI and a
regional al-Qaeda leader. Hambali, whose given
name is Riduan Isamuddin, is called by some the
"the Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia". American
officials in the past have said he is a close
associate of September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed. Hambali was arrested in February 2004 by
Thai authorities in the central town of Ayutthaya,
and later handed over to the US Central
Intelligence Agency.
No one so far has
claimed responsibility for the weekend attacks
that blew apart two seafood cafes in Bali's
Jimbaran beach resort and a three-story noodle and
steakhouse in downtown Kuta, the island's bustling
tourist center. Investigators are still putting
together evidence and asking for anyone who
recognizes grisly photographs of three suicide
bombers to come forward.
The JI
dilemma In the early 1970s, Muslim youths
hostile to the religious repression of Suharto's
New Order regime started supporting local Muslim
groups, and the diverse bands of believers became
collectively known as the Jemaah Islamiyah, which
literally means "Islamic community". These small
groups agreed to live by Islamic law and were
blamed for arson attacks on churches, nightclubs
and cinemas.
JI's ambition now is to
create a single, fundamentalist Islamic state of
more than 400 million, which would embrace
Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and the
Philippines.
Intelligence officials claim
a deepening rift between the hardliners in JI who
favor continued large-scale terrorist attacks and
those who want more emphasis on education and
recruitment. The suggestion is that mainstream
ideological leaders are concerned that more
Indonesians - most of them Muslims - are being
slaughtered than Westerners, impacting badly on
any support and sympathy for the group.
Thirty-three JI operatives have been
convicted over the 2002 Bali bombings, with three
sentenced to death. JI has also been accused of
responsibility for the August 2003 bombing at
Jakarta's JW Marriott Hotel that killed 12 people,
and the September 2004 blast at the Australian
Embassy in Jakarta that killed 11 people.
Sidney Jones, Southeast Asia project
director of the International Crisis Group (ICG),
said that even if JI closed up shop tomorrow, the
terrorism problem would not go away. All it takes
is a few operatives and a little cash for a
determined team to carry out an attack,
particularly when suicide bombers are involved,
Jones said.
Only days before last
weekend's blasts the ICG rashly concluded that
following Indonesian police and intelligence
operations, JI no longer "poses a serious threat
in Indonesia or elsewhere".
Former
Australian foreign minister, Gareth Evans, who
heads the ICG, said lamely that a "mad rush" to
get his speech out to journalists meant he
overstated the view that the terrorist group no
longer posed a serious threat.
Current
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who says he has
nothing but praise for Indonesia's commitment to
the counter-terrorist task, believes banning JI
would make little difference to terrorist
operations anyway, though he acknowledged it was
an important symbolic gesture for Jakarta to "make
perfectly clear its profound disapproval of the
activities of that organization".
Some 220
suspects have been jailed for terrorist activities
since the 2002 Bali bombings, but only about half
of these are JI members, with others coming from
diverse jihadi groups.
Crackdown ahead,
but how hard? Former chief of the National
Intelligence Agency (BIN), A M Hendropriyono, has
urged the president to come up with a new bill to
give teeth to the intelligence bodies.
Hendropriyono still laments the failure of
Megawati and the legislature to pass a law that
would have allowed BIN to detain suspects for
limited periods.
He said intelligence
operatives needed the ability to "discretely take
aside" members of radical organizations in an
attempt to entice them into providing information
from inside terrorist cells. Receiving
intelligence in this manner, BIN could better
anticipate terrorist acts before they took place,
before a crime had been committed.
One can
almost hear a chorus of Hallelujah's coming from
the White House, but Yudhoyono is unlikely to go
as far as Malaysia and Singapore - or the United
States - by detaining alleged militants and
terrorists indefinitely without charge.
While Yudhoyono is certain to launch a
further crackdown on Islamic radicals, the social
dissent prompted by the recent drastic increase in
fuel prices means an increased risk of alienating
the poor and providing potential new terrorist
recruits. The price of kerosene, which is used
mainly by the poor for cooking, has increased by
more than 185%, while petrol has risen 87.5% and
diesel has more than doubled in price.
With a ready stock of young, disillusioned
Muslims and a diversity of radical Islamic groups
waiting in the shadows, future suicide bombers may
not need to act as part of a regional, coordinated
strategy of JI.
Meanwhile, some fear that
a backlash from Muslim groups and political
parties could threaten the tenure of the
government.
Still, critics point to a
failure by Indonesia to explain the nature of the
terrorism threat to the public, yet perhaps even
more compelling is the need to bring moderates
into the fold, and persuade them to reach out
across the archipelago and preach moderation and
toleration.
Recent forcible closures of
many Christian houses of worship in Bandung and
neighboring districts in West Java by Muslim
hardliners from the Anti-Apostasy Movement
Alliance suggest that religion is as big a factor
as ever in political considerations.
Police have so far refused to take any
action against the activists, who include the
Islam Defenders Front (FPI) that claimed
responsibility for the closures. FPI is better
known for smashing nightclubs and discotheques and
any other places it judges to be dens of iniquity.
Clash of cultures Most radical
leaders cite immorality as the root of every
single socio-economic problem imaginable. Social
injustice, poverty, unemployment, inflation, high
taxes, poor harvests and the generalized social
chaos are all blamed on loose sexual mores - the
consumption of alcohol, hedonism, inappropriate
dress and the failure to work hard and pray five
times a day.
For example, Samudra said the
Kuta nightspots Paddy's Bar and the nearby Sari
Club were targeted in 2002 because their
loose-living patrons disgusted him. The radicals'
solution is the imposition of Islamic Sharia law
with its harsh punishments.
Weak
link? While Jakarta has won praise for
scores of arrests and convictions since the first
Bali bombings in 2002, Washington and Canberra say
some key players got off lightly. The fact that
key individuals involved in planning and executing
several bombings are still at large prompts
concerns by some that Indonesia is somehow a weak
link in the "war against terror".
Through
the Jakarta Center for Law Enforcement Cooperation
in Semarang, both the Australian Federal Police
and the Indonesian police have trained several
thousand police, intelligence personnel, and
others in fighting terrorism. The 300-strong,
Federal Bureau of Investigation-trained police
taskforce 88 is also boosted by a substantial
contingent from the Australian Federal Police.
Australian Federal Police Commissioner
Mick Keelty says Indonesia is as able as any
nation to track down the killers, while pointing
out that it is not the only country in the world
that has not managed to stop terrorism altogether.
"Even with all the might and sophistication of the
United Kingdom they still have had terrorist
attacks in London," he said.
The other
effects of terrorism Bali's tourism
industry had been going from strength to strength
after a large number of local hotels were
renovated or upgraded after the earlier tragedy.
Luxury accommodation was available to the masses
with the rupiah at record lows to the American
dollar. The island accounts for more than 80% of
the Indonesia's tourism income, thousands of jobs
will go after the latest blasts.
Anti-migrant sentiment has been simmering
for years, yet after the 2002 carnage, the
predicted inter-religious, anti-migrant violence
simply did not happen. This time around the local
economic situation is profoundly worse, given the
two rounds of massive fuel price hikes.
With the second terrorist attack on
Indonesian soil directed at a predominantly Hindu
province, community leaders in Bali may be
hard-pressed to prevent the pecalang,
Balinese civilian security groups, venting their
anger on non-Balinese, particularly the thousands
of Javanese, most of them Muslim, who earn a
living there.
Intolerance to people of
other faiths in the world's largest
Muslim-populated nation is becoming much more
pronounced, yet the vast majority of Indonesians
have little sympathy for the killers in their
midst.
Meanwhile, authorities need to sort
out the latest bombing before they can tackle the
root causes of terrorism in Indonesia. But maybe
this time, the president will get the proof he
needs to come down hard on JI.
Bill
Guerin, a Jakarta correspondent for Asia Times
Online since 2000, has worked in Indonesia for 19
years in journalism and editorial positions. He
has been published by the BBC on East Timor and
specializes in business/economic and political
analysis in Indonesia.
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