An alleged terrorist goes
legit By Simon Roughneen
DILI - After spending two years in prison
on terror-related charges, Abu Bakar Ba'asyir,
widely regarded as Indonesia's most radical
Islamic cleric, is plotting his next career move:
into mainstream politics.
A spokesman for
Ba'asyir's Indonesian Mujahedeen Council (MMI)
told Indonesian media last week that the
controversial cleric is weighing a run for the
presidency at the 2009 polls. Ba'asyir's
spokesman said that before
officially declaring his candidacy, "He wants to
see what people say first."
Ironically,
perhaps, the radical cleric would likely aim to
run on a morality ticket, attempting to seize on
growing public cynicism over official corruption,
including recent damaging allegations that
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono received
illicit funds to finance his 2004 election
campaign. (Yudhoyono has denied the allegations,
which were lodged by an opposition politician.)
Ba'asyir was sentenced to two and a half
years in prison in March 2005 on conspiracy
charges related to the 2002 Bali bomb attacks,
which killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.
That sentence was eventually reduced and he was
released last December, irking Canberra - many of
those killed in Bali were Australians - and
enraging the victims' family members.
Western officials have contended that
Ba'aysir is the spiritual leader of Jemaah
Islamiyah (JI), an Indonesia-based Islamic radical
group accused of various terror attacks, including
the 2002 Bali bombings, the 2003 J W Marriott
Hotel bombing in Jakarta, which killed 14 people,
and the 2004 Australian Embassy bombing, also in
the Indonesian capital.
The United States
and Australia contend that JI has links to
al-Qaeda, and Ba'asyir is on the United Nations'
list of international terrorists. More recently,
JI has allegedly been involved in stirring
communal violence in areas surrounding the town of
Poso on Sulawesi island.
For his part,
Ba'asyir has repeatedly denied that JI exists and
denies having links to terrorism. Last month,
however, Indonesian police arrested the group's
alleged leader, Zarkasih, and military head,
Dujana, in coordinated raids on their hideouts. In
detention, Dujana has told Indonesian authorities
that Ba'asyir was JI's leader from 2000-02.
Ba'asyir refuted Dujana's allegation,
repeating his claim, "There are no terrorists in
Indonesia. What there are, are
counter-terrorists," he said, adding: "The aims
and sacrifices of the bombers, in their efforts to
defend Islam and Muslims in making war against the
real terrorist - that is, the United States of
America and its allies - need to be taken as a
model."
Ba'asyir famously called on his
followers to harass and chase American tourists
from hotels in Central Java in 2001. On June 25
this year, the radical cleric announced a new
political pressure campaign to have Indonesia's
US-backed counter-terrorism police unit, known as
Detachment 88, officially disbanded.
Ba'asyir's legal defense team, known as
the "Team for the Defense of Muslims", has in
recent years provided defense counsel to several
militant suspects. Team lawyer Munarman alleges
that Detachment 88 is financed opaquely by the US,
Australia and Singapore, and is unlawfully waging
war on Islam and using torture techniques while
interrogating suspected militants.
Both
the US and Australia provide training and
communications surveillance equipment to the elite
unit, which has been credited by Western officials
with netting several militant suspects. In
Indonesia, however, the unit has been viewed with
suspicion by some Islamic groups, and rights
organizations have raised questions about the
growing number of suspects detained without trial.
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty
has said that his officers were "forward-deployed"
during the Dujana and Zarkasih arrests - raising
politically sticky sovereignty issues.
Pro-sharia activism Last week
Australia issued a new travel warning to its
nationals, suggesting that new terrorist attacks
could be imminent on Indonesia-based tourist
resorts and in-country Western interests. It's
still unclear how much Dujana's, Zarkasih's and
other key JI members' arrests have hindered the
group's operational capacity, but judging by
Ba'asyir's recent activities, it appears the
radical group could be refocusing its efforts on
pro-sharia activism.
Since his release
late last year, Ba'asyir has resumed his drive to
have sharia (Islamic) law instituted across
Indonesia, where 86% of the 234 million population
are professed Muslims. Part of that campaign, it
appears, is to foment anti-Western sentiment and
disseminate conspiracy theories against
Yudhoyono's government, which has worked closely
with US and Australian counter-terrorism
officials.
The old radical logic goes that
fostering a sense of persecution and shared
grievance against the West will sharpen
Indonesians' sense of being Islamic and cast the
incumbent, secular elites as corrupt, Western
lackeys. To be sure, it will be difficult for
Ba'asyir, for all sakes and purposes a convicted
terrorist, to mount a serious bid for the
presidency amid continued JI terror attacks, which
the country's majority moderate Muslims have
frowned on.
Rather than promoting crude,
religious-based political violence, Ba'asyir is
now bidding to launch a more sophisticated form of
culture war, aimed at winning over hearts and
minds rather than destroying enemies. With both
presidential and parliamentary elections due in
2009, political tensions are ratcheting up.
Prior to the 1998 ouster of Suharto,
Indonesia was a one-party state and arguably never
staged free and fair elections during his 32-year
tenure. That changed with the multi-party polls in
2004, and Indonesian democracy now gives scope for
Islamic expression in politics. Several Islamist
groups are jostling for electoral position with
the new political opening, largest among them the
Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS), or Prosperous
Justice Party. The PKS won 7.3% of the vote on a
morality ticket, claiming it would end the
corruption that has long plagued Indonesian
politics. But the party's popularity, judging by a
2005 public opinion poll, has declined
dramatically because of its renewed push to
implement sharia law.
Ba'asyir nonetheless
seems keen to test the political waters, which he
apparently hopes have shifted with the recent
corruption allegations against Yudhoyono, who
successfully ran on a "clean hands" ticket at the
2004 polls. If Ba'asyir can effectively and
emotively conflate voter dissatisfaction with the
perceived corruption of the incumbent elite with a
sense of injustice toward Muslims, then his
presidential bid could gather significant popular
support.
More than 70 million Indonesians
are members of two main Islamic organizations -
the "traditionalist" Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and the
"modernist" Muhamiddiyah. Both are engaged in
varying forms of social work, education and
political activism and promote inter-religious
tolerance in a pluralistic society - much more
moderate than the purist, radical agenda
Ba'asyir's MMI professes.
NU leader and
former president Abdurrahman Wahid co-staged early
last month a religious-tolerance conference on the
resort island of Bali, where he brought together
Nazi Holocaust survivors, Buddhist leader Sri Sri
Ravi Shankar, and Indonesian Muslims in a display
of cross-religious understanding.
The
moderate Muslim leader also published a survey
showing that 95% of Indonesians support religious
tolerance, but with an interesting caveat that an
even larger percentage of respondents did not
think that pesantren, or Islamic schools,
fostered intolerance. The majority of terrorist
convictions in Indonesia have come against
JI-affiliated pesantren, including
allegedly Al Mukmin boarding school, which
Ba'asyir founded and still runs in Central Java.
Simon Roughneen is senior
analyst for ISN Security Watch. He has reported
from Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Pakistan,
Sudan, Uganda, Ethiopia and Somalia and has been
working since early this year in Southeast Asia,
where he has covered Indonesian and Malaysian
politics for the Irish Times, The Village, ISN
(International Relations and Security Network) and
others.
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