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Menace of the Indonesian jihad
EFL
No one knows how many there are, or who they are, or where they are living their quiet, ordinary lives. Or where they will strike next. The best estimates say there may be 300, mostly men in their 30s and 40s, living in scores of towns right across Indonesia, unsuspected by friends and family, ready to act when called on. And if, as suspected, they were the people who blasted Jakarta’s luxurious Marriott Hotel on Tuesday, they clearly remember what they learned in Afghanistan.
That’s where they went in the 1980s and 1990s, fighting and learning from al-Qaeda members in remote mountain camps. Their studies were mostly about bomb-making. Indonesian intelligence officials reckon that on their return home they called themselves Group 272, or G272, because that’s how many of them made the trips that transformed their lives and now threaten to destroy so many others. In the years since, some have been arrested, some have died, but most have resumed apparently unremarkable existences in communities that don’t suspect young men who disappear abroad for years. Because millions of Indonesians work abroad for years, it’s been easy for the Afghanistan veterans to come home, lie low, and keep contact with a handful of others, to be sleeper cells that might awake at any time to fight the jihad, and to bring down the Government of Indonesia.
Of some 300 JI members Jones believes are mainly in Indonesia, there are still six or seven leaders whose arrests she used to think would seriously weaken the organisation. Now she’s not so sure JI can so easily be contained. "We are beginning to get information there’s a back-up system so if one of the top guys gets caught, there are others to put in his place."
Indonesia’s Government barely reacted to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and for almost a year rejected declarations from neighbouring Singapore and Malaysian governments that Indonesia was harbouring terrorists, especially the alleged spiritual leader of JI, Abu Bakar Bashir. The Bali bombings changed that overnight. The Indonesian Government and the police moved decisively, co-operating with Australia and other foreign countries, and over nine months arrested more than 30 suspects in connection with the Bali attacks alone.
These latest raids, and Tuesday’s massive car bomb, have added to the growing pile of evidence that in Asia at least, Indonesia remains the safest place for terrorists to hide and to operate. "It’s harder now, but still if I choose to be a terrorist I don’t think the police can get me. Once you have a close community, like a religious community, you are safe enough. Everywhere there are places like that," said Sulistyo.
"The Government has largely ceded the public space to the radicals," one long-term observer said. "Megawati is just not interested in a dialogue with her people."
That environment has allowed some of the country’s Islamic boarding schools, or pesantren, to continue advocating support for the radical actions of people like Amrozi.
"Some of the stuff that is coming out of the pesantrens is very worrying," one Western diplomat said.
With no serious Government attempt to influence what happens in these pesantren, they can remain part of what one analyst called "an enormous replenishment pipeline" for any JI members who are arrested or killed on their missions.
Under Soeharto’s authoritarian regime, members of any religious or political groupings considered a threat were immediately targeted, often jailed or executed without any fair trial. Muslim radicals like Abu Bakar Bashir fled this brutal but effective regime to the more friendly climes of Malaysia. But after the fall of Soeharto, Bashir returned to a freewheeling Indonesia to continue his campaign for an Islamic state. Now it’s the authoritarian Malaysian and Singapore governments that have the intelligence networks that know what is going on in their mosques and Islamic schools. They’ve shown a capacity to find out and stop what terrorists are planning. It’s a capacity that has long since gone in Indonesia. Regaining that capacity while preserving democracy appears a daunting task indeed.
Posted by: Paul Moloney 2003-08-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=17465