HTML pages
designed &
maintained by
Alifuru67
Copyright ©
1999/2001 -
1364283024
& 1367286044
|
|
|||||
|
|
||||
Jakarta now under pressure to act
By Susan Sim
INDONESIA CORRESPONDENT
JAKARTA - Few sights unsettle Western diplomats here more than the welcome desk the Laskar Jihad maintains at Ambon airport to register foreign mujahideen fighters volunteering for their year-long war to cleanse the Maluku islands of Christians.
At about the time last month that President Megawati Sukarnoputri was asking a personal emissary of the US President for help to combat international terrorism on Indonesian soil, a planeload of battle-hardened Afghan fighters were landing in Ambon, American counter-terrorist experts say.
What she will do about the hundreds of mujahideen fighters, soldiers trained and funded by America's No 1 enemy, Osama bin Laden, who are already in Indonesia, is a question that her host tomorrow, President George W. Bush, will demand clear answers to.
She and her entourage of senior ministers will have to work out Jakarta's response as they go on a mission they had originally hoped would result in greater investor confidence in Indonesia.
But the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington last week have changed all that.
''Indonesia is already being eroded from within by these militant groups,'' a senior Bush official told The Straits Times. ''They talk about territorial integrity, but they've already lost control of Maluku.
''The proof of how serious President Megawati is about combating terrorism will lie in what her government does to clear those mujahideen fighters in Ambon.''
As Washington begins dividing the world into friend and foe based on how far governments are prepared to fight Osama and his terrorist ilk, the somewhat-equivocal response of Indonesian leaders is eliciting great concern.
Ms Megawati, who will be the first and only foreign visitor to the White House over the next two months following last week's outrage, has already condemned the violence as ''barbaric and indiscriminate'', and promised that Indonesia would cooperate in any international effort to counter terrorism.
But her security czar Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who is accompanying her to Washington, just as quickly backed away from any implicit support of US military operation against the perpetrators.
The government ''should follow the people's aspirations'', he said last week, as commentators here suggested to the local media that Washington was reaping what it sowed because of its ''unfair'' policies in the Middle East.
Inevitably, attitudes in the world's largest Muslim country towards the US are intertwined with the tragedy of the Palestinians.
Kompas, the country's largest newspaper, said in an editorial on Tuesday's terrorist outrage that the US was defending Israel at the cost of Palestinian lives.
''If the United States wants to connect this violent action with fanatic and fundamentalist groups in the Middle East, shouldn't they also correct their own behaviour?'' it asked.
Vice-President Hamzah Haz also called on the US to reflect on its own policy shortcomings.
''Hopefully, the tragedy can cleanse the sins by the US,'' he was quoted by Kompas as saying.
''Therefore, there should not be any revenge against the Islamic community or Islamic countries.''
Few here appear to remember that it was US policy which contributed much to the Afghan mujahideen's field victories over superior Soviet forces.
Noting that the Central Intelligence Agency spent US$3 billion (S$5.2 billion) to support the Afghan resistance, a 1993 CNN documentary probing the surge in terrorist acts by veterans of the mujahideen asked poignantly if Afghanistan was a ''Terror Nation: US Creation?''
Osama entered the counter-terrorist lexicon somewhat late in the day, when the Al-Qaeda (the Base) group he founded in the late 1980s, to bring together Arabs who fought in the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan, turned into a coalition of extremist groups dedicated to killing US citizens and their allies everywhere.
He now stands for a totally new epoch of mass terror, his readiness to train and fund any group sharing his single-minded animus against America changing the terrain of political violence around the world.
And South-east Asia is looked on now as a fertile new battleground.
Osama's public statements leave no doubt that he sees violence as a tool to bring Islamic rule to Muslim lands and to ''cleanse'' them of Western influence and corruption.
So by his logic, the secular governments of Muslim majorities in this region could be fair game too for his far-flung Al-Qaeda group if local adherents believe their political leaders are serving American interests, not Islam's.
For all the journalistic fondness for headlines like ''The sacred rage of Islamic terrorism'', the tactics of groups like Al-Qaeda violate basic principles of Islamic law, like the injunction against the taking of innocent lives.
And as long as terrorists try to justify their violence against the West as self-defence of Muslims against foreign occupation or domination, it can, it appears, be difficult for some public figures in Muslim countries to condemn their actions unreservedly.
But what has Western officials in Indonesia greatly concerned is when empathy with the Palestinian cause translates into reluctance by the police and government to enforce Indonesian laws against groups which attack foreign interests in the name of Islam.
US envoy to Jakarta Robert Gelbard was shocked when upon appealing to the national police chief to restrain a militant Islamic group which was searching a hotel for American tourists in Solo last October, he was told the police could not act because it did not want to ''look anti-Islamic''.
A more fundamental reason than public image could be that some of these militant groups were spawned by the security authorities, when army generals under siege from protesters in the early post-Suharto months decided to use youth groups run by several militant Arab-Indonesian clerics as their shock troops.
By the time these groups metamorphosed into the Laskar Jihad, no one dared to stop them from marching down central Jakarta with sabres drawn, or to sail for Maluku.
Like other Jihad groups in hotspots, Indonesia's Laskar Jihad is led by a man of Arab descent who fought with the mujahideen against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
A fiery preacher held in awe by his penniless disciples, Jafar Umar Thalib had shot down five Soviet helicopters with one missile in Afghanistan, they tell visitors to the Laskar Jihad headquarters in a run-down pesantren (Islamic boarding school) outside Yogyakarta.
But despite the seeming poverty, the group has a slick website which, until recently, had links to the somewhat- similar-looking websites of the Lashkar-e-Taiba in Indian Kashmir, Jihad groups in Chechnya, Bosnia and Moro, the Taleban Online and the Middle East terrorist groups Hamas and Hizbollah.
More disturbing, its early fund-raising efforts included not only solicitations to contribute direct to a local account in Indonesia's largest bank, Bank Central Asia, but also the sale of a book on the Maluku conflict authored by a retired army general, with a foreword by then Yogyakarta academic M. Mahfud, written just months before he became Gus Dur's short-lived Defence and Justice Minister. The book has now been taken off the website.
What links beyond the Afghan mujahideen connection Laskar Jihad has with Al-Qaeda is not generally known; its founder disputes American accusations that he is being funded by the Saudi exile.
But in an interview with Tempo magazine a fortnight ago, Jafar claimed that it was the Malaysian mujahideen group (Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia), formed by veterans of the Afghan resistance like himself, which was part of Osama's network in this region.
This Malaysian group, he said, had an offshoot called Laskar Mujahideen, which is active in north Maluku.
Other sources have noted that while Laskar Mujahideen is distinct from Laskar Jihad, the two groups coordinate closely their efforts to ''cleanse'' the Maluku islands of Christians.
Jafar's claims appear to dovetail with the fortuitous arrest in Jakarta on Aug 1 of a Malaysian man, caught as he lay wounded when his bomb went off prematurely outside a shopping mall, and the arrest in Malaysia three days later of members of the Malaysian mujahideen group.
The group's larger objective, it appeared, was to destabilise the governments of Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia and so establish the Daulah Islam Nusantara (sovereign Islamic archipelago).
To that end, the Malaysians and local affiliates had carried out the spree of synchronised bombings of churches across Indonesia last Christmas Eve, a suspect allegedly confessed to Indonesian police, Tempo reported.
That a Malaysian terrorist group with links to Osama had operated across the length and breath of Indonesia for months without being detected might not be a completely fanciful notion, given the disarray of the intelligence services here and the general breakdown in law and order.
Western intelligence sources say they have been trying to convince Jakarta for months that militant Indonesian groups here were undergoing terrorist training in a camp in southern Philippines run by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a Philippine separatist group with links to Al-Qaeda.
Of late, a mujahideen-run training camp had also sprouted in Jakarta itself, counter-terrorist experts say.
There is also strong suspicion that a joint Indonesian-MILF terrorist cell detonated the remote-controlled car bomb which went off last August in front of the Philippine Ambassador's home in central Jakarta as the envoy was entering the compound.
The same group may also have been behind the car bombing of the Jakarta Stock Exchange six weeks later.
But unable or unwilling to probe more deeply into the incidents, Indonesian police had floundered around blaming former President Suharto's fugitive son Tommy, while politicians insisted the communists were making a comeback.
But if such ambivalence in handling terrorist activity that does not appear to pose a direct threat to the Indonesian state is national policy, then a serious rethink by the Megawati presidency is required as Washington begins considering how it will punish those who will not work with it to fight terrorism.
The culture of impunity will have to be replaced by actual law enforcement. Baldly put, Jakarta can no longer use police incompetence as an excuse should American interests here be attacked.
When the World Trade Center imploded last week, it also shattered whatever tolerance Americans had for fuzzy logic; joining the Bush ''crusade to rid the world of evil-doers'' is the only option for those who seek American goodwill and aid money.
And an Indonesia scrambling to recover from the Asian financial crisis cannot afford to become a pariah state.
Received via email from: Ambon@yahoogroups.com
Copyright © 1999-2001 - Ambon Berdarah On-Line * http://www.go.to/ambon
HTML pages designed and maintained by Alifuru67 * http://www.oocities.org/baguala67
Send your comments to alifuru67@egroups.com