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FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue cover-dated September 27, 2001
THE COMING WAR
The Danger Within
Southeast Asia only recently began to take the threat of spreading Muslim militancy very seriously. Tougher state action is likely
By John McBeth/JAKARTA and REVIEW correspondents
LAST JULY 17, SEVEN AFGHAN NATIONALS flew into the strife-torn Moluccan capital of Ambon to a warm greeting from local police officers and a welcoming party of Indonesian Muslim militants. When officials wanted to check their identities by looking at their passports, the Laskar Jihad militants brushed them aside before whisking their mystery guests away. They joined about 200 other Afghans, Pakistanis and Malaysians, whom Western intelligence sources claim remain on the Indonesian island to help the Laskar Jihad in their violent campaign against a cowed Christian population.
Two weeks later, a 26-year-old Malaysian lost a leg when the bomb he was carrying exploded in a Jakarta shopping mall. The man, who spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, appears to have been part of a group behind a string of deadly bomb attacks against Christian targets around Indonesia in December and July.
The United States has for the past two years warned about the spread of Muslim militancy in Southeast Asia, claiming it was producing an expanding pool of potential recruits for domestic and international terrorist networks alike. Indeed, the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta has been on alert since receiving information from Europe in early August about bomb threats and detailing specific surveillance of Ambassador Robert Gelbard and five other senior U.S. diplomats--apparently by Sudanese nationals linked to Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.
Only recently have governments in the 10-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations--almost all members of which have significant Muslim communities--taken the threat very seriously. The deadly September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., which are being blamed on bin Laden, are likely to heighten their vigilance. One of the hijackers had been detained briefly in the Philippines only days earlier, while another had been secretly filmed in Kuala Lumpur, according to U.S. intelligence.
"The U.S. will be after them to keep their own houses in order," says a European diplomat in Jakarta, referring to regional governments. "There's going to have to be a lot more effort in human intelligence, on the dirty-tricks side of the house." That may require the U.S. to share information with national intelligence services in the region for the first time and help improve these agencies.
The region's leaders have only recently begun to focus on newly forged linkages between Muslim extremist groups in their backyard and between those groups and fundamentalists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "The Americans only see it from their side," says a senior Indonesian counter-terrorist police officer. "But now the situation has developed and we know more about it ourselves we're taking it very seriously."
Muslim extremism and related terrorist issues came high on the agenda during a flurry of meetings in late August between Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew. It is why Indonesian intelligence chief Hendropriyono wants new information-sharing arrangements with other Asean nations. And it will be a main topic at a summit of police chiefs from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Burma in Jakarta next month.
Malaysian, Filipino and Indonesian students have been going to study at Islamic religious schools overseas for decades, but of concern is that the number coming under the influence of hardline Islamic teachers--particularly in Pakistan--appears to be rising rapidly, bringing strong winds of conservative Islam to Southeast Asia. (See story on page 22.)
Hundreds of Southeast Asian Muslims have fought in Afghanistan--first with the mujahideen or Muslim guerrillas against the Soviet occupation of 1979-89 and later with the now ruling Taliban militia during devastating factional fighting. During the early 1990s, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency stations in Jakarta and the Middle East sought to keep track of 700-1,500 Indonesians bound each year for study in Egypt, Syria and Iran. "We figured 30%-40% of them never showed up," says a retired CIA officer. "We don't know where they went."
The Americans have been trying for years to persuade Indonesia to keep track of students returning to Muslim boarding schools across the country. They say radicals among them could form part of the many networks that have made transnational terrorism such a new and potent threat across Southeast Asia as resentment grows over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. But because Washington has been reluctant to share sensitive information, little has been done on the ground to investigate suspected cells.
Malaysian leaders, in particular, have expressed deep concern about the growing influence of extremist groups. The warnings coming from Mahathir, and other ruling party members, may sound like digs at the main opposition Islamic Party, but as one minister puts it: "If you have a party campaigning to establish an Islamic state, it opens the way for an extremist wing to develop."
That prospect certainly worries Singapore's Lee. "If it takes root in Indonesia and they go up to the islands south of us, and if they take root in Malaysia and come down to Johor, then we are vulnerable," he warned in early September.
Across the Strait of Malacca, most Indonesian Muslims follow a moderate course. But they have been buckling under pressure from extremists who use a mix of religious fervour and intimidation to get their way. "What I worry about is, it is becoming politically incorrect to oppose militancy," says one Western expert on Islamic affairs, pointing to the way some newspapers have stopped reporting such issues. "It is a creeping form of fundamentalism."
Take Indonesia's ousted President Abdurrahman Wahid, the Muslim cleric who built his credibility on tolerance and religious pluralism--and surrendered it all for short-term political gains. Former palace officials now say Wahid ignored the newly formed Laskar Jihad's disastrous intervention in the Moluccas in mid-2000 in exchange for promises from hardline Muslim leaders that they, at least, would leave the embattled leader alone.
Senior U.S. State Department officials admit they don't have a clear handle on the linkages that exist in Southeast Asia. Investigators, for example, are still unable to determine who was behind a car bomb that severely wounded Philippines Ambassador Leonides Caday in Jakarta last year. But they suspect it may have been a thank-you for the training given to 700 Indonesian militants in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, or MILF, and the smaller Abu Sayyaf in the late 1990s.
International terrorists have long had links with the Filipino rebels. Bin Laden's brother-in-law, Saudi businessman Mohamed Jamal Khalifa, financed a number of non-governmental organizations in Mindanao that are suspected of being used to funnel money to rebel groups. Khalifa fled the country in 1996. Ramzi Yousef, jailed Pakistani mastermind of a 1993 bid to blow up the World Trade Centre, spent time with the Abu Sayyaf during preparations for an aborted 1995 plot to blow up 12 American airliners, apparently teaching them bomb-making techniques. Moreover, intelligence sources, who have seen photos, say government troops killed several Middle Eastern and Pakistani trainers and demolition experts when they overran the main MILF base on Mindanao last year.
Like the Philippines, Thailand has also been a favoured staging post for international terrorists taking advantage of Bangkok's lax tourism-promoting immigration procedures. Despite a failed truck-bomb attack against the Israeli embassy in 1994, Thai authorities have often turned a blind eye to such groups. "Anyone, even bin Laden-connected terrorists, can come in to Thailand as long as they are not in our criminal records," admits Apachit Thienpermpool, lead investigator of Thailand's International Crime Intelligence Centre.
But times may be changing. Only last June, Ibrahim Ghosheh, leader of the militant Palestinian organization Hamas, was quietly ushered out of Thailand without any official explanation. And after the September 11 attacks, the Thai Supreme Command said it was monitoring the movements of a "small number" of bin Laden-related operatives working out of Thailand.
Thailand has also in recent months seen the revival of Islamic terrorism in its four Muslim-dominated southern provinces. The shadowy Bersatu group bombed the Hat Yai railway station and a hotel in Yala province in April and, more recently, has engaged in kidnapping and extortion. "Countries in the Middle East provide training, education and financial support for fundamentalist groups in the south," Thai army commander Gen. Surayud Chulanont told the REVIEW. The attacks have prompted Malaysia and Thailand to share intelligence.
Indonesian police, meanwhile, say shopping-mall victim Taufik Abdul Halim and two other more recent Malaysian detainees are members of an extremist organization that opened a branch in Indonesia in the late 1990s when the Laskar Jihad began to take shape. All three are among hundreds of foreign volunteers smuggled into Ambon and perhaps other parts of the country via Malaysia's Sabah state and Indonesia's East Kalimantan province.
The Americans claim that bin Laden followers have had a small presence in Indonesia for the past two years. It is something the Megawati administration seems to have taken on board. When the U.S. embassy went on its most recent alert, police armed with automatic rifles posted a 24-hour guard on the mission.
Diplomats say that with nationalist elements returning to the ascendancy in the armed forces, there are indications Megawati may soon authorize an operation in Ambon to expel the Laskar Jihad and their foreign allies. Independent observers say that must happen if local Muslims and Christians are ever going to put an end to two years of violence that has claimed more than 9,000 lives.
The heat has been on the Laskar Jihad since a special forces battalion, largely credited with bringing order back to the island, killed 17 militants during a gun battle in mid-June. When Laskar Jihad chief Ja'far Umar Thalib sought a meeting last month with Vice-President Hamzah Haz, leader of the Muslim-orientated United Development Party, he may have been expecting sympathy. Instead, Haz read him the riot act. "Thalib was shocked, angry and offended," says one source. With Megawati brushing aside the concerns of Muslim leaders and having gone ahead with a visit this week to Washington, it may only be a sign of things to come.
Copyright ©2001 Review Publishing Company Limited, Hong Kong. All rights reserved.
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