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The New York Times, September 21, 2001
Militant Islam Unsettles Indonesia and Its Region
By SETH MYDANS
BANGKOK, Thailand, Sept. 20 — Southeast Asia knows what havoc militant Islam can create. With mass kidnappings in the Philippines, "holy warriors" in Indonesia and armed cells in Malaysia, governments have learned they can never relax.
With the terrorist attacks in the United States, some Western diplomats are expressing heightened fears that these groups may be cooperating and may be receiving increased support from militants in the Middle East.
None of the Southeast Asian nations seem to be at risk of a militant Islamic takeover any time soon. But the economic slump of the past four years and the ensuing political instability have created fertile ground for recruitment, infiltration and indoctrination by outside groups.
"There is a small group of trained jihad warriors that have moved in and out of these areas," said Carlyle Thayer, a Honolulu-based expert on Asian security. "Whether they are masterminding command and control is still being debated."
The extent and nature of any terror network is hard to assess. But there is a spreading fear that an American retaliation for the attacks last week in New York and Washington would ignite a stepped-up and possibly coordinated activity aimed at American interests in Asia.
In Indonesia, experts and diplomats say, there is reported involvement by Osama bin Laden, who has been blamed by the United States for last week's terror. An American diplomat said this week that Mr. bin Laden was tied to a serious security threat that caused the embassy in Jakarta to close for several days last fall. The embassy remains on alert.
Last week, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines said "some traces of relationship" exist between Islamic separatist fighters in the southern Philippines and the perpetrators of the attacks in the United States.
The countries most concerned are Indonesia, a nation with 210 million people; the Philippines, with an intractable separatist insurgency in its partly Muslim southern islands, and Malaysia, where radical Muslim groups are taking advantage of a time of political flux.
Worries also exist in Thailand, which has a small but persistent separatist movement on its southern border with Malaysia, and in Singapore where ethnic Chinese make up the main part of the population of the city-state, which is surrounded by Muslim neighbors.
Some experts said there is little question that these separate movements have been in contact with each other and that several are being tutored by Middle Eastern groups. Several leaders in the insurgencies share a background as fighters in Afghanistan, these experts said.
Most worrisome to diplomats and security experts is Indonesia, where poverty has spawned widespread discontent, new political openness has given latitude to extremist groups and disarray in the security forces has weakened law enforcement.
In the oil-rich province of Aceh, warring separatists seek to create a strict Islamic state. In the Moluccas, a radical Islamic army called Laskar Jihad has recruited openly and joined in a Moslem-Christian war that has taken thousands of lives in the past three years.
"The head of that organization, I think he's Yemeni, fought in Afghanistan and was trained in Yemen by an offshoot of the bin Laden group," a Western diplomat said. "He has knowingly brought in hundreds of foreign mujahedeen, hundreds of them, to the Moluccas."
Harold Crouch, an expert on the Indonesian military with the International Crisis Group, questioned reports like this, asking why no Arabs had been found among the dead in the Moluccas.
Other hints of outside involvement in Indonesia include a mysterious bombing that wounded the Philippine ambassador at his residence in Jakarta last August may have been carried out by terrorists from Malaysia or the Philippines, said one expert.
Among several other unexplained bombings last year is a grenade attack, also in August, on the Malaysian Embassy that caused no injuries.
Last December, a series of bombings in both the Philippines and Indonesia took several lives and could have been related, the expert said.
In the Philippines a centuries-old Muslim separatist war on the southern island of Mindanao has flared in the past two years.
The government is now engaged in peace talks with the main separatist group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. But a splinter group called Abu Sayyaf has committed a series of kidnappings, including those of dozens of foreigners, and continues to evade military offensives.
In a recent raid, two Indonesian passports were found in an abandoned Abu Sayyaf camp. But the extent of cooperation between these and other groups remains unknown.
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