THE WASHINGTON POST, Friday, January 3, 2003; Page A12
A Quiet Voice Echoes Among Islamic Radicals
As Exiled Indonesian Cleric Pushed Cause, His Followers Embraced Message of
Jihad
[File Photos: Abubakar Baasyir has been identified as head of Jemaah Islamiah, a
radical network tied to al Qaeda with operational cells in Southeast Asia. He denies it.
(File Photos/ Ellen Nakashima -- The Washington Post)]
By Alan Sipress and Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post Foreign Service
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- When Abubakar Baasyir vanished from his home on the main
Indonesian island of Java 17 years ago, he took with him little moore than a black
Yamaha motorbike and a reputation for opposing the dictatorship of Gen. Suharto. At
the time he went into exile in Malaysia, he was a cleric with a small but devoted
following centered at the Islamic boarding school he had founded in central Java with a
fellow radical preacher.
It was a different Baasyir who returned to Indonesia in 1999 after protests forced
Suharto to resign. Baasyir had become a prominent preacher, sought out by
politicians and day laborers alike, with connections to leading radical thinkers around
the world, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. His followers, inspired by his
teachings of jihad, had gone to fight on battlefields in Afghanistan, Bosnia and the
southern Philippines.
Baasyir returned to Indonesia with a broader vision than when he left, seeking to
establish Islamic rule not only in Indonesia but across several Southeast Asian
countries, and he embraced a campaign to promote militant Islamic causes
worldwide. His more expansive ambitions were emblematic of a new generation of
Islamic militants in Indonesia who are believed to be responsible for attacks on
Westerners in the region, including the bombing of nightclubs filled with tourists on
the island of Bali in October, and a series of plots to blow up foreign embassies.
Today, Western and Asian intelligence officials have identified Baasyir, 64, a
soft-spoken cleric with thick gold-rimmed eyeglasses and a white beard tinged with
yellow, as the head of Jemaah Islamiah, a radical network connected to al Qaeda with
operational cells in several Southeast Asian countries. But they have not yet offered
evidence.
Baasyir is rarely seen without a coterie of advisers, supporters and fellow clerics.
They streamed to his bedside in a Jakarta police hospital, where he was held for
nearly two months until being moved last month to a jail cell at the national police
headquarters. Authorities determined that Baasyir, who has complained of difficulty
breathing, is healthy enough to face charges of involvement in a series of church
bombings two years ago and a plot to assassinate President Megawati Sukarnoputri.
In a September interview, Baasyir denied he was a leader of Jemaah Islamiah and
asserted that no such organization exists. The name Jemaah Islamiah refers only to
the community of Muslim believers he had gathered while in exile, he said. Baasyir
recalled that he had provided religious instruction for an informal network of followers
in Malaysia and Singapore called the Sunna Group. He urged them to "implement the
teaching of jihad," he said, and some of his listeners did so by taking up arms on
behalf of fellow Muslims in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, the Philippines and the
Moluccas, an Indonesian region beset by violence between Muslims and Christians.
'His Horizons Broadened'
The story of how Baasyir rose from an obscure cleric to embody the militant Islamic
movement in Southeast Asia goes back to the 1970s. He and a fellow cleric, Abdullah
Sungkar, founded an Islamic boarding school, Pondok Pesantren Ngruki. The school
was nothing more than a few classrooms arrayed around small courtyards and shade
trees tucked into the narrow back streets of Solo, a city long known for the intense
religious devotion of many of its people and the proliferation of Islamic schools.
Baasyir and Sungkar campaigned for the adoption in Indonesia of sharia, or Islamic
law, which was considered subversive by Suharto. They were arrested in 1978 and
jailed on charges they belonged to a group engaging in violent opposition to the state.
After serving four years in prison, and facing the imminent prospect of re-arrest, they
fled in 1985 to Malaysia.
Suddenly, it was as if the world opened to them, according to those who know them.
Malaysia had earned a reputation for hosting exiles and dissidents from neighboring
countries. There, Baasyir and Sungkar were free to preach and organize. Soon after
arriving, they convened a clandestine meeting not far from the capital, Kuala Lumpur,
with several confidants to chart the future of their movement, according to evidence in
an Indonesian trial of a man who served as their courier.
They directed their supporters in Java to follow them into exile, especially those who
could find work in Malaysia's construction industry, according to the court documents,
which Indonesian and Western experts describe as credible.
Baasyir and Sungkar also decided to sharpen the military skills of Indonesian activists
by dispatching them to Afghanistan, where they could get combat training and
experience in the battle against Soviet troops, according to evidence in the courier's
trial. The exiled leaders also vowed to send Indonesian fighters to the southern
Philippines and southern Thailand to support Muslim insurgencies there.
Baasyir traveled widely during his exile, visiting not only nearby countries such as
Singapore and Australia, but Pakistan and countries in the Middle East and Europe,
associates said. Along the way, they said, he met leaders of the Afghan mujaheddin.
His religious philosophy became more global in ambition and scope, according to
interviews with associates who knew him before, during and after his exile. "His
horizons broadened. He started to interact with many people and many nations and
many schools of thinking," said Muhammad Hafidz, an Indonesian who has known
Baasyir for more than 20 years. As he compared notes with Islamic scholars and
activists, Baasyir concluded that Indonesian Muslims were not alone in facing
government repression, recalled Ade Hidayat, director of student affairs at the Ngruki
school.
The sources of this repression were varied. Baasyir found that in some places such
as Egypt, Muslim militants faced resistance when they tried to press their
governments to implement Islamic law. In others, such as the southern Philippines
and the separatist Russian republic of Chechnya, insurgents were battling to break
away from the grip of central governments.
According to a report by the International Crisis Group, Baasyir's worldview was
especially influenced by a veteran Indonesian militant, Abdul Wahid Kadungga. Since
moving to Germany as a student more than 30 years ago, Kadungga developed a
circle of Islamic activists in Europe while building friendships with Muslim leaders
around the world, from Malaysia to Egypt, according to several published accounts.
Two years ago, a religious Indonesian magazine, Suara Hidayatullah, described
Kadungga as a jet-setting activist who visited Osama bin Laden in his Afghan
hideaway.
Kadungga was responsible for helping to establish Baasyir and Sungkar in Malaysia,
according to Sidney Jones, an Indonesia expert and author of the Crisis Group's
report. It was also Kadungga who introduced them 10 years later to the radical
thinking of an Egyptian militant organization, the Islamic Group, converting them to
the vision of an Islamic state spanning beyond Indonesia, Jones said.
After disappearing from public view, Kadungga, 62, was detained last month in Jakarta
and questioned about possible connections to terrorism. He was released but must
remain in Indonesia and report regularly to police, officials said.
In the mid-1990s, Baasyir settled in the Malaysian village of Sungai Manggis, a string
of wood-plank houses 60 miles south of Kuala Lumpur. He rented one of several
modest homes alongside a rutted dirt alley that stretches into a grove of banana
trees. Baasyir converted the back room into a small prayer and preaching hall.
Next door was Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, who is now considered
by Western intelligence officials to be Jemaah Islamiah's main liaison with al Qaeda.
Hambali had arrived there three years earlier, according to the landlord. He appeared
to make a living selling medicine and perfume.
Later, Baasyir and another Indonesian preacher, Mohamad Iqbal, shifted to more
spacious quarters down the road, sharing a duplex with whitewashed walls and a
mangosteen fruit tree in the front yard. The two preached to local residents, neighbors
recalled.
Baasyir and Iqbal received countless visitors. In particular, the landlord recalled some
from the Middle East and Africa who kept to themselves.
"He talked about jihad, about creating an Islamic state," Abdul Halim, one of Baasyir's
local devotees, said of Baasyir in a recent interview. "He didn't talk only about
Indonesia. He talked about Malaysia, Afghanistan, the Philippines."
Global Battlefronts
According to another Malaysian who attended the small discussions, participants
were privately asked whether they would volunteer for "dangerous missions."
But Baasyir and Sungkar, who were wandering the country as itinerant preachers,
could not pay their followers' way to the battlefront. The task of raising money for the
jihadists ultimately fell to Iqbal, a gregarious if at times severe orator, who is now in a
Malaysian prison accused of extremist activities. Iqbal solicited contributions from
wealthier Malaysians, according to interviews with his brother, Irfan S. Awwas, and
another Indonesian who was part of the group, Muzayyin.
Muzayyin, who uses only one name, had been one of Baasyir's best pupils at the
Ngruki school in Indonesia, and followed him into exile, working in construction,
farming and the sale of traditional Javanese food. A short, slight man with a thin beard
and mustache, he also became one of the first in the movement dispatched to
Afghanistan, according to court records.
"Abubakar Baasyir encouraged his listeners to do jihad by explaining its importance
in the Koran," Muzayyin said in an interview at Ngruki, where he is now a religious
teacher. "In Malaysia, it was much easier to go abroad than in Indonesia, much easier
to go to Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines and other places. The political
atmosphere in Malaysia was very supportive."
The strategy of sending Indonesians overseas began slowly, with only six recruits by
December 1985, the records show. But it was the start of a new international outlook
for Indonesia's Islamic radicals, who already had a long tradition of resistance at
home, dating to the country's fight against Dutch colonialism and its first years of
independence.
The suppression of Islamic activists during Suharto's 32-year dictatorship radicalized
some Muslims, and the willingness of clerics like Baasyir and Sungkar to publicly
challenge him attracted more followers to their cause. But Indonesia's activists truly
began building their international network and adopting ambitions beyond the
country's borders only after Baasyir and his followers went into exile.
The 1980s were an especially heady time for Indonesians who made their way to
Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan. "The jihad atmosphere dominated our
campus," recounted Ikhwan Abidin, a graduate of Baasyir's school in Ngruki, who
later studied in Pakistan. Students protested daily in support of the Muslim forces
fighting the Soviets, distributed leaflets on behalf of the jihadists and underwent
military-style training, he said.
Many of Abidin's fellow Indonesians rushed to the battlefield, signing up with
predominantly Arab forces, he said in an interview. They joined Muslims from other
Southeast Asian countries, including Malaysia and Thailand. Even after the Soviet
defeat in 1989, Indonesians continued to journey to Afghanistan, where they could
fight with several Muslim militias skirmishing over the spoils.
A 31-year-old native of Java, Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, went to Pakistan and
Afghanistan after graduating 12 years ago from Baasyir's boarding school. He had
rebellion in his blood: His father had been imprisoned by Suharto.
Al-Ghozi was recruited into Jemaah Islamiah after meeting other Indonesian militants
while studying in Pakistan, according to regional security officials.
In recent years, as al-Ghozi rose through the group's ranks, he slipped from country
to country in Southeast Asia, using five different passports and speaking several
languages.
But al-Ghozi, a bomb-making expert, made headlines last January when he was
arrested in Manila on charges of possession of illegal explosives, becoming one of the
first Indonesians captured on suspicion of involvement with al Qaeda-related violence.
He told police he had helped carry out a series of attacks in the Philippines two years
ago, authorities said. Asian and Western security officials have implicated him in a
more recent plot by Jemaah Islamiah to bomb U.S. and other Western targets in
Singapore. Those attacks were never carried out.
New Face of Militancy
The current investigation into the Bali bombings has netted more Indonesians with
similar credentials, though a new report by the International Crisis Group concludes
that Baasyir did not order that attack. The report says that although Baasyir knew
more about the planning of the attack than he admits, he reportedly objected to the
bombings for tactical reasons, fearing they would provoke a crackdown on Islamic
radicals in Indonesia. Some of his followers, feeling they had outgrown his leadership,
went ahead with the operation, according to the report.
Though steeped in the indigenous tradition, the new Indonesian militants are
organized in covert cells rather than in guerrilla bands, said Landry Haryo Subianto, a
researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta. They are
radical intellectuals, not the pious villagers of 40 years ago. Most important, he said,
"They are trying to make all of Southeast Asia into one Islamic state."
When Baasyir returned to Indonesia three years ago, both he and his homeland had
changed dramatically. Democracy had been restored, and it was legal to press for the
implementation of Islamic law. But Baasyir and his followers wanted more.
Baasyir was elected chairman of a new militant umbrella organization, the Indonesian
Mujaheddin Council, which has been identified by some Western terrorism experts as
the public face of the underground Jemaah Islamiah. The council issued a manifesto
two years ago declaring goals of "building a solid and strong line of religious warriors
in the country, region and world"; working toward "the realization of an Islamic state
and of an Islamic leadership in the country as well as in Muslim communities
throughout the world"; and calling on Muslims to pursue "evangelism and jihad in the
whole world."
Muhammed Sholeh Ibrahim, now the principal of the Indonesian boarding school that
Baasyir founded, today lives off a long narrow alley, with a picture of Osama bin Laden
on his door. Beside it is a poster for the Ngruki school, depicting a raised arm
brandishing a rifle and green banner that reads "There is no God but Allah." Inside
Ibrahim's small study is another poster -- aimed at the United States -- showing a
sword buried in the side of Afghanistan with the slogan: "The suffering of Afghanisstan
is the suffering of all Muslim people."
Ibrahim, sitting cross-legged on the floor, explained quietly how the fight against the
Soviets and, more recently, opposition to the U.S. war in Afghanistan brought together
Indonesian and other Muslim militants, despite differences of nationality and
language. "The ones who went abroad learned how to organize the Islamic movement,
how to make the Islamic movements into one," he said. "They have common
enemies, like the United States and Russia before that. It made them become closer
to each other, to become unified."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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