Mainly terrorism in Indonesia: catch all

[Steve Blair]

Maybe they could look at some of the US programs aimed at helping former gang members integrate into normal society when they're released from prison...both for things to do and possibly things to avoid doing.

[Strickland]

Indonesia has done a respectbale job of rounding up known or suspected terrorists. Whether it is done so out of self-interest vice concern for the GWOT is irrelevant. Unfortunately, recent governments have been handicapped by corruption, internal insurgencies, piracy, drug trafficking, and counterfeiting as to make them less than fully effective partners in the GWOT. What Indonesia does provide, along with Pakistan and Bangladesh, is a good example as a potential manpower pool for well financed terror organizations. With 55 million people living in absolute poverty and most illiterate, how do we begin to address their greivances in order for these folks not to become terrorists? Between Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Indonesia, you have over 100 million people living in total poverty and ignorance, thus making them susceptible to being deceived into actively supporting terror networks. What can be done about this? Are we prepared to embark on a global campaign to eradicate ignorance and poverty in order to eliminate those who turn to terrorist groups?

[YellowJack]

I'm kinda pessimistic about Indonesias hand in the GWOT. There was a report on this a few days back here in Australia. Take the report with a grain of salt. The liberal Islamist Wahid is going senile methinks, but the Indonesian police chief is spot on. POLRI (Indon Police) is incompetent and corrupt. The ICG released a telling report two years back on how POLRI members blatantly paraded a group through the town thereby stirring up violence. I think it might have been this report. The links between the TNI (Indon military) and militia groups is also well known. Seeing as though some of these militia are muslim oriented it kinda raises the question as to what extent the TNI are cracking down on extremists and to what extent they are interacting with them for their own purposes. So these social networks might have to be investigated and curtailed.

It's in my own view that a lot of the military members at the lower levels can get out of control. Because the TNI works right down to a village level, whereby members are actually embedded within the political structure of small communities, recklessness can get out of hand without any sort of authoritative oversight. Also considering the massive command and logistical strains over the archipelago which can leave military members isolated like a modern day Colonel Kurtz (just kidding, but you get my point on the ties between geographic isolation and information isolation).

On the political front the conservative political Islamists are doing an excellent job at separating themselves from the radical Islamists. This was seen in the 2004 elections. If anything the best warning signal for growing strife within Indonesia would be to watch their political parties and see which are starting to be influenced by the jihadi zeitgeist. Because the two can be closely intertwined it could pop out of nowhere. One way to weaken the extremist Jihadi political aspirations would be to support and strengthen the liberal Islamist movements within Indonesia, as they are an effective deterrent.

On the media front, if anyone peruses the Indonesian news on this board you'll be aware that corruption is the new black within the Indonesian media (that and their constant love of the paranormal, something that Ralph Peters would probably have something to say about in regards to bad information). So I would expect some of this news to either be: spotlighted for the international community on the corrupt links between terrorism and the military; or, for that news to be blowtorched by the government and military.

Also, in regard to the International Crisis Group ... they should be applauded for their work on gathering open source information on Jemaah Islamiyah.

[Jedburgh]

ICG, 19 Nov 07: Deradicalisation and Indonesian Prisons

Even as the police are focusing their deradicalisation program on prisoners and ex-prisoners, they are the first to acknowledge that the current state of Indonesian prisons undermines their efforts. It is a telling indictment of the system that they do their best to keep top terrorists at police headquarters, out of the normal prison system entirely, because the chances of backsliding are so high.

Choices about isolation or integration are important but they cannot be made outside a broader program of prison reform, particularly an attack on prison corruption, which is very much on the agenda of the new director general of corrections. More important than choosing between two policies, in any case, is training prison administrators to look at terrorist prisoners as individuals and tailor prison programs to their needs.

Deradicalisation programs are important but they will inevitably be trial-and-error in nature; there is no single intervention that can produce a rejection of violence among a disparate group of people who have joined radical movements for many different reasons. Within JI alone there are the ideologues, the thugs, the utopians, the followers and the inadvertent accomplices; local recruits from Poso are motivated by very different factors than those who graduate from JI-affiliated schools in central Java.

Much more thought needs to be given to how to evaluate the “success” of deradicalisation programs, because there is a danger that many people deemed to have been deradicalised are those who were never the real problem, or that the reasons individuals renounce violence have nothing to do with police programs. Even if we could measure the number of people deradicalised according to specific criteria, that figure would only have meaning if we had some sense of the number of new recruits and knew that the balance was going in the right direction.

Focusing on the criminals-turned-jihadis in prison is also important. In all the prisons where “ustadz” are held, there is likely to be a small group of such men but it is not clear that anyone is tracking them or turning deradicalisation efforts in their direction. If it is important to design programs to ensure newly released JI members have vocational opportunities, what about the criminal recruits who may, like Beni Irawan, the Kerobokan guard, turn out to be more militant than their mentors? These men also need to be the focus of special programs and thus far have been left out.

It is hard to set performance goals for deradicalisation because it means so many different things to different people. But setting such goals for improving prison management is possible, desirable and critically necessary.

Complete 35 page paper at the link.

[Jedburgh]

22 Jan 08: Indonesia: Tackling Radicalism in Poso

Serious violence in Poso has had a ten-year history. Between 1998 and 2001, it had been the scene of Christian-Muslim fighting. After 2001 and a government-brokered peace pact, the violence became one-sided, with local extremists, many of them linked to and directed by the extremist organisation Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), mounting attacks on Christians, local officials and suspected informants. The 11 and 22 January 2007 operations were the culmination of almost a year’s unsuccessful effort by the police to persuade those responsible for criminal acts to turn themselves in. Fourteen militants and one policeman died in the process, but Poso is quieter and safer, by all accounts, than it has been in years. As a result of the January operations:

�� almost all the JI religious teachers from Java have fled the area;

�� the perpetrators of all the jihadi crimes committed since the 2001 Malino peace accord have been identified, and most have been arrested, tried and convicted, without any backlash;

�� the JI administrative unit (wakalah) in Poso appears to have been destroyed, at least temporarily;

�� a major vocational training program is underway aimed at ensuring that would-be extremists have career opportunities that will keep them out of trouble;

�� the central government has made new funding available, including for improving education in the hope of diluting the influence of radical teaching; and

�� no serious violence has taken place in Poso in twelve months.

Complete 12 page paper at the link.

[Jedburgh]

ICG, 28 Feb 08: Indonesia: Jemaah Islamiyah’s Publishing Industry

A handful of members and persons close to Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), Indonesia’s most prominent extremist organisation, have developed a profitable publishing consortium in and around the pesantren (religious school) founded by Abu Bakar Ba’asyir and Abdullah Sungkar in Solo, Central Java. The consortium has become an important vehicle for the dissemination of jihadi thought, getting cheap and attractively printed books into mosques, bookstores and discussion groups. The publishing venture demonstrates JI’s resilience and the extent to which radical ideology has developed roots in Indonesia. The Indonesian government should monitor these enterprises more closely, but they may be playing a useful role by channelling JI energies into waging jihad through the printed page rather than acts of violence.....

Complete 25 page report at the link.

[Jedburgh]

IHT, 3 Jul 08: Islamic militants abort terror attack in western Indonesia at last minute

Militants linked to Southeast Asia's most wanted terror suspect placed three bombs inside a tiny cafe in western Indonesia, but aborted their attack at the last minute after realizing many of the victims would have been Muslims, police said Thursday.

The revelation came during the interrogation of 10 men who were arrested this week on Sumatra Island. Twenty-two explosives also were seized, many packed with bullets to maximize the impact of the blasts, said police spokesman Maj. Gen. Abubakar Nataprawira.

The busts highlighted the lingering threat in Indonesia, which has been hit by a string of suicide bombings in recent years, including the 2002 Bali nightclubs attacks that thrust the world's most populous Muslim nation onto the front lines in the war on terrorism.......

[davidbfpo]

Due to a host of factors, Indonesia continues to witness an upsurge of religious radicalism. Some salient characteristics, the DNA of radicalism so to speak, stand out when one analyses the attitudes and behavior of jihadists.

The jihadist embodies the following characteristics:

Link:http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2...adicalize.html

[Jedburgh]

ICG, 19 Apr 11: Indonesian Jihadism: Small Groups, Big Plans

Violent extremism in Indonesia increasingly is taking the form of small groups acting independently of large jihadi organisations but sometimes encouraged by them. This is in part a response to effective law enforcement that has resulted in widespread arrests and structural weakening of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), Jama’ah Ansharut Tauhid (JAT) and other organisations accused of links to terrorism. But it is also the result of ideological shifts that favour “individual” over “organisational” jihad and low-cost, smallscale targeted killings over mass casualty attacks that inadvertently kill Muslims....