Security experts say the regional terrorist group, Jemaah Islamiah still poses a significant threat, despite the arrest of around 200 men suspected of having links to the organisation. Experts say the group's history, rigorous training, strong family bonds, and the belief amongst Indonesian leaders that Jemaah Islamiah doesn't really present a coherent threat, are all working in JI's favour.
Presenter/Interviewer: Tricia Fitzgerald Speakers: Doctor Greg Fealy, Australian National University; Sidney Jones, International Crisis Group, Indonesia.
Fitzgerald: Indonesian authorities have been on alert since last year's Bali bombing, but analysts say the crackdown probably won't be enough to curb JI's activities. But why is the group proving so resilient?
Experts gathered in Melbourne this week for Monash University's Annual Indonesian Lecture Series, said the group's strength lies partly in its deep roots in Indonesian history.
Although JI only sprung to international prominence last year, Doctor Greg Fealy of the Australian National University, says JI is linked to and partly inspired by Indonesia's militant Islamic group Darul Islam which led a series of rebellions in the 1940's, 50's and 60's.
Fealy: The impact of Darul Islam was on a vastly greater scale than anything perpetrated in the post-Suharto era, indeed anything since, the number of people directly affected by this. There is quite a bit of evidence that somewhere between 15 and 20-thousand people died, many thousands more were injured and kidnapped. Over one-and-a-half-million people were evacuees or refugees as a result of the rebellion. Probably around about half a million houses and buildings were destroyed, there was also extensive destruction of the infrastructure, and there was immense suffering too. Villagers were terrorised by both Darul Islam fighters and also TNI soldiers.
Fitzgerald: Doctor Fealy says Islamic extremism isn't new in Indonesia, like JI, Darul Islam was fighting for an Islamic state in Indonesia, and called on its followers to kill and wage war against those it believed stood in its way.
Fealy: Violent Islamic extremism goes back at least 50 years in Indonesia, and the ideology, which accompanies that, is also nothing new in Indonesia. It's been present consistently from the 1940s, it has been suppressed with various degrees of success by the state pretty much from the early 1960s right through the late 1980s.
Fitzgerald: The crackdown on Darul Islam followers in the 1980's by former President Suharto meant many radical Indonesian Muslims were looking for an escape at that time. This coincided with a recruitment drive by Islamic leaders in Afghanistan who were battling Russian troops.
Sidney Jones, the South East Asian director of the International Crisis Group, says with Saudi Arabian funds, hundreds of Indonesians went to Afghanistan where they received expert training in how to wage terrorist warfare.
Jones: So you had the push factor from the Suharto government and the pull factor from the Afghanistan developments and you began to have Indonesians on a systematic basis going to Afghanistan to train. From Abdullah Sungkar's perspective, and he was working very closely with Abu Bakar Bashir at this stage, the main motivation was to increase the military capacity of Darul Islam so they could better fight against the Suharto government to establish an Islamic state. But once these people got to Afghanistan there began to be a much more global perspective on the world at large.
Fitzgerald: It was at this time that Indonesian fighters in Afghanistan forged ties with the international terrorist group Al Qaeda and with radical Muslims from Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Pakistan.
The Indonesian fighters also went to the Philippines for training, and fought for the Islamic cause in Bosnia, Kashmir and Chechnya.
Once they returned to their home ground Sidney Jones says JI's involvement in the running of Islamic boarding schools and political support ensured their survival.
Jones: Many of the Afghan and Mindanao Alumni returned to Indonesia to become instructors in Indonesian Muslim boarding schools called Pesantrens, and they're not all that many that they are involved in, but there is a serious group of a small number of Pesantrens that are propagating a radical Jihadist ideology. And one of the questions is, is there anything that the Indonesian government can do about these without tainting the overall Muslim education system more generally. And secondly, the question is even with the fact that serious JI activity has been going on for two years by the time of the Bali bombs, it took the Bali bombs to wake up the Indonesian government, but even today you have less than half the Indonesian population willing to believe that Jemaah Islamiah exists.
Fitzgerald: Greg Fealy says the relucance to crack down on Islamic groups has deep roots in Indonesian history.
Fealy: It's this ambivalence they have, you saw it with Darul Islam in the 1950s and 60s where governments they had a strong Islamic element were very wary of taking it on militarily, cracking down on it. Most particularly Mashumi, but even with the Nahdlatul Ulama, supposedly the most moderate of parties, they had all sorts of revolts at the local level when they tried to push through motions endorsing military action against Darul Islam. There's an ambivalence then saying that these Darul Islam people are Muslims, they might be misled, their Islam is not our Islam but they are Muslims, and in Indonesia we should not be killing our co-religionists. And the same kind of ambivalence you find today to Abu Bakar Bashir, and this very simplistic attitude that you get from our governments and from lots of commentators about radical Islam and moderate Islam that grossly over-simplifies it. That person can be moderate in certain fields, but they can be very sympathetic to Bashir and to some of the things that JI might be trying to do in other ways.
Fitzgerald: The international Crisis Group says another hidden support for JI, is the network of wives, mothers and sisters who Sidney Jones says carry the flame for the group, especially when their men folk are under arrest.
Jones: The women play an extraordinarily important role in Jemaah Islamiah but not as fighters. As far as I know there isn't a single instance of Jemaah Islamiah for example using a woman to deliver a bomb or getting actively involved in that way. But first of all this organisation hangs together in large part because of the women, and there's been this extraordinary pattern of inter-marriage within Jemaah Islamiah where there is a deliberate effort to try and strengthen bonds within the organisation by selecting wives that have the Darul Islam lineage or who have other key characteristics that will somehow not only solidify the network but also make it more secure. And the security leads into another role for the women because particularly within these organisations the women are clearly privy to a lot of information that gets shared, and they appear to play something of a courier role among different parts of the organisation, and this is particularly true after their husbands or brothers or whoever are arrested. And if this organisation survives the crackdown that it's undergoing now it may be in large part because the women who are not suspected can keep communication going among different cells.
Fitzgerald: Despite Indonesia's history of cracking down on its religious extremists, in the '50's and '60's, the International Crisis Group believes Indonesia isn't in a position to repeat those tactics now.
Jones: Indonesia is hampered in some ways by the fact that the last thing it wants to do is to bring back the military into a position of power or to bring back clampdowns on freedom of association and freedom of expression, and even people who are in the current Megawati government, which is sort of rolling back democratic reforms right and left, that government is still committed at some level to protecting some of those freedoms. They don't want to go back to the Suharto era. What you can get away with in Singapore is something that you can't get away with in Indonesia or the Philippines for that matter, and however much some members of the Indonesian military would like to have an Internal Security Act, it's not going to happen in Indonesia.
Fitzgerald: Sidney Jones believes however there are some signs that JI might start to fracture from within. She says there have been unconfirmed reports from the secretive organisation that there are increasing internal divisions.