Martin Abbugao, Singapore – Shortly after Indonesian police arrested suspects in the 2005 Bali bombings, five senior members of the extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) were secretly flown to a safehouse on the resort island.
There, they engaged the suspects – all junior members of JI – in a series of sometimes heated ideological sparring sessions in an attempt to convince them violence is not the way forward, police say.
For about a week, police interrogators kept themselves out of sight, allowing the senior members, who had agreed to work with the government, time to establish a psychological beach-head.
"Sometimes they debate the whole night," said Senior Superintendent Tito Karnavian, intelligence chief of Detachment 88, an elite US-trained unit of the Indonesian police involved in the operation.
"When their Islamic argument is already defeated, then it's easy for us. Then we enter," Karnavian told reporters here on the sidelines of the Global Security Asia Conference on domestic security threats.
The tactic signals a broadening of Indonesia's efforts in the fight against extremists like the militants from JI, which has been blamed for a series of deadly bombings in Indonesia, including the 2002 and 2005 Bali attacks.
The police force is no longer interested only in dismantling militant networks – they now are making an effort to rehabilitate suspects in custody and prevent future attacks through religious education, Karnavian said.
Indonesia has paid a heavy price for its failure to fully recognise the depth of the presence of home-grown and internationally-allied groups like JI until they began their attacks in 2000, he noted.
A total of 202 people, mostly foreigners, were killed in the 2002 attack on the resort island. Another 20 bystanders were killed in the 2005 suicide bombings.
With the help of international police, Indonesia initially moved against JI and other militant networks through traditional investigative work and raids.
"Our strategy had been developed due to a series of major attacks, so the strategy was 'fire brigade' – how to reveal (the network) very quickly," Karnavian said. "But having analysed that, it was not enough. The more we uncovered the network, we were surprised at its extent."
Two Malaysians, Azahari Husin and Noordin Mohammad Top, were allegedly key masterminds of JI attacks, but experts now believe they subsequently split off to form a more hardline group. Azahari died in an Indonesian police raid in 2005 and Noordin remains on the run.
Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, told the conference that Indonesia needed an ideological victory over hardline Muslims.
"Unless we target their ideology and we counter the false belief system that has been generated... we will always face the threat of terrorism," he said. The Indonesian police gradually shifted their approach over the past two years, Karnavian said.
He said armed militants in Sulawesi island's religiously divided district of Poso, and on Ambon island, are now dealt with by directly addressing the "root causes" of the problem – religious conflict, poverty and lack of education.
But police have taken a different approach to JI because of its international links. One tactic is to convince moderate Muslims to denounce the militants and counter extremist ideology through education.
"We go to the Islamic boarding schools. The government is working with the organisation of Islamic scholars to discuss issues," Karnavian said.
Militants are identified through their rank in the organisation's hierarchy, which is based on knowledge of Islam, the extent of their training in camps in the southern Philippines or Afghanistan, and the year they "graduated".
Senior militants are usually harder to reform than junior members. If a junior is arrested, reformed senior operatives are sent to "neutralise" their ideology, as with the suspects in the second Bali bombings, he said.
Of the 300 JI members arrested, Karnavian said 50 of them are senior and of those, about 10 to 20 of them have been successfully won over to moderate Islam and are helping the government. "We can use them," he said. "They respect seniority very much."
Winning over arrested militants does not exculpate them from their act, he stressed, adding that those found guilty in connection with the 2005 Bali attacks have been jailed.
Instead, it helps reassure the government that they will not influence fellow prisoners or other people when they finish serving their term, he said.