Sunanda Creagh – Some things in the Central Jakarta district of Matraman have barely changed since the late 1960s, when US President Barack Obama lived and played there.

Old men train their racing pigeons on the basketball court and screaming children chase one another through the winding, grimy alleyways. But if Obama decides to drop by his old neighborhood when he visits Indonesia next week, he may notice changes around the local mosque.

It has become a meeting spot for members of the small but vocal Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), an extremist group famous for smashing up bars that serve alcohol. It also made headlines when its followers assaulted several elderly men and women at a peaceful interfaith rally in 2008.

"Now there are so many radicals around here. We don't agree with them but there are definitely more than there were before," said Ali Rully, a pensioner who was a high-school student when little "Barry" Obama lived here.

One resident, who asked not to be named, said she had detected an increasingly anti-Western tone in some of the sermons broadcast by the local mosque.

Obama is a Christian but was listed in his elementary-school records as a Muslim, probably because his father and stepfather were Muslims. As a child in Jakarta, he would have been exposed to a very moderate form of Islam by his Javanese stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, locals says.

Obama's former neighbors, however, said the revelations of new jihadist cells in Aceh showed that times have changed.

"There was nothing like that in those days, when Obama was a kid here. None of these, what do you call them, terrorists," said Agus Salam, who sells gado-gado from a stall and who remembers the president as a chubby-faced little boy.

Radical groups were kept tightly in check under Suharto. His fall from power in 1998 paved the way for greater democracy – including the freedom for such groups as the FPI to express their views openly.

"Maybe our government at the moment is not firm enough. Back in Suharto's day, the government was much tougher," said Rudy Yara, 61, who remembers teasing Obama about his tightly curled hair as a child.

Not everyone has such a rosy view of the past. One Matraman resident remembered feeling scared at night in the 1960s in Bandung because of the fear of attacks by extremist group Darul Islam. Many of today's extremist groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah have their roots in DI, which was repressed by the army.