ID Nugroho and Suherdjoko, Surabaya, Semarang – Dissatisfied with the government's reaction to violence by the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), an alliance of religious organizations in Jember regency, East Java, is preparing a special force to launch a strike at the hard-line group.
The alliance is affiliated with Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, and the National Awakening Party (PKB).
The force will be divided into 300-member groups to undergo special training in self-defense and the use of knives, machetes and other traditional cutting tools in a training field in Sucopengetok village, 25 kilometers from Jember.
A large number of self-defense instructors were coming down from mountainous areas in the regency to train the combatants recruited from Garda Bangsa, Batuan Serbaguna, Anshor and a number of Islamic pesantren (boarding schools) in the regency, Ayub Junaidi, coordinator of the force and secretary of the Jember branch of the PKB told The Jakarta Post here Saturday.
"If the FPI is not disbanded, the special force will leave for Jakarta to do it," Ayub said.
Ayub said the training would be conducted in groups and would be completed within several months. "All participants will be trained physically and mentally so they will be able to endure the worst situations."
He said the special militia was not being reestablished to create public unrest but to put an end to that created by the FPI and its affiliated organizations.
The special force was originally founded in 2000 and was deployed to the State Palace to support President Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, who was facing increasing pressure to resign.
Ayub said all Muslim organizations in East Java were opposed to the FPI, which used violence in the name of Islam, a religion, he added, that actually sought to create peace on the planet.
He said the government must disband the FPI, which had acted against the law, endangered national unity, discredited the 1945 Constitution and risked authoritarianism.
He also said Muslim people and organizations in East Java were disappointed with the police's failure to take strong actions against the FPI, despite the group's history of violence.
Another militia group has been prepared at Soko Tunggal Islamic Boarding School in Semarang, led by cleric Nuril Arifin Husein. The group was ready to take on the FPI, Nuril said Saturday.
"The FPI is only a small group of Muslims, but behaves as if it were the biggest one. Its members like to force their will on others and take the law into their own hands," Nuril said.
Nuril said he did not agree with FPI leader Rizieq Shihab. "From where in the world does the FPI's brand of Islam, which tends to ridicule clerics, come from? What kind of teaching is Rizieq spreading?"
Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono said the FPI was the result of social conditions.
"Beyond the merits of banning or not banning the FPI, as long as there are 9.8 million unemployed and 36 million living below the poverty line, there will always be angry young men and women attracted to various streams of radicalism, Islamic or otherwise," the minister said in Jakarta on Sunday.
"They (the FPI) skillfully position themselves as defenders of the humiliated, young and marginalized urban poor fighting the evils of bars, nightclubs and other symbols of decadent foreign secularism."
Juwono reminded people that 10 years ago, the then Jakarta Police chief was a patron of the FPI. "The important thing is that sympathy for the FPI has effectively been eradicated from the hearts and minds of most mainstream Muslims in Indonesia," he said.