Indonesians must unite to root out the "poverty and backwardness" that led an 18-year-old to carry out the suicide bombing at a luxury hotel last month that ended a four-year pause in terrorist attacks in the country, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said yesterday.
In his annual Independence Day address, he said the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation "must not, and cannot, be defeated by terrorism".
It was Dr Yudhoyono's first major policy speech since twin bombings on July 17 killed seven people and wounded more than 50 at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta, and the first since police said they uncovered a terror plot to assassinate him.
One of the hotel bombs was set off by an 18-year-old high school graduate, and Dr Yudhoyono said steering young people away from extremists was a key to a terror-free future.
"Let us protect our citizens and youth from misleading and extreme ideas that may lead them to commit acts of terrorism," he said.
He said government programs would be implemented to alleviate "poverty, backwardness and also injustice" used by militant Islamists to recruit volunteers in a misguided jihad, or holy war.
Last month's hotel attack has been blamed on the same terrorist networks behind four earlier bombings that together killed 250 people, many of them international tourists on Bali.
Police have stepped up their manhunt for Malaysian terror mastermind Noordin Muhammad Top, said to have orchestrated all the bombings since 2003, many of them with al-Qa'ida funding. Those include an earlier attack at the JW Marriott Hotel in 2003, another on the Australian embassy in 2004 and a triple suicide bombing in Bali in 2005.
Three militant suspects have been shot to death during recent raids, while several other key suspects, including Top, remain at large, police say.
During their hunt, police allegedly uncovered a plot by Top and his associates to use a car-bomb to assassinate Dr Yudhoyono, who was re-elected to a second five-year term just days before the Jakarta hotel blasts.
A former commander of Jemaah Islamiah, the group behind the first Bali bombing that killed 202 people including 88 Australians in 2002, said yesterday that new militant volunteers continued to pose a threat to Indonesia's security.
Top no longer needs to find new members himself because "recruitment has been carried out by his followers and supporters", said Nasir Abas, who left the network years ago and assists with a government de-radicalisation program.
Top manages to elude capture thanks to a tight-knit support network that enables him to resettle, take new wives and plot attacks, Abas says in a new book, Fighting Terrorism and the Hunt for Noordin M. Top, that was released this week.