Sita W. Dewi, Jakarta – The International Crisis Group (ICG) said that the government needed a strategy to counter clerics who do not use violence but nevertheless preach that it is permissible to shed the blood of so-called infidels or tyrants, which is parlance for Indonesian officials and the police.

"The problem is that there is no agreement within the country's political elite on the nature of the threat," the ICG said in a report published on its website on Thursday.

The Brussels-based organization examined the radicalization of a group from Cirebon, West Java, which was behind the 2011 suicide bombings of a mosque and a church.

Ideological and tactical lines within the radical community were blurring, making it harder to distinguish "terrorists" from hard-line activists and religious vigilantes, the report pointed out.

"The Cirebon men moved from using sticks and stones in the name of upholding morality and curbing 'deviance' to using bombs and guns, and this may become the common pattern," ICG senior adviser Sidney Jones said in a statement.

The report cited that the Cirebon men, who were poorly educated and underemployed, represented a generational shift from jihadists who were trained abroad or from those who fought a decade ago in two major communal conflicts in Ambon and Poso.

Instead, the men were radicalized through attending public lectures by radical clerics, and most had taken part in attacks on stores selling liquor and had been involved in anti-Ahmadiyah activities.

The men had been members of Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid (JAT), an extremist organization founded by well-known cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir in 2008, but then left to form an even more militant group.

The two suicide bombers, Mohamed Syarif, who blew himself up at a Cirebon mosque on April 15, 2011, and Ahmed Yosefa Hayat, who died in an attack on a church in Surakarta, Central Java, on Sept. 25, taught themselves how to make bombs from the Internet and worked alone.

ICG noted that the merging of vigilantes and jihadists had been facilitated by the proliferation of Islamist civil society organizations and the popularity of public religious lectures as forums for spreading radical views.

If the radicalization of groups such as the one in Cirebon men was to be halted, the government needed to build a national consensus on what constitutes extremism, directly confront hate speech and promote zero tolerance of religiously-inspired crimes, the ICG noted. (nvn)