A Jailhouse Conversion Splits Terrorists, and In-Laws

The Saturday Profile

By SETH MYDANS

JAKARTA, Indonesia

SENTENCED to death for a terrorist bombing, the brother-in-law of Nasir Abas writes to him from prison calling him an infidel and an enemy of Islam.

“I don’t reply,” Mr. Abas said. “I feel sympathy for him because he is under pressure in jail. He is not in a normal emotional state.”

But even in a normal emotional state, a convicted terrorist could be excused for being furious with Mr. Abas.

Once a high-ranking commander in the region’s deadliest terrorist group, Mr. Abas, 38, has been born again as an anti-terrorism evangelist. Working with the police, he visits his former comrades in jail in an effort to persuade them to cooperate and to mend their ways.

He appears at public forums and he has published a book called “Exposing Jemaah Islamiyah,” the terrorist group he once belonged to, which is linked to Al Qaeda and is behind most of the major attacks in the region in recent years.

His philosophical conversion is a boon to the police, who have taken what Indonesia’s counterterrorism chief, Asyaad Mbai, calls a “soft, humane approach” to detainees, treating them as wayward brothers rather than as criminals. They are given special privileges in prison, and in some cases their families receive financial support.

“It has the dual function of tainting some who accept and also winning members to a cooperative stance, so the police get more intel than before,” said Sidney Jones, senior adviser to the International Crisis Group and an expert on terrorism.

As part of this approach, Mr. Abas said he tried to convince detainees that their view of holy war is misguided, that the police are not evil and that cooperating with them is not a sin.

“I explain to them that it is wrong killing people with bombs,” Mr. Abas said. “This is not jihad in Islam. You are killing unarmed civilians. It is a shameful thing.”

He tried telling that to his brother-in-law, Ali Ghufron, when he was still able to visit him in prison, and they ended up shouting at each other, he said.

“He will not return my salaam,” Mr. Abas said, referring to a Muslim greeting. “He does not want to see me any more.”

His brother-in-law, known as Mukhlas, is one of three men scheduled to be executed soon for the bombings in 2002 of two nightclubs in Bali that killed more than 200 people.

“He says it’s a war,” Mr. Abas said. “America killed our civilians in Chechnya and Afghanistan and so on, so we are taking revenge on them.”

THEIR dispute reflects a rift that has caused Jemaah Islamiyah to move away from large-scale terrorist acts; there has not been a major attack since 2005, a second bomb attack in Bali.

“The broad picture is of a highly fractured movement which for now is weakened in capacity but in a constant state of flux, mutation and realignment,” said Ms. Jones, the terrorism expert.

For Mr. Abas, this schism plays itself out as a domestic dispute.

Family ties, including intermarriages, are a common way of cementing relationships within the terrorist movement. Fathers, sons, cousins and in-laws are connected by complex family networks.

But there has never been a rupture as public and personal as this clash between one of the group’s most aggressive killers and its highest-profile defector.

Caught in the middle is Mr. Abas’s sister Farida, who he said simply tries to duck as her husband and brother snap at each other.

“I say to my sister, ‘Mukhlas says I’m an infidel. Do you believe that?’ ” Mr. Abas said. “She says, ‘I don’t want to think about what you two have quarreled about. This is a problem between you and it is not my problem.’ ”

During a long sushi dinner recently at a downtown restaurant, his switch from terrorist to counterterrorist remained a bit of a mystery — a combination perhaps of impulse, self-interest and rationalization.

One day, as he tells the story, he was charging at his police captors, hoping to die for his cause; the next morning he was theirs, informing on his comrades and advising on tactics to combat them. He insists that he was not mistreated or coerced.

It all started, he said, because he hated to do his high school homework. Born in Singapore and raised in Malaysia in a working-class family, he was delighted to discover a Muslim boarding school where the curriculum mostly involved the reading of the Koran.

One thing led to another, as it often did in those days, and he soon felt a calling to fight for his fellow Muslims in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. There, at a Qaeda training camp, he discovered a knack for weaponry, and quickly became an instructor.

After six years there, he helped establish a terrorist training camp in the southern Philippines, then rose to command one of four territorial divisions of Jemaah Islamiyah. Some of the detainees he visits now are his former subordinates, he said.

By the time he was arrested in Indonesia in 2003, he said, he had already turned against the killing of civilians, calling it bad tactics and bad religion.

When he talks with detainees, he said, it is the story of his detention and overnight conversion that interests them the most. He presents it as a parable of pragmatism, and his listeners are welcome to take him at his word.

THROUGHOUT his night of interrogation he kept silent, Mr. Abas said he tells them, offering nothing but a prayer to God. But throughout, he said, he was thinking.

“I told myself, you must accept the reality that you got arrested,” he said. “God did not let me die, so there is something God wants me to do.”

By morning, he said, he was ready. He said a prayer and began to talk, offering the police a flood of detail about the structure and activities of Jemaah Islamiyah.

Nothing he did was inconsistent, he insists; simply an adaptation to circumstances.

“My change was that I agreed to continue my same mission together with the police,” he said. “My mission is to stop the crimes, stop the violence, stop the deviants. Bombing is an evil deed, and my obligation is to stop evil deeds.”

From this perspective, no one deserves punishment more than his brother-in-law, a mastermind of the deadliest terrorist act the region has seen.

But with his execution, Mr. Abas’s sister will become a widow and her children will lose their father. As if in a gesture of penance for the rift, Mr. Abas seems almost obsessive in describing his brother-in-law as a wonderful husband.

“Mukhlas stayed in the house,” he said. “He cooked. He washed clothes. He taught the children. He cleaned the home. He read books to the family. He never hurt the children. He never raised his voice. That is how good a husband he was.

“Not like me,” Mr. Abas said. “I’m not a good husband. I am away from my family. I never wash my family’s shirts and I never cook. Thank God my wife still loves me.”

Gates praises Indonesian military but cautions on human rights

The Defense secretary says the U.S. is willing to sell weapons to the key Southeast Asian ally.
By Peter Spiegel
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

12:12 PM PST, February 25, 2008

JAKARTA, INDONESIA — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said today that the U.S. was still willing to sell Indonesia new weaponry, particularly for its navy and air force. But he cautioned that democracies must have firm civilian control of their militaries, which must be disciplined for human rights abuses.

Gates praised Jakarta for moving to professionalize its military, which for decades under former President Suharto ruled the archipelago with an iron fist until the late dictator was deposed a decade ago.

Although Gates did not criticize the Indonesian military's current conduct, he made a point to emphasize that democracies must investigate and prosecute allegations of corruption or abuse within their armed forces.

"In addition to the importance of civilian control of the military, there cannot be even a taint of corruption or a hint of tolerance for human rights abuses," Gates told the Indonesian Council on World Affairs.

During the last three years, the Bush administration has moved to lift restrictions on military ties between the two countries that were first cut after Indonesian military atrocities committed in East Timor in 1991.

Congress has moved to withhold some of the aid until past abuses by the Indonesian military were accounted for, and human rights groups have argued that the armed forces still are not fully answerable to civilian authorities.

Gates' address followed his afternoon meetings with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono. U.S. officials traveling with Gates said he pushed to deepen security ties with Indonesia, which as the world's largest Muslim country has become a key ally in the region and a model of the kind of secular Muslim state the Bush administration hopes to replicate elsewhere.

Although Indonesia has become the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the region, at about $15.7 million this year, Indonesian government officials have expressed repeated frustration with the slow pace of U.S. military sales.

In recent months, Indonesia has discussed acquiring weapons from China and Russia, with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin vowing during a visit here in September to sell Jakarta $1 billion of advanced weaponry.

The discussions with the Russians and Chinese were seen by analysts as a hedge against inaction, but Gates emphasized that all U.S. restrictions on arms sales to Indonesia were lifted by the Bush administration in November 2005. At a news conference with Gates after their talks, Indonesia's defense minister said his consideration of non-U.S. weaponry was sound acquisition policy.

"We review all equipment from all countries, including the United States, in a balanced and very fair-minded way," Sudarsono said.

peter.spiegel@latimes.com

"Inherited Jihadism: Like Father, Like Son"

Sidney Jones in The Australian Financial Review
4 July 2007
Australian Financial Review

With the arrests of two top Jemaah Islamiyah leaders in Indonesia last month, all the attention was on the adults in the organisation. We should be thinking about their children.

We already have two generations of sons who followed their fathers' footsteps but had access to ideas and technologies that their fathers never dreamed of. We need to ensure that the career options of a third generation do not include terrorism, and that means thinking as much in terms of social work as law enforcement.

A few weeks ago Abu Dujana's eight-year-old son, Sidik, testified before the Indonesian parliament about how police shot his father in the leg after he had already been captured. However valid are concerns about police procedure, that child, egged on by his mother, is a perfect candidate for carrying on the JI tradition. The chances that he sees his father as a role model are high.

We already have inherited jihadism. One top JI leader, Abu Rusdan, now in his late 40s, is the son of a man imprisoned by Soeharto in the early 1980s for involvement in Darul Islam, the Islamic rebellion that gave birth to JI. At the age of 15 his son was inducted into the father's organisation. Abu Jibril, a contemporary of Abu Rusdan, supervised the creation of a JI cell in Karachi, Pakistan that consisted of his own son, Mohamed, and the siblings of several fellow JI members.

In the last three weeks, we've seen the police arrest a JI logistics supervisor named Taufik Kondang, whose 16-year-old son appears to have been working as an aide to Abu Dujana, and one of the young Australian embassy bombers was sent by his JI father, an Afghan veteran, to study bomb-making.

But it isn't just a question of the fathers providing inspiration. JI has a systematic indoctrination program that starts with pre-kindergarten playgroups and moves into kindergartens for Quranic study, Islamic elementary schools and a small group of pesantrens - religious boarding schools - across Java. The close family ties ensure that the children in these schools will grow up in a network where the parents have already bonded, and where the ideology serves to strengthen a social and economic network that could survive dozens more arrests.

We have cases where whole families have gone to JI schools. One of the men convicted in the Marriott bombing was the fifth of eleven siblings. In 2004, his youngest sister Aisyah, then 13, was attending a JI school together with her 15-year-old brother. Aisyah is now 17. Where is she now, what has she learned, who will she marry, and what will she teach her children?
While adolescent children and siblings of current JI leaders, particularly the boys, are likely to succeed them, there are some mitigating factors to be considered as well.

Enrollment in some of the flagship JI schools seems to be declining. This may be due to the stigmatisation of terrorism, but it may also be rooted in the restrictive environment - no music allowed, for example - or the lack of opportunities afterwards. One young man told me he realised he had graduated with no marketable skills and is only employable in other JI schools. He yearns for something that will fulfill his ideals of fighting for a just cause without violating his religious principles and earn him some money at the same time. It's also possible that some in JI families will see their brothers' imprisonment as a deterrent.

The jihadist movement could self-destruct, but we can't count on it, especially with the war in Iraq, a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Gaza, and the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict. International factors by themselves don't determine recruitment but they
provide a critical backdrop.

How are we going to draw children out of the jihadist network before the indoctrination sets in? Here are a couple of ideas:

1. Work with educational departments of local state Islamic universities to map the networks of JI schools and try to develop quality alternatives.
2. Develop an outreach program for the families of those detained that might include subsidizing the children's education at state schools.
3. Encourage the local business community to invest in on-the-job training programs or youth activities in areas where JI schools are based.
4. Draw on experiences elsewhere. What programs were put in place for IRA children? Are there any experiences from the work with child soldiers that would apply to children schooled in jihadism?

If we see the problem of terrorism as being confine to the adults, we miss the long-term dangers. It's not Abu Dujana who could be a problem ten years hence; it's his children, who need to be shown a different path.

Sidney Jones is South East Asia Project Director for International Crisis Group

Religiosity, Not Radicalism Is New Wave in Indonesia

By SETH MYDANS

TANGERANG, Indonesia — When Lt. Col. Antonius Tihadi confronts a couple in a hotel room, he does so very politely.

“We don’t kick down the door or anything like that,” he said.

Under a local ordinance that includes elements of Islamic Shariah law, Colonel Tihadi heads the enforcement unit that raids shops selling alcohol, interrogates women who are out alone at night and arrests unmarried couples for “immoral behavior.”

“We ask politely to see their documents,” he said. “If they do not have the same address we ask them separately to tell us the names of their in-laws. If they don’t know that, they aren’t married.”

This is the extreme version of the possible future of Indonesia, where as many as 50 communities have adopted similar Shariah regulations in recent years.

A conservative tide is challenging the moderate, tolerant traditions of the world’s most populous Muslim nation. But most analysts doubt that Tangerang, an industrial city of 1.5 million people adjacent to the capital, Jakarta, is a model for a future Indonesia, despite the emergence in the country of hard-line organizations and Islamic political parties, an increase in Islamic head scarves among women and periodic attacks by terrorist groups.

“There is a view that Islam is on the march,” said Greg Fealy, an expert on Indonesia at the Australian National University. “I don’t see any evidence for that.”

“Yes, there is a religious and cultural Islamization, in private and public,” he added. “But in the political realm, there is hardly any evidence to support the view that Islam is rising.”

Some analysts say the Shariah ordinances are in large part a response to economic hardships, colored by a rise in religious devotion that mostly has nothing to do with radicalism.

More broadly, they say, this Islamic ferment is a product of the democratic clamor unleashed in 1998 when the longtime strongman Suharto was driven from power.

The change in mood can be seen on campuses, where students who demonstrated for democracy a decade ago are forming Islamic associations and turning toward religion. The short skirts of the past have been replaced by Muslim head scarves.

“Democracy is like a gate that is opened to let people say what they want,” said Budi, a student at the secular University of Indonesia who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name. “Having the door open wider, it was easier for us to promote Islamic values and teaching.”

Nearly 90 percent of Indonesia’s 235 million people call themselves Muslims. But Indonesian Islam has a history of accommodation of other beliefs and tolerance for differences.

After Muslim traders brought their religion in the 12th century, the Indonesian version of Islam embraced elements of the Hinduism, Buddhism and animism that flourished here. It is still characterized more by the mysticism of these roots than by the orthodoxy of Islamists.

“Indonesia has these awful political crises,” said Robert W. Hefner, an expert on Indonesian Islam at Boston University. “But one thing that has consistently survived is this kind of sweet nationalism, not a racist nationalism — it’s a multiethnic thing.”

The tension between Islam and secular democracy goes back to the founding of the nation in 1945, when the Islamists failed in their attempt to insert into the Constitution what are known here as the seven words. They translate into English as “with obligation for Muslims to practice Shariah.” Islamist delegates to Parliament tried again to insert the phrase after the fall of Suharto and were rebuffed in 2002.

Militant Islam has found little support among the public, analysts say, and is unlikely to be a strong force in shaping the country’s future.

“In my experience, Indonesian Islam will remain tolerant, remain moderate,” said Azyumardi Azra, director of the graduate school at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. “Of course there is growing conservatism, but not in terms of becoming more radical.”

Indonesians overwhelmingly say they support Shariah, said Mr. Azyumardi, who has studied public attitudes on the question. For most, though, Shariah means Muslim morality rather than the imposition of Muslim law.

“When you ask them if they support Shariah in a general way, they support it,” he said. “They think of prayer, fasting, the hajj” — the journey to the holy city of Mecca.

But he said most of these same people say they do not support the imposition of restrictive Islamic law, which includes punishments like flogging or stoning for adultery.

“The implementation of ‘Shariah’ is not Shariah,” he said of municipalities like Tangerang. “These so-called laws against prostitution and alcohol and moral issues are only bylaws with Islamic colors.”

The exception is the province of Aceh, which until last year fought a separatist war against the government and was granted special autonomy. It has adopted a fairly strict Shariah law that includes public canings, but even there the strictures are contentious.

The Muslim political parties that emerged after the fall of Suharto have learned the hard way about the public’s wariness of their Islamist agenda. Together, they have never drawn more than about one-fifth of the electoral vote, and they have mostly stopped talking about Shariah in their campaigns.

The Justice and Welfare Party, one of the largest of these parties, now campaigns as the party of clean government and public service, though Shariah law remains one of its founding principles.

“Islamic state, blah blah, not an issue,” said Zulkieflimansyah, a member of Parliament who is a leading voice among the party’s younger generation. Shariah law, he said, is much less than it is cracked up to be.

He agreed that it was economic hardship that drives the popularity of Shariah ordinances among people whose lives have not improved under a decade of democratic rule.

This seems to have been the story in Tangerang, which was badly hit by the economic crash of 1997.

Hard times brought a rise in crime, prostitution and narcotics and an epidemic of alcoholism that spread into surrounding villages, said Dewi Gustiana, the Tangerang reporter for the daily newspaper Suara Pembaruan.

“People were asking the government to do something, and there was pressure from groups trying to introduce Muslim values,” she said.

The regulations were adopted in 2005 and enforcement fell to a local civil police force of about 200 officers. The work has been steady. In May, according to their own count, it raided 10 places selling alcohol, arrested one woman in a hotel room and arrested another on the street.

There have been complaints, Ms. Dewi said. Among other things, the force has been detaining young women factory workers no their way home from night shifts. The government suggested a dress code that has nothing to do with head scarves. If a woman wants to avoid arrest as she waits for her bus home at night, officials said, she should be sure to wear her factory uniform.