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Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia Terrorist Group Splits, But Retains Islamic Militancy

2007-03-01

The Southeast Asia group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), which has been blamed for a series of bombings over the past several years, has splintered into factions and may be heading in new directions. VOA’s Nancy-Amelia Collins traveled to the heart of JI territory in Central Java, in Indonesia, and has this report. In this part of Indonesia’s central Java island, most people quietly eke out meager livings from the land and sea. But this region has become notorious, after three brothers brought shame to their village. They helped carry out the bombings on the resort island of Bali in October 2002 that killed 202 people, many of them foreign tourists. Here in the sleepy village of Tenggulun, those three brothers lived and thrived. Now Amrozi Nurhasyim and Ali Gufron are sentenced to death. Their brother Ali Imron is serving a life sentence. All three had significant roles in the hard-line Islamist group Jemaah Islamiyah. And while the Central Java district is known as a spiritual home of the terrorist group, not everyone here supports it. Thirty-two-year-old Malik was born and raised in Tenggulun and says the three brothers do not represent the village. He says he does not know why Amrozi and his brothers carried out the terrorists bombing on Bali, but he says many people in the village hate what they did. The three brothers are representative of a radical faction of JI that is headed by Southeast Asia’s most wanted terrorist, Malaysian Noordin Top. Under Noordin’s leadership, the faction’s goal has been to attack Western targets, and as result, hundreds of people have died. Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir represents another faction. He was released from a Jakarta jail in June after serving 25 months for his alleged role in the 2002 Bali bombings. Indonesia’s Supreme Court cleared him of the charges in December. The 69-year-old Bashir is accused of being the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah. It is a charge he denies. But he does not deny his belief in radical Islam. In this Jakarta mosque, and many more like it across Java, Bashir preaches against non-Muslims, or infidels. He calls for the implementation of Sharia, or Islamic law, across the sprawling archipelago of Indonesia, a secular nation with the world’s largest Muslim population. He says infidels will stay in hell forever and live in insecurity because they are the worst creatures living on earth. He says the person who is not ruled by Islam is poor in dignity. The vast majority of Indonesians practice a moderate, tolerant form of Islam, but Bashir seeks an Islamic state across much of Southeast Asia that leaves little room for non-Muslims. He says according to Islam, infidels must not live freely, but must be monitored under Islamic law because they will cause destruction and kill people. Bashir says while the infidels cannot be forced to become Muslims, they must be forced to bow to Islamic law. Nasir Abas was once a Jemaah Islamiyah leader, and he is the brother-in-law of Amrozi, one of the Bali bombers now on death row. He was arrested in 2003 and now works with the Indonesian police as an informant. Like many of the group’s leaders, he fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He later ran one of the largest JI training camps in the southern Philippines. And, like many others, he split with the organization after the 2002 Bali bombing. “What they did is killing the civilians, killing unarmed people, killing a non-military people,” he said. “So this is something that I can say - that is not war. That is not battle. That is not jihad. But that is a mass kill. A mass killing operation.” Indonesian authorities have arrested and prosecuted more than 300 Islamic militants over the past few years. While that has hampered JI’s activities, the organization remains alive. Sidney Jones, the Southeast Asia director of the research organization the International Crisis group, worries about a new, third Jemaah Islamiyah faction. Its members are fighting in the district of Poso, on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, where the population is divided between Christians and Muslims. Until recently, Poso had been fairly calm after about 1,000 people died in sectarian fighting there between 2000 and 2001. But recent violence in Poso following police raids to arrest Muslims militants has claimed the lives of 17 people. “I think the danger of what happened in Poso is that they’ll be able to attract people from outside the Poso area who don’t believe in Noordin’s targets at all but who also don’t want to sit around quietly and do nothing, and who may see the opportunity for a jihad against what they see as anti-Islamic forces as being exactly what they were waiting for,” said Jones. Jemaah Islamiyah is a splintered organization, but it also is fluid and relentless. Experts say it continues to threaten Indonesia’s secular, democratic society and security in the region.

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India-Pakistan

Pakistani madrassa reform is a sham. Wotta surprise

2006-04-07

Although the Pakistani government vowed to reform the country's 13,000 madrassas or Islamic seminaries, little has actually changed. After the London bombings in July, when it was confirmed that two of the suicide bombers had travelled to Pakistan before the attacks and one of them was also shown to have visited a Pakistani madrassa, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf said that all foreign students in the madrassas, some 1,400 of them, had to leave the country by the end of 2005. Months after the pronouncement, and after fierce opposition from Pakistan's religious parties, the reality on the ground is different. "Visas are no longer issued to foreign students," Fayaz Ali Khan, the additional inspector general of police in the southern port city of Karachi told Adnkronos International (AKI). But Khan, head of the Special Branch, in-charge of intelligence and issuing the visas, admitted that "there are foreign students already present in the madrassas and they have been allowed to complete their studies". However these steps back from the promises made to the West do actually correspond to an internal logic. Musharraf cannot deal with a full confrontation with the religious parties in the country that control the government in two out of four provinces and have a significant influence in the national parliament. Currently, the federal government is in the middle of a troubling military stand-off, both in the south-western province of Baluchistan with clashes between Pakistani troops and tribal rebels as well as major offensives in the tribal region of Waziristan which lies on the Afghan-Pakistan border against pro-Taliban militants. The unrest can prove lethal for Musharraf, who the West see as the moderate force within Pakistan. One of the more important madrassas in Karachi and among the largest in Pakistan, the Jamiatul Uloom Islamia of Binori Town, the school in which a large part of the Taliban studied, denies the pronouncements made by Islamabad. ‘"It is not true that foreign students are not allowed," said Abdul Razzak Sekandar, the elderly rector in Binori Town, in an interview with AKI. "Those who are already here remain and new students continue to arrive," he said. Sekandar, who remembers his participation in 2004 at an Islamic religious seminar in Rome, also attended by Vatican and Italian government representatives, cites the UN charter which states that people should be allowed to study and practice their religion. What's more, Sekandar argues, "foreign engineering and medicine students are allowed to come here to study, so why should be prevent those wishing to study religion." To give an idea of the importance of Binori Town, the temple of the Deobandist school of Sunni orthodoxy - the most radical on the subcontinent - a few figures suffice. Some 2,2000 students ranging in age from 5-20 years study and live on the premises. Binori Town alone controls another 16 major Koranic schools in Karachi and hundreds across Pakistan: It is an economically independent and hard to control entity, which has made its influence felt in the organisation of recent mass demonstrations against the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, published by a Danish newspaper, and deemed offensive to many Muslims. "There were acts of violence, that is true" Sekandar admits, "but not by our students. On the contrary, the government appreciated our moderation." However without calling into question the severe cordiality and good faith of Sekandar, not so long ago it was here that Osama Bin Laden reportedly met Mullah Omar, a regular guest was Omar Sheikh, the organiser of the kidnapping and killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl. Binori Town in recent years has had two of its mufti murdered, possibly victims of the unstoppable flow of reciprocal violence with the Shiite community, but also perhaps due to their own intransigence. The last rector, Nizamuddin Shamzai, killed two years ago on the steps of the madrassa, had issued a fatwa against Pakistani troops engaged alongside US forces hunting down Taliban and al-Qaeda figures in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. There are rumours that the powerful intelligence services (ISI) sent one of their hitmen to eliminate him. Sekandar rejects any accusations of terrorism. "We believe in all the prophets and if a Muslim rejects one then he is outside Islam. The problem with the Jews and the Christians is that they believe in only one prophet. So who is the extremist?" He puts it down to "misconception" of madrassas by the West. A similar concept was expressed recently by the religious affairs minister Ejaz ul-Haq, tasked with overseeing the reform of the madrassas. "No madrassa in the past has been involved in terrorism" he stated. Ul-Haq, son of the late dictator, Zia ul-Haq, who from the 1970s began the forced Islamisation of 'Pakistan and gave a decisive push to the uncontrolled proliferation of the Koranic schools, also said that "the registration process is proceeding". In reality, according to independent estimates, only 3,000 out of 13,000 madrassas have to date responded to the census imposed by the government. This system grew beyond all reasonable control during the years of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan when, with the support of the various Pakistani regimes and funding from Saudi Arabia, hundreds of thousands of young mujahadeen were indoctrinated and sent off to fight the Russians. Then after the 11 September, 2001 attacks in the US, the madrassas found themselves transformed overnight into dangerous jihadi assembly lines, in the eyes of the West, at least. "Not all madrassas are extremist" said Pakistan's 'general-dictator', as Sekandar refers to Pervez Musharraf. The rector says he met the president several weeks earlier to discuss reforms and urged him to press the United Nations on the wave of the cartoon protests around the world, to adopt a resolution condemning blasphemy against all religions. Musharraf is depicted as an enemy for his desire [so far not realised] to put the madrassas in order, keeping tabs on who studies there, obliging them to teach modern subjects such as English and science and making them provide information on where they receive funding. But he is also perceived as an interlocutor in the joint committee where representatives of government and of the five main theological schools that own madrassas meet to discuss the reforms. 'Planet madrassa' has become over the years an anomalous slice of Pakistan's non-existent welfare state, offering board, lodging and instruction, even if education is limited to studying the Koran, to 1.7 million Pakistani children, mainly from poor families. It is free, as it is funded by Islamic charity, making up for the state' incapacity of provide education and support for Pakistanis of school age. Children from five years of age learn the Koran by heart, repeating litanies of Arab verse, without understanding what it all means, only to have it explained through the filter of mullahs who are not always enlightened. The equation madrassa = terrorism is undoubtedly a gross generalisation, but the problem remains serious, with the risks that generations of young people in Pakistan continue to grow up in a climate of diffidence and misunderstanding of the West- if not of outright hate towards all things Western . The International Crisis group, a respected think tank which is generally attentive to and critical of power in Pakistan, wrote in a recent report: "Militancy is only one part of the madrassa problem. The jihadi phenomenon is independent of them and most jihadis do not come from these schools. The pro-jihad madrassas limit themselves to supporting the Jihadi movement, mainly in terms of recruitment. Most schools do not provide any military training, but sew the seeds of extremists in the minds of students."

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China-Japan-Koreas

North Korea Boasts Of The Bomb, But Can It Deliver?

2005-06-03

North Korea's boast that it has made nuclear weapons has caused global concern, but the jitters could turn to panic if Pyongyang masters the art of miniaturisation. Most experts are keeping an open mind on North Korea's nuclear weapons programme because the country is so tightly controlled and they have too little information to work on. Many believe that Pyongyang has one or two nuclear bombs but that they are so big they cannot effectively be loaded into planes, let alone fired by missiles. The technology to build the bomb is one thing, but in order to use them effectively, particularly on ballistic missiles, North Korea would have to acquire the tricky skill of miniaturising a nuclear warhead. When North Korea said in February that it possessed nuclear weapons, confirming long-held suspicions in the United States, South Korea's National Intelligence Service said Pyongyang probably lacked the technology to fire them on a rocket. "North Korea might have developed one or two conventional nuclear bombs, but if it did, it may not have the technology to launch them on a missile," the NIS report said. "We believe North Korea has not acquired enough technology to miniaturize nuclear bombs which must weigh less than 500 kilograms to be mounted on a missile." North Korea has a well-advanced missile programme and among Washington's greatest fears is that Pyongyang could breech the technical threshold of marrying its ballistic missile development with its nuclear weapons drive. In April, the head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, told a Senate committee hearing in Washington that US intelligence agencies believed North Korea had mastered the technology for arming its missiles with nuclear warheads, though he did not say Pyongyang had actually done so. The Pentagon later took a step back from Jacoby's assessment, saying it was "theoretical in nature" but US President George W. Bush said it was safer to err on the side of overstatement when dealing with North Korean capabilities. "There is concern about his capacity to deliver," he said. "We don't know if he can or not, but I think it's best when dealing with a tyrant like Kim Jong Il to assume that he can." Abdul Qadeer Khan, the disgraced father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb who is now under house arrest, has admitted playing an important role in North Korea's atomic development. Clandestine cooperation between Khan and the North Koreans since the 1990s has reportedly included the provision of warhead designs to North Korea. Khan has also claimed that during one of his many visit to North Korea he saw a missile carrying a nuclear warhead. "That is not impossible," said Kang Jungmin, a South Korean nuclear analyst based in Seoul. He said that leading experts think North Korea may have developed crude nuclear weapons similar to the devices dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Nagasaki "Fat Man" bomb weighed more than four tonnes and was overloaded with chemical explosives used to trigger the plutonium blast. North Korean nuclear scientists have been working feverishly to refine their version. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they carried out more the 100 tests of high-explosive triggers that would help them in their weaponization efforts. "We don't know for certain, but North Korean scientists may have been able to weaponize a Rodong missile," said Kang. North Korea's medium range Rodong can travel up to 1,300 kilometers, meaning it is capable of hitting targets in most areas of Japan. Pyongyang in 1998 test-fired a Taepodong-1 missile with a range of up to 2,500 kilometers that overflew Japan and is said to be developing the Taepodong-2 with a range of 6,700 kilometers. Nicholas Reader, an analyst with the International Crisis group, said the preponderance of circumstantial evidence suggested that North Korea had already weaponized its missiles. "The argument that they don't have a missile delivery system is spurious, according to most experts," he said.

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