The Seventh Anniversary Ceremony Bali bombing victims

About 70 people held a joint prayer at the memorial on the site of the blasts in Kuta, Bali's main tourist strip where Islamist extremists detonated two bombs targeting packed night-spots in 2002.Memorial organiser Hayati Eka Laksmi, whose husband was killed in the blasts, said the service was an opportunity to "send a message for a peaceful Indonesia".People from 22 countries died in the massive explosions, including 88 Australians.

The anniversary came days after police killed two militants in the latest raid against Islamist networks blamed for Bali bombings and other attacks across the mainly Muslim archipelago.

Gatut Indro Suranto, who was only metres away from one of the bombs but somehow survived, said it was high time the Indonesian government cracked down on Islamists who glorified "holy war" and suicide bombers."To prevent such horrible incidents from happening to others, I think the government should focus its efforts on the recruitment of suicide bombers," the father-of-two said. "We may be able to topple their leaders, but not their young followers who have a deviant way of thinking."He was referring to the killing last month of Noordin Mohamed Top, a Malaysian fanatic who led a splinter group the Jemaah Islamiyah terror network blamed for the Bali attack among others. "If it continues, the threat of terrorist attacks will always haunt our life," Suranto said, urging the government to counter "wrong religious perceptions" propagated by Islamist radicals.One of Asia's most violent Islamist ideologues, Noordin was killed by police in a raid on a house in Central Java on September 17. Analysts say he knew of the planning for the 2002 Bali attacks but was not directly involved. Instead he was blamed for subsequent attacks including one against the Australian embassy in Jakarta in 2004, Bali again in 2005 and twin suicide blasts against the luxury hotels in Jakarta on July 17 this year.

Indonesia has killed or arrested hundreds of Jemaah Islamiyah militants since 2002, but two of the alleged Bali plotters - Dulmatin and Umar Patek - remain at large and are believed to be hiding in the southern Philippines.

Comments

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s. During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization. Even though NU was one of the ...

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy. But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...

INDONESIA A NEWS

Search This Blog