Skip to main content

Australia acknowledge INDONESIAN not a terrorist state


INDONESIA, the world's most populous Muslim nation and the site of more Australian deaths at the hands of terrorists than any other country, will not be included in a list of 10 countries targeted for toughened visa screening rules aimed at thwarting terror attacks. As Kevin Rudd released his government's long-awaited counter-terrorism white paper yesterday, The Australian has learnt that Indonesia, Pakistan and India will not be among the 10 countries singled out for for toughened visa screening.

This is despite those countries playing host to the overwhelming number of regional terror attacks.Yemen and Somalia -- identified in the white paper as the emerging epicentres of radical Islamic terrorism -- will be included.The white paper fingers home grown extremists -- as opposed to transnational groups such as al-Qa'ida -- as the main terror threat now confronting Australia.The Prime Minister said the threat of terrorism had become a "persistent and permanent feature" of Australian life."The key threat comes from people who are adherents to the distorted and militant interpretation of Islam, that is espoused by groups such as al-Qa-ida," Mr Rudd said. He said $69 million would be spent over four years gathering fingerprint and facial data from visitors from 10 yet-to-be-revealed countries in an attempt to detect terrorists travelling to Australia.The biometric screening system will piggy-back a similar system already in place in Britain, which requires all people who travel to the UK on a visa to provide biometric data.

A multi-agency Counter Terrorism Control Centre would also be set up within ASIO to identify intelligence priorities, the Prime Minister said.The white paper warned that Somalia and Yemen had emerged as new areas of radical Islamic terrorist activity, citing last year's thwarted plot by Somali and Lebanese extremists to attack Sydney's Holsworthy army barracks and the attempted bombing on Christmas day of a US-bound passenger jet, a plot organised by al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula.Writing in The Australian today, the Australian Security Policy Institute's Carl Ungerer welcomes the document as a "modest improvement" on the Howard government's 2004 white paper, which focused on foreign terrorism as the main threat.Dr Ungerer questions the spending priorities identified in the paper."If homegrown terrorism is the problem, why is border security and a better visa system for foreigners the answer?" he says.

Dr Ungerer says there would be little point including Indonesia and India on the list as they are not major exporters of terrorism. However, he says Pakistan should be a priority.Tony Abbott dismissed the white paper, which was released as the government sought to fend off a sustained attack on Environment Minister Peter Garrett's handling of the botched roof insulation scheme."I suspect that like everything that this Government does it will be more talk than effective action," the Opposition Leader said.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more