INDONESIA A NEWS

As Hisyam Alizein, alias Umar Patek and a cadre of the Southeast Asian terror network Jemaah Islamiah (JI), rose to speak during his trial in the West Jakarta district court on March 7, few would have expected the 45-year old hardcore terrorist to apologize to the victims of the 2002 Bali bombings that claimed the lives of 202 people.  The JI had indeed surprised many by its rise and ability to organize repeated high profile symbolic attacks in the early 2000s. Patek, being one of last remnants of the outfit offered asurprise yet again - this time confirming the rapid decline of the outfit since the Indonesian authorities executed the Bali bombers in 2008 - both in terms of its existence and ideology. Nothing else could have been a more convincing statement on the decline of Islamist terror in the archipelagic nation, with larger implications on the entire Southeast Asia.  "I ask for forgiveness from all the victims and their families. Those who lost their lives and t...

I still cannot get one sound from the Feb. 6 Cikeusik mob attack on a handful of Ahmadiyah followers out of my head. At some point the shouting and mayhem, which millions have seen on YouTube, seems to subside as a lifeless body in the mud is beaten with wooden staves. There follows a series of sickening wet slaps against the corpse as a crowd shouts in approval.  But that man and two other victims were not murdered, according to prosecutors who chose the lightest possible charges to throw up against the clearly identifiable suspects in the Banten province attack. On Thursday, a court made it official, handing out sentences of three to six months to 12 men accused of leading and carrying out the assault.  Dani bin Misra, a 17-year-old, smashed a victim’s skull with a stone; he was charged with manslaughter and got three months. The leader of the mob of about 1,000 people who attacked 20 Ahmadis, Idris bin Mahdani, was convicted of illegal possession of a machete and got ...

IN THE aftermath of last week's suicide bombing by a rogue Islamist of a church in the Central Java city of Solo, messages flew around the social networking site Twitter urging followers to go to an extremist website. There, on arrahmah.com, was an article condemning Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for his strong and quickly delivered words against the violent act in Solo, contrasting it with a supposedly weak response to the alleged attacks on Muslims by Christians in Ambon. It continued with a litany of falsehoods, including claims that a village had been burnt down and that thousands of Muslims remained in mosques in Ambon, seeking refuge from the crusader hordes. In two days some 20,000 people had retweeted the message. Disturbingly, it was just the latest in a series of highly inflammatory tweets, SMS and Facebook postings sowing the seeds of disharmony and promoting terrorism in Indonesia. Last month, there were two striking examples of the power of social m...

To recall the May 28 terror attacks in Lahore is to acknowledge that Pakistan is not a land apart; rather it is the vanguard of religious and sectarian violence In his novel, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad paints a furious picture of a humanity that cannot escape the inherent evil that resides within the deepest recesses of every individual. The innate wickedness of mankind, he suggests, is masked and curtailed only by the restraints of civilisation. His colonial Africa is described as "one of the darkest places on earth" and a "God-forsaken wilderness"; but the real darkness lurks in the unfathomable human proclivity to commit heinous acts of evil. Yet, perhaps, even Conrad would have been rocked to his core by the savagery of the recent mob killings of three Ahmedis in Indonesia. On February 6, in a small village not too far from the capital of Jakarta, an angry rabble of 1,500 bloodthirsty zealots, many wielding machetes, sticks and rocks, attacked 20 members...

THE killing of three followers of the Ahmadiyah faith by a frenzied group of Islamists this week has left Indonesia reflecting on how closely it lives up to its national credo ''unity in diversity''. Captured in horrific detail, on a video taken with a mobile phone, were the lifeless bodies of three men, stripped naked, being battered by stones and staves as hundreds of onlookers cheer. The police either stand back or, in the case of one officer, try half-heartedly to shoo away the attackers. It was grotesque, stomach-churning stuff. And it was widely circulated throughout the country. Then, two days later, a marauding mob of militants attacked churches and torched vehicles in central Java, upset that a man who had been found to have blasphemed Islam was given a five-year sentence, the maximum, and not death. The country's reputation for religious harmony - lauded by US President Barack Obama as an ''example to the world'' on his historic visit t...

Noor Huda Ismail is a one man anti-terrorism squad. The author of Temanku, Teroris? (My Friend, the Terrorist?) is battling Indonesia's Islamist radicals on multiple fronts.   You might find Ismail leaning over a computer screen, teaching a convicted terrorist the finer points of currency trading. You might find him at a prison, trying to smooth relations between guards and inmates, leading a discussion of his book, or doing research for scholars. Asia Times Online caught up with Ismail, a former Washington Post correspondent, at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali this month.   "You can't fight terrorist with guns and bullets, you have to fight them with ideas," Ismail said. "To defeat this enemy, you have to understand them."   Ismail is well positioned to understand the people behind Indonesia's most notorious terrorist attack. He's a graduate of Pondok Pesantren Ngruki, the Islamic boarding that incubated three leading figures in th...

Indonesia's military will play a greater role in combating terrorism, supporting police on major investigations and responding to attacks, the head of the country's new national counter-terrorism agency says. However, Ansyaad Mbai said the military's activities would be curbed by regulations, including making them accountable ''by civilian law'' and restricting their use of firearms. Mr Ansyaad also revealed, in an interview with the Herald, the armed forces were already involved in tracking militants in Sumatra, where three police were shot dead last week in retaliation for anti-terrorism raids that resulted in 18 suspected terrorists either killed or arrested. The enhanced position of the military is a significant shift for Indonesia, where the police have dominated counter-terrorism activity since mass casualty attacks emerged in the archipelago with the bombings in Bali in 2002. But there has been a change of thinking as Indonesia'...

Perhaps we would never believe that Indonesia is a country where the life comes from the sweats of the country men but is enslaved from abroad, and what is more    unbelievable is that, it is a country in which the Islamic ummah is the biggest   in the world, but is the third biggest producer of corruptions. A country which they say that when you plug the tree into the ground, it would produce fruits to be eaten by its people, but everywhere, we could easily see    people dying of starvation, where the metaphor is “like a chicken dying in its    barn”. We can also see shiny cars that cost over billions of Rupiah, milling   about in the middle of the streets amidst the begging hands of the beggars and   the carts of the street scavengers. Not long ago, a class III A officer of DITJEN (Directorate General) of Taxation   was found to have 25 billions in his savings, compare it with the average income   of the Indonesian c...

Islamic militants based in Indonesia's Aceh province worked with a fugitive suspected of planning the Bali bombings in an effort to unite various militant networks, court documents tabled on Thursday showed. While Indonesia's anti-terror squad has killed or detained scores of militants since the bomb attacks on the resort island of Bali in 2002, police and other security experts have warned about the potential security threats to foreign and government targets in Indonesia from newly formed groups. Prosecutors told a West Jakarta district court on Thursday that several men with links to various Muslim militant groups had operated a secret training camp in Aceh. The camp was discovered by police earlier this year, and at least 50 people have been arrested and several others killed in police raids since then. Earlier this month, police detained Indonesia's most famous radical cleric, Abu Bakar Bashir, who was formerly the spiritual leader of the Southeast ...

The arrest last week of radical Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir was the highlight of a government crackdown on Islamic militants following the discovery in February of a training camp in Aceh province. Once regarded as the spiritual leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terror group, Bashir's popularity has wavered in recent years and his position is emblematic of the evolving nature of militant Islam in Southeast Asia. The 72-year-old Bashir was arrested together with his wife and five bodyguards on August 9 while traveling to deliver a sermon in West Java. The arrest came only a day before the start of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan and a week before Indonesia's nationally celebrated independence day on August 17. Bashir has denied any involvement with the camp, and even claimed that his arrest was arranged by the United States.   Bashir's arrest is the latest in an ongoing crackdown since the discovery of a jihadi training camp in northern Aceh run by a new coali...

On July 17, 2009, an 18-year-old boy walked into the lobby of the JW Marriot hotel in the Indonesian capital Jakarta and blew himself up. Five other people died in the attack and many more were injured. The Indonesian police quickly identified the bomber as Dani Dwi Permana - a teenager with no prior criminal record or history of violence. So what could have driven him to commit such an act? It was a question that plagued Dani's older brother, Jaka Karyana, and a year on from that day he set out to discover the answer. Filmmakers Lynn Lee and James Leong travelled with Jaka on his emotional search to discover what turned his brother into a suicide bomber. We first watched the news on TV about a year ago - a suicide bombing at Jakarta's JW Marriott Hotel and another one just down the road at the Ritz Carlton. There was shattered glass and debris everywhere, throngs of reporters and camera crews. We saw body bags being carried out of the hotels. But what really jolted us was...