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THE ROVING EYE
Al-Qaeda's global terror
franchise
By Pepe Escobar
Karachi, Djerba, Yemen, Bali, Moscow - and now
Amman, where an American diplomat has been assassinated.
Al-Qaeda is back - with a vengeance. But is it al-Qaeda?
Guesswork flies from the US to Western Europe to
Southeast Asia and back. Al-Qaeda is a portmanteau code
word to define anything from a terrorist attack to
virtual threats, dormant cells, alleged conspiracies,
axis of evil-related states and even deranged serial
killers such as the Washington sniper.
In a
sense, Osama bin Laden - now "resurrected" in his
ancestral tribal land in north Yemen - has already won.
His strategy of fear has proved to be a tremendous
success. Al-Qaeda may have changed its name to
Fath-e-Islam since early September. It may have started
concentrating on soft targets. It may have subcontracted
tasks to indigenous groups everywhere. And although
al-Qaeda is still an ideology - even a cosmology - it's
not an organization or a movement any more. It's now a
mutant virus, an invisible international jihad spreading
its tentacles, like a real McDonald's of terrorism.
Al-Qaeda has been widely blamed for the Bali
disco bombing and the Chechen-orchestrated
hostage-taking operation in a Moscow theater. Yet
there's no proof of direct al-Qaeda involvement in
either.
British writer and documentarist John
Pilger was one of a few who stressed that Bali should
rather be blamed on Indonesian state terrorism - which
ran rampant for 40 years, backed by Britain, America and
Australia. "It is hardly surprising there are
resentments and tensions, and support for extreme
religious groups." Pilger notes correctly that "in West
Papua, the army openly supports an Islamic group,
Lashkar Jihad, which is linked to al-Qaeda. This is the
same army which the Australian government trained for
decades and publicly defended when its terrorism became
too blatant." Pilger adds that Australia's "long
complicity with state terrorism in Indonesia ... makes a
mockery of the self-deluding declarations last week that
the nation had 'lost its innocence in Bali'." Sources
have confirmed to Asia Times Online that a group of
Indonesia's generals with connections to General Prabowo
- married to one of former dictator Suharto's daughters
- could have been behind Bali. The general's supreme
interest is to destabilize the government of President
Megawati Sukarnoputri.
President Vladimir
Putin's Soviet heavy metal response to the Chechen
operation in Moscow was sold by the Kremlin as the best
response against ultra-radical Islam. But this is an
insult to the intelligence of informed international
opinion. The Kremlin is serving the same rhetorical soup
being cooked by the White House - according to which the
"war against terror" justifies anything. Now Putin adds
the gassing of innocent civilians. The corollary of this
policy is an absolute refusal to even try to examine the
explosive regional conflicts - such as Kashmir, Chechnya
or the Middle East - which generate resentment in the
first place. This would be the only way for the West to
win this "war".
Saddam Hussein may have been
guilty of crimes against humanity when he gassed 8,000
Kurds. Nobody - US or Europe - raised a peep at the
time. Putin - the ultimate unscrupulous autocrat - may
be guilty of crimes against humanity on account of his
massacres in Chechnya. Nobody - US or Europe - has
raised a peep in the past three years.
What if
al-Qaeda developed a network in Java? And what if
al-Qaeda is still networked in Chechnya? It's not the
point, because the strategic objective - to instill fear
in the West - has been achieved. Forget Afghanistan and
Pakistan; al-Qaeda has relocated to northern Africa and
it has reactivated its network in Southeast Asia. This
subcontracting now implies a much larger role for
regional groups in terms of how to study a soft target,
how to attack it, employing which techniques and when.
The objective is to kill Americans and other
Westerners (like Australian tourists in Bali), to
embarrass leaders of Muslim countries toeing the US line
- like Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf or
Jordan's King Abdullah, for instance - and to try to
subvert the global network of transport and tourism.
Among the victims so far we find a cross-section of
Pakistani Christians, French engineers, Australian
tourists. But neither the Pakistanis nor the Indonesians
- assisted by Westerners - have so far found a clear
al-Qaeda connection. The fruits that al-Qaeda is now
allegedly collecting in the Philippines and Indonesia
had their seeds sown in the early 1990s. The most wanted
man in Southeast Asia right now is Riduan Isamuddin -
aka Hambali, believed by the US to be the regional Osama
bin Laden. Hambali is a mix of managing director and
field operator; he fought the anti-USSR jihad in
Afghanistan, moved to Malaysia, and was a key figure in
setting up al-Qaeda's first base in the Philippines in
the early 1990s.
Hambali was very close to Abu
Bakar Ba'asyir - the Muslim cleric accused of being the
head of Jemaah Islamiyah - who has just been transferred
from his hospital bed in Solo, central Java, to Jakarta
to be questioned on the Bali bombing. Ba'asyir approves
of bin Laden's methods - but this does not mean that he
is able to implement them.
In 1996, Ba'asyir and
Hambali founded the Indonesian Council of the
Mujahideen, whose objective is the creation of a Muslim
state uniting Malaysia, Indonesia, southern Philippines,
southern Thailand and Brunei: 250 million people living
in lands that once were Islamicized sultanates before
the arrival of the Dutch and Spanish colonial powers.
Hence the name Jemaah Islamiyah - Islamic community.
In the mid-1990s, al-Qaeda maintained a training
camp in remote central Sulawesi in Indonesia. Hundreds
were trained there, including at least 200 Arabs. Jemaah
Islamiyah - with the backing of al-Qaeda - moved on to
plot in, of all places, fortress Singapore. Nothing
happened. More recently, a group of at least 200
Indonesians, Malays from Malaysia and Singapore, and
Filipinos moved on to concentrate in Bangladesh. All of
them trained near Lahore, in Pakistan, and fought
against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. It's
practically certain that Hambali is among them. The
objective of these radical Islamists is to perpetrate a
series of attacks against the US and its immediate
allies - such as Australia - in different latitudes, and
so preempt Washington's obsession with attacking Iraq.
There was never any proof that Ba'asyir was
involved in a terrorist operation - inside or outside
Indonesia. But only three days before October 12 in
Bali, Ba'asyir threatened to launch a jihad against the
Indonesian government. He basically said that Megawati
had to choose between the US and the defenders of Islam.
The cat-and-mouse game between the West and the
franchises of terror remains open. Mohammed Jamal
Khalifa - Osama's brother in law, active in the
Philippines since the early 1990s - has vanished. Omar
al-Faruq, a Kuwaiti who established a base in Solo in
the mid 1990s, was turned over to the Americans in
Indonesia last June. But Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, alleged
leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah, remains, at least for
the moment, free. Protests in central Java against his
removal to Jakarta could spiral out of control.
Meanwhile, in London, Omar Abu Othman, alias Abu
Qatada, a 41-year-old Palestinian born in Jordan who
later moved to London as a political refugee, has
finally been formally arrested. He had been in a safe
house by British police for the past few months
somewhere in northern England. Under a new
anti-terrorist law he couldn't be arrested or expelled
from the UK because absolutely nobody really knew where
he was.
Abu Qatada is believed by European
intelligence agencies to be the spiritual leader and the
key controller of al-Qaeda operatives all over Europe.
He is arguably the biggest fish so far caught in a
13-month-long secret anti-terrorist investigation
spanning the whole of Western Europe. Muslims in Britain
are enraged. A protest rally is scheduled for Friday in
front of 10 Downing Street in London. Abu Qatada is
considered to be one of the most respected Islamic
scholars in Britain - on a par with Sheikh Abu Hamza
(leader of the Supporters of Shariah) and Sheikh Yasir
Al-Siri (head of the Islamic Observatory Center), who
will both attend the protest rally.
The arrest
of Abu Qatada and the possible arrest of Abu Bakar
Ba'asyir in Jakarta may contribute to inflaming even more
moderate Muslims' attitudes toward what they
increasingly regard as a war by the West against Islam.
Both clerics' connections with al-Qaeda are at least
debatable - but that's not the point. The point is the
mutant virus will grow stronger and stronger from the
ensuing radicalization.
(©2002 Asia Times Online
Co Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication
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