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The prodigal sons return
By B
Raman
The car bomb explosion that killed more
than 180 people on the Indonesian resort island of Bali
late on Saturday night follows close on the heels of an
attack on a French supertanker off the coast of Yemen,
within days of the first anniversary of the beginning of
US air strikes in Afghanistan on October 7, and as
preparations for a possible United States intervention
in Iraq to have President Saddam Hussein overthrown
intensify.
A terrorist organization based in
Aden is reported to have claimed responsibility for the
strike against the tanker, but this has yet to be
verified. No group has claimed responsibility for the
Bali attack, although for some time intelligence
agencies have warned that Indonesia was developing as a
major hub of Southeast Asian-based Islamic terrorist
groups, with two different motivations - a pan-Islamic
one, Jemaah Islamiah (Islamic Group) aiming to achieve a
caliphate in the region covering southern Thailand,
Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, southern Philippines and
Brunei, and an anti-Christian one targeting the
Christian community, many of whose members happen to be
ethnic Chinese. The leader of the Jemaah Islamiah,
according to Singaporean and Malaysian security
officials, is Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir
(Bashir), who is being portrayed as the Osama bin Laden
of Southeast Asia.
The developments in Indonesia
have an interesting parallel in the pan-Islamic and
anti-Christian motivations operating in tandem in
Pakistan, and the pan-Islamic and anti-Hindu motivations
similarly operating in tandem in India.
The
pan-Islamic organizations of Pakistan, which are members
of bin Laden's International Islamic Front for Jihad
against the US and Israel - the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
(HUM), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), the
Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) -
seek to achieve an Islamic caliphate in South Asia, and
look upon Hinduism as a corrupting influence on Islam,
not only in Pakistan, but also in Indonesia. They blame
Hinduism for making Islam soft in Indonesia.
Against this background, the attack in Bali,
which is predominantly Hindu, and the fact that
President Megawati Sukarnoputri's mother was a Muslim of
Balinese Hindu origin, was quickly attributed by some as
a reason for the strike. However, there is so far no
evidence to show that the explosions had anything to do
with the predominantly Hindu nature of the island or
Megawati's family background. On the contrary, Bali
seems to have been chosen mainly because security
precautions there have traditionally been very lax since
it was not considered by the Indonesian intelligence and
security agencies as a likely target of terror.
In an assessment prepared in April, they
identified six security "trouble spots" in Indonesia
from the point of view of the fight against Islamic
terrorism - Aceh, Maluku, Papua, Sampit in Central
Kalimantan, Poso in Central Sulawesi and West Timor.
According to Indonesian intelligence officials, foreign
terrorist groups had used Poso as a training ground in
recent years. The attraction of Bali to the terrorists,
it appears, also arises from the fact that it receives a
large number of Australian and Western tourists.
Among the foreign nationals who fought in the
International Islamic Front as members of its Pakistani
component were American Muslims (mostly Afro-Americans),
nationals/residents of West European countries, Thais,
Malaysians, Singaporeans (who projected themselves as
Malays from Malaysia) and Indonesians. Their total
number was estimated to be about 200. Practically all of
them had been recruited by HUM, HUJI and LET teams -
which conducted their recruiting in the guise of
preachers of the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ), the mother of all
the Pakistan-based jihadi organizations - taken to
Pakistan and trained in the various madrassas (religious
schools) with funds provided by the TJ and then
taken to Afghanistan to received further lessons in
jihad.
In addition to those mentioned
above, about 400 foreign students were recruited by the
HUM, the HUJI and the LET from Malaysia, Indonesia and
Thailand, who were studying at the various
madrassas in Pakistan prior to their being
inducted into the jihad. Of these, 190 were training in
the madrassas of Sindh, 151 in Punjab and 59 in
the schools of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
Reports of the fighting earlier this year by the
dregs of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other components of
the International Islamic Front against US troops
(Operation Anaconda) brought to light the participation
of trained Indonesian jihadis in the fight against the
US troops in Afghanistan. It is learnt that these
jihadis were trained in the camps of the LET in the
Muridke area of the Punjab, from where they were sent to
eastern Afghanistan to participate in the fighting.
According to the News newspaper of Islamabad (March 15,
2002) one of the bodies recovered by pro-US Afghan
troops after fighting in the Shahi Kot area carried an
Indonesian identity card.
Evidence available to
date indicates that while the terrorists from Malaysia
and possibly Singapore were trained in the headquarters
of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) in the Binori
madrassa complex in Karachi, those from Indonesia
were trained in the Muridke complex of the LET, near
Lahore. The HUM traditionally trained recruits from the
southern Philippines and Myanmar, in addition to those
from Xinjiang, Chechnya and the Central Asian Republics.
The HUJI trains those from Bangladesh. Before October 7,
2001, the training camps of the HUM and the HUJI were
located in eastern Afghanistan. It is not known where
they moved after that date. However, in the past they
have used the infrastructure of the Tablighi Jamaat in
Raiwind in Punjab for training purposes.
Since
July, unconfirmed rumors have circulated in Karachi and
elsewhere about a large number of members of al-Qaeda,
including even leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin
Laden's deputy, as having escaped to Bangladesh, with
the help of the HUJI, which has an active branch in
Bangladesh.
What does appear to
have happened, and is still happening, is that
many Bangladeshis, Arakanese, Malays from Singapore
and Malaysia, Indonesians and Filipinos who had fought as
members of the HUM, the HUJI and the LET against
the Northern Alliance and subsequently against the US
in Afghanistan, have made their way into Bangladesh - possibly
with the help of the HUJI and the Jamaat-e-Islami
(JEI) of Bangladesh, which is a member of the ruling
coalition in Dhaka.
Unconfirmed reports have
also mentioned the presence in Bangladesh of Riduan
Isamuddin of Indonesia, better known as Hambali, the
36-year-old cleric wanted by the US and four Southeast
Asian countries as the terrorist mastermind of the Asian
operations of al-Qaeda, and the guiding force of
Southeast Asian terrorism.
It is likely that
some of these terrorist remnants have since sneaked back
to their countries of origin, of which one is surely
Indonesia. The Bali explosions, then, could well mark
the return of some of these beaten jihadis from
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The talk in the Pakistani
madrassas has been that from now on members
of the International Islamic Front would be carrying out
a well-orchestrated series of terrorist attacks against
Western nationals and interests in different parts of
the world as warning signals to preempt military strikes
against Iraq.
B Raman is Additional
Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of
India, and presently director, Institute For Topical
Studies, Chennai; member of the National Security
Advisory Board of the Government of India. He was also
head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research
& Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence
agency, from 1988 to August, 1994.
(©2002
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