Indonesia: The weak link in the anti-terrorism chain

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

President Bush’s State of the Union speech identified the “axis of evil” — the state terrorists, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. And he pointed up the danger of their giving aid to the non-state terrorist cells, like Osama Bin Laden’s network.

For while the U.S. action in Afghanistan has destroyed Al Qaida’s headquarters, gathered invaluable intelligence, smoked out some plans and targets, it has also dispersed important Bin Laden’s operatives. They will now seek to set up among the tens of thousands of veterans around the world of the Afghanistan war against the Soviets. They include those whom Bin Laden has already recruited in the past decade for his new war on the U.S. To what extent they will have state terrorist support of those countries that Bush named is not yet clear. His blunt denunciation must have been a deterrent.

It is a tribute to Osama Bin Laden’s organizational abilities that his operatives navigated the globe in search of willing sacrificial lambs for their attacks and for deceiving the U.S. and other governments. Afghanistan proved that a relatively remote part of the international terrorist swamp, if left to putrefy, could harbor and project a threat to civilized society everywhere.

That’s why the present attempt to clean up Southeast Asia takes on significance, even as the Middle East tends to monopolize the spotlight. Although Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir denies it [after earlier arguing there could be no links to Malaysian Moslems because they were too backward], the FBI now believes staging for the 9/11 attacks may have taken place in sunny, peaceful Kuala Lumpur. The extent of an overlapping international terrorist operation in Singapore which had already identified local U.S. targets, with ties to Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, continues to multiply. And there are ties between the Abu Sayud gangster-terrorists – where U.S. forces have engaged in the southern Philippines– with both the Singapore and Malaysian cells and, thence, to Al Qaida.

What is most troubling in all this is the lack a forceful action by the Indonesian government. President Megawatti Sukarnoputri in Washington shortly after the atrocities did join President Bush in condemning terrorism. But back in Indonesia, balancing her father, Soekarno’s secularist tradition against the need for support from Moslem groups, she condemned the U.S. in Afghanistan. Her policy on terrorism has been only a part of the fecklessness with which she has pursued other problems.

All this has led to a lack of Indonesian resolve in pursuing the leads in the country to Al Qaida. There are estimated to be some 15,000 Indonesians who returned from Afghanistan, recruited during the war against the Soviet Union. How many of those are would-be terrorists, of course, is speculation. But as the Indonesian political scene has splintered since the fall of President Soeharto, radical Islamic elements – among what has always been considered a moderate Islamic society – have surfaced. Islamic radicals, for example, have waged a virtual religious war in the Moluccas in East Indonesia against Christians -- led by a fundamentalist veteran of Afghanistan who acknowledges he knew Bin Laden.

It is these transnational liaisons, which are the essence of Bin Laden’s success. Nowhere in the Islamic world are the cultural and religious ties stronger across present political boundaries than in Southeast Asia among the Indonesia, Malaysian, Singaporean, and Philippines Moslem Malays.

And there could be even greater problems ahead. Aceh, the northern tip of Sumatra which has been in revolt against Jakarta off and on since 1956, is heating up. Although secret talks between the government and the rebels continue, the recent killing of the guerrillas’ commander by the Indonesian army will probably intensify the conflict under his new Libyan-trained replacement. The Acehnese, although divided among themselves, have refused Jakarta concessions of autonomy including the institution of shariah [Islamic religious law]. They are holding out for independence that Jakarta regards as the ultimate threat to unity in the huge archipelago and its diverse, multicultural population. Aceh has old – and now renewed political – family ties with the Malaysian states where an Islamicist party is in power, bitterly opposing Mahathir.

So far, repeated public warnings from Washington and local U.S. diplomats have had no effect, and in fact, have elicited veiled threats from Indonesian officials against American properties. The possibility of resuming military cooperation [and equipment sales] with the Indonesian army, canceled in the East Timor conflict because of human rights abuses, is part of Washington’s strategy to elicit a change.

But, for the moment, Indonesia, with its more than 3,000 islands, its debilitated economy, its lackluster central government, its fractured army command, is a weak link in the chain of anti-terrorist cooperation Washington is trying to build around the world, an attractive target for the terrorists to hole up in.