 Aceh Terror Suspect Surrenders
With US President Barack Obama due in Jakarta next week, Indonesia's
counterterrorism forces seem to be doing a creditable job rolling up
terrorists in advance of his visit. A demoralized suspect named Abu
Rimba turned himself in to police Wednesday night, carrying with him an
AK 47, five magazines and 238 bullets, police said.
Indonesian
authorities said the Obama visit is likely to go ahead as planned and
described it as a confidence vote in the Indonesian counterterrorism
fight. Obama, his wife Michelle and daughters Malia and Sasha are
expected to visit Indonesia, where Obama spent several childhood years
going to school, through March 22.
Rimba said he had left an
alleged terrorist camp in Aceh before police raids began there on
February 22 and had hidden in remote villages before deciding to turn
himself in. Police are still searching for six other suspects.
Breaking
up the Aceh network follows the slaying last week in the town of
Tangerang of Ammar Usman, who gained fame under the jihadi nom de
guerre Dulmatin, who was accused of having played a key role in 2002
bombings in Bali that left 202 people dead, mostly western tourists.
The 39-year-old Dulmatin and two other people were shot dead March 9 in
a gunfight with counterterrorism forces in Tangerang, a city 27 km
south of Jakarta. Officials had put a US$10 million reward on his head.
In
their intensified campaign to go after terrorists, since Feb. 22 the
Densus 88 antiterrorism police unit has so far arrested 31militants in
Aceh, West Java and Jakarta including firearms suppliers and financiers
since the first arrests were made. They have killed six more, raising
questions for human rights observers on whether the police are too
quick on the trigger.
Last year, the police staged several
spectacular gun battles, killing a top Malaysian operative named
Noordin Mohammad Top, who was also implicated in bombings in Bali that
took the lives of scores of innocent people, as well as the bombings of
two American luxury hotels in Jakarta last year. Three others were
killed in the gun battle and a woman was wounded. At one point,
Noordin's confederates were involved in an audacious plan last year to
blow up the Presidential palace of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono himself.
In
2005, police also shot and killed Azahari bin Husin, a confederate in
the Bali bombings. Dulmatin, however, was considered to be a particular
prize. He was the Jemaah Islamiyah leader for the entire Southeast
Asian region, police said, and had been given intensive military
training in Mindanao starting in 2003. He was also a sophisticated
bomb-maker, police said.
"For us, counterterrorism using
violence is not sufficient to stop terrorism. We think it is contrary
to the principles of human rights and citizens' rights to legal aid,"
said Bhatara Ibnu Reza, a researcher for Imparsial, the Indonesian
human rights monitor. Despite a decrease in the number of terrorist
attacks, he added, violence runs the risk of encouraging the expansion
of terrorist networks and movements at the grass-roots level. Some 400
suspects have been captured or killed since the first Bali bombing in
2002.
However, Jim Della-Giacoma, Southeast Asia Project
Director for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, told Asia
Sentinel in an email that Indonesian counterterrorist forces have
actually been restrained in their attempts to search out jihadis.
"They
know that each time one of these suspects is shot dead they're losing a
lot of information, but they don't want to risk the lives of their own
men to get it," Della-Giacoma said. "They are probably aware also that
they are creating martyrs. High rates of public approval for the
police-led fight against terrorism, even after the killings and an
uncritical local media go some way to explaining why there is less
pressure to develop better techniques to capture rather than kill
suspects - to smoke them out rather than shoot them out."
Indonesia
has put hundreds on trial for terrorism offences, with authorities
ready and able to use the courts in a way others in the region have
not, Della-Giacoma said. "You've got to give both the police and the
prosecutors some credit for this."
The successes don't mean the
US president's security forces have any reason to relax. The outpouring
of defiance at the burial of Dulmatin in his home town in Central Java
brought thousands to the streets, shouting "Allahu Akhbar" and calling
the dead man a mujahideen and not a terrorist. Others called him a holy
warrior.
Heru Kuncoro, Dulmatin's brother-in-law and one of
Indonesia's most wanted figures, is still on the loose. Police continue
to Dulmatin's confederates throughout Central Java. Others who remain
at large are Upik Lawangga, Umar Patek and Zulkarnaen. Umar and
Zulkarnean are wanted by the US government for their roles in the 2002
Bali bombings. Zulkarnean is believed by some analysts to now head
Jemaat Islamiyah, which is believed to have carried out more than 50
bombings in Indonesia since April 1999, the International Crisis Group,
including the 2002 Bali bombings and attacks on the resort island in
2005 that killed 20 more.
Andi Widjajanto, a military analyst
from the University of Indonesia, told local media that Jemaah
Islamiyah bombings, appears to be growing stronger, recruiting new
members outside of the island of Java. He estimated that that there are
300 active JI members spread nationwide with [an additional] 240
released terrorist convicts. This does not include many people who are
being trained secretly."
The International Crisis Group, in a
report last August, said that the network is proving to be larger and
more sophisticated than previously thought, with funding coming from
the Middle East.
"While the extent of foreign involvement this
time around remains unclear, recruitment in Indonesia has proved
disturbingly easy," the report said. "The salafi jihadi ideology that
legitimizes attacks on the US and its allies, and Muslims who associate
with them, remains confined to a tiny fringe, but that fringe includes
disaffected factions of many different radical groups and
impressionable youths with no history of violence."
The jihadi
movement, the crisis group said in another report, continues to evolve
in new directions, with an inner circle that may include no more than
seven or eight men, who escaped capture in earlier dragnets. It is
possible, the crisis group said at the time, that the jihadi
organization had no clear structure beyond Noordin and his inner circle
and consists only of ad hoc cells put together for specific operations.
Despite concerns over released terrorism suspects, the crisis group
said, they are mostly not a threat. So many of them are turned and go
back to their old organizations as police informers that the jihadis
tend not to trust them.
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