15/09/2004

Why they hate us

In the days after the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, The Bulletin journeys into Indonesia's hardline Islamic world.

BY ERIC ELLIS

A scale model of the shiny new mosque Haji Wahyuddi plans for his boarding school is displayed in a glass case outside his office in a back alley in the hardscrabble suburbs of Solo in Central Java. “The mosque isn’t yet finished yet because we don’t have any money,” explains the school’s 53-year-old director, who seems not to notice the putrid smell of a canal nearby that washes over his campus. “I’d consider donations from Australians but I don’t expect to get any because it would be considered funding for terrorists.”

The grizzled director has an astringent turn in irony. The college he’s desperate to upgrade is the notorious Al-Mukmin pesantren in Ngruki, considered the birthplace of Jemaah Islamiah, a wellspring of Islamist extremism believed by many to be al Qaeda’s branch office in South-East Asia. Its alumni are credited with the 2002 Bali bombings, the 2003 Jakarta attack on the JW Marriott Hotel and last week’s suicide bombing at the Australian Embassy. Ali Gufron, alias Mukhlas and condemned brother of the smiling Amrozi and the coffee-loving Ali Imron, graduated from here in 1982 and is now on death row, convicted as the co-mastermind of Bali. Another old boy is Mubarok, sentenced to 17 years for financing that attack. And then there’s the alleged head of Jemaah Islamiah’s military wing Zulkarnaen, closely linked to the Marriott bombing. He’s class of 1979.

In Indonesia, a young student can — as most do — attend a state school and learn “the three Rs”, basic science and geography and a reasonable grounding in a moderate Islam that accords with Indonesia’s long-cherished ideals of secularism and inclusion. Or that student can board at Al-Mukmin for a regime that starts at 3.30am and finishes at 10pm, where he’ll (there are no girls) get those education basics ... and quite possibly training in terrorism.

Show-and-tell at Al-Mukmin might be your award-winning essay in rudimentary English as to why Australia and the United States are terrorist nations. Or the lively montage of images you gathered from your ever-so-willing teachers depicting whatever the day’s horrors are from Iraq. That’s just some of the handiwork on view in a glass display case outside the ramshackle classrooms, where the teacher’s recommended light reading is a tome that Bali bombing mastermind Imam Samudra wrote while on death row. Samudra’s Me Against the Terrorists is on sale at the Al-Mukmin’s bookshop at 25,000 rupiah (about $A5), though the average impoverished student might have to settle for the Al-Mukmin library’s well-thumbed copy.

Where a school elsewhere might have little signs near the playground reminding students that a healthy body is a healthy mind, Al-Mukmin students head off for a bout of football or martial arts reminded by painted signs that “Death In The Way of Allah Is Our Biggest Aspiration”. Another sign, illustrated with a tank firing its gun, asks “Jihad? Why Not?” As teens play a vigorous game of volleyball on a dusty outside court, they are instructed that there is “No Prestige Without Jihad”. If that message isn’t clear to the 15-year-olds who attend schools like Al-Mukmin, the armed warrior that illustrates it drives the point home. It’s not hard to imagine young suicide bombers coming from a place like this.

“The desire to do such thing is always challenging,” the director explains. “If Islam is disturbed, the life of a person becomes cheap. If the life of a Muslim brother is taken away, it is the responsibility of Muslims to help their brothers.”

I ask Wahyuddi what he would say if a student came to him wanting to sacrifice his life in such an attack. He says he would caution against such an act but adds “every Muslim has an obligation to do such thing if they see that their religion is under threat”.

The director makes a perfunctory condemnation of attacks like Bali and last week’s embassy bombing. “Those who understand true Islam would not do such things,” says Wahyuddi, who is the son-in-law of Al-Mukmin’s late co-founder, alongside Abu Bakr Bashir, of Al-Mukmin and JI, the late Islamist hardliner Abdullah Sangkar.

Searching for terror’s root causes, Wahyuddi embarks on a global tour d’horizon; Australia’s support for the U.S-led war in Iraq, Israel’s suppression of Palestine, the West’s supposed distaste that Indonesia is the world’s biggest Muslim country, the West’s desire to exploit Indonesia’s resources. He posits that Western nations might have set up these attacks themselves as a pretext to destabilise Islam and Indonesia. The conspiracy theories are nothing new in Indonesia but, perhaps ominously, they aren’t always espoused by the principal of a school which controls the lives of impressionable kids. “The problem of terrorism is imported from outside, it is not from Indonesia or from this pesantren,” he says. “Please don’t discredit our school.”

Some 70km away, in a poor neighbourhood outside Jogjakarta, Indonesia’s Javanese heartland, another pesantren, Ihya’as Sunnah, is run by holy war veteran Jaffar Umar Talib. Jaffar has a neatly kept library of perhaps 2000 books, mostly Koranic texts and hadist, the teachings of Islam’s Prophet Mohamed. Among the collection is a shelf of political tracts in Bahasa Indonesia. There’s Revolusi Indonesia by Pramoedya Ananda Toer, the leftist writer-poet jailed for many years during the Suharto period, and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Jaffar was an anti-Soviet mujahid in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a jihadi or holy warrior who proudly admits to killing Russians. His bookshelf is a case of know thine enemy.

Jaffar, 43, is an interesting man. Friendly, thoughtful and considered, he is regarded by Indonesians as a Muslim intellectual. Dressed in a traditional checked Javanese sarong and a crisp white topcoat, he became notorious in Indonesia in the late 1990s for leading a jihad in Ambon, where local Christians and Muslims were fighting a bloody civil war that claimed hundreds of lives on both sides of the religious divide. It was from this pesantren in Jogjakarta where Jaffar raised the Laskar Jihad, a militia for holy war that rallied the faithful for battle in the Moluccas, several islands away. He makes no apology for his involvement in that conflict, which he says sprang from the inability of the Indonesian state to intervene. “Muslims were being killed and nothing was being done about it,” he calmly says. “We had to act.”

It’s the same thinking that saw Jaffar join the Afghan mujahadeen in the 1980s. Muslims are also being killed elsewhere in the world, indeed elsewhere in Indonesia such as Aceh, the launchpad for Islam in the islands centuries ago. But Jaffar says the response of the state now in Aceh is adequate. “The war there is not about Islam but about Acehnese nationalism,” he says. Jaffar is a believer in a unitary Indonesia.

No man to trifle with, Jaffar has long known the JI crowd at Al-Mukmin and is none too pleased with them. They are a perversion, he says, espousing the notion of “takfiri”. Broadly translated, takfiri means that if one doesn’t follow the strict version of Islam taught at places like Al-Mukmin, one is an infidel, an unbeliever. As Jaffar explains it, anybody — and this includes fellow Muslims — who do not subscribe to the JI world view is an infidel and is therefore impure, unclean and presumably needs to be either converted or dealt with.

The Bashir crowd insist their curricula and their interpretation of Islam is absolute; the one true faith. But Jaffar says the reason for Al-Mukmin’s problems, and the rise of JI and the “extremist ideology” that springs from it, is that they are “incorrect, extreme and not pure enough”. To the dogmatists of Al-Mukmin, that’s quite an insult to a group that regards itself as the most pious, most correct of Muslim scholars. Jaffar similarly regards the teachings of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as inadequate. He met one of bin Laden’s senior aides in Ambon at the height of the war there, but rejected his frequent offers for money and fighters. “I had seen them in Afghanistan,” he says. “This was a corruption of Islam and it was not what we wanted to achieve.”

There is an ideological turf war between Jaffar’s more moderate pesantren and Bashir’s Al-Mukmin. But if there is a battle for young Muslim hearts and minds in Central Java between Jaffar’s school in Jogya and Al-Mukmin 70km away in Solo, it is one Bashir and friends are clearly winning. Jaffar has about 50 boarders at Ihya’as Sunnah. The Al-Mukmin campus has more than 1800, one of the region’s biggest schools.

“RE-VO-LU-SI! RE-VO-LU-SI!” Al-Habib Mohammed Rizieq Shihab stressed each syllable in Bahasa Indonesia for the benefit of the sole kafir, or unbeliever, in his congregation. But on this velvety Friday night in a mosque in the desperate depths of a West Jakarta slum, this preacher’s fire and brimstone didn’t need any embroidering.

Barely 24 hours earlier, a murderous mushroom cloud rose 200m over the Australian Embassy downtown from here in the first direct attack on Australians. It killed only Indonesians — nine so far — but it was an attack which had the people of both countries asking very reasonably “why do they hate us?”

Rizieq, one of Indonesia’s most notorious of Islamist hotheads and the notional leader of the Islamic Defenders Front, had a ready answer — and a chilling one for anyone, perhaps like John Howard and George W Bush, who think the war on terror is being won.

“We don’t hate you but I want all of the Australian people to think deeply about this ...,” he says, stopping his flow of invective only briefly for theatrical pause, “... this incident is a whip for you to question why these groups consider you in the West as an enemy.

“And now the question is why there is anger toward these three countries. The answer is short — because America, England and Australia has treated Islam unfairly. There is a strong will among these groups to give a strong response back to these three countries.”

The 39-year-old cleric is a minority in Indonesia, but a vocal one. And he likes to play the crowd with his rhetoric. He splices his sermons with jokes and cutting humour, some of it directed at the bule (foreigner) who has dropped by to hear him speak. The dozen-strong crowd of mums, dads and their kids lap it up. The atmosphere is part theatre, part seminar. Before he’s interviewed, he ushers me to the centre of the room, beneath a picture of the Kaabah, the focus of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and thus of Islam. To the delight of the congregation, he asks me my religion. Non-practising Anglican, I explain, but he seems to struggle with that. “Is that Catholic?” he asks. Christian Protestant, I say. “Islam is not taught to treat other religions as enemies,” he says.

“The question you must ask of yourself is ‘Why do they treat us an enemy?’ And the answer is ‘because I, in the West, have acted unfairly. America, England but especially Australia have to realise that there are certain groups who hurt, and feel vengeful and angry and who’d like to pour out their anger towards them, toward certain Western countries whom they consider are trying to crush Islam or reduce Islam like the US, England and also Australia.”

Rizieq rants as if he’s got a direct line to terrorists. He may well have. After his Islamic Defenders rampaged through various Jakarta bars and clubs last year to rid them of anti-Islamic “impurities” such as alcohol and prostitution, he spent most of 2003 in Cipinang prison, alongside Al-Mukmin’s — and Jemaah Islamiah’s — spiritual leader Abu Bakar Bashir, whom he regards as “a good man, an innocent Muslim”.

Like Bashir (and bin Laden), Rizieq is of Yemeni origin, their ancestors coming from the Hadramawt districts at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. It was Hadramis who exported Islam to Indonesia centuries ago, which gives their descendants something of an elevated status in today’s Indonesia. Rizieq is a self-appointed Habib, an honorific which suggests a direct ancestral line to the Prophet Mohammed.

“Jemaah Islamiah simply means Islamic people. There is no JI with a formal structure and there is no leader and no court, even the highest of courts, has proven Abu Bakr Bashir is the leader of JI and the existence of this organisation.

“We have to be based on law, not on Western opinion in this matter. It’s not true.

“If they [the West] continue behaving unjustly, especially against Islam, there will be more, there will be more Osama, Osama, Osama ... more Osamas will be born, more Imam Samudras. Do not dream that what they have done will never happen again.

“If they only catch Imam Samudra or Osama and America, England or Australia continue to behave unfairly, tomorrow a new Imam Samudra will be born. And a new Osama bin Laden. And the movement will be stronger, the level will be higher, it could be tomorrow that the Pentagon could again be the next target or then the day after tomorrow even the White House, and even a nuclear power station. I’m not trying to be scary but this is fact for those who seek revenge.”

Rizieq’s key conjunctive is “but”. He begins every diatribe with a disclaimer that he rejects terrorism but then attempts to explain such acts.

“I’m not supporting these acts but I just want to warn. I call on the Indonesian government to re-evaluate diplomatic relations and treaties with Western countries who have problems with the international community, like America, England and Australia.

“A lot of innocent people became victims but I cannot also just close my eyes not to consider what pushed them to do it. I cannot just say that Imam Samudra is a criminal. What made him become a so-called criminal? We say that Osama is a criminal but how about the America that made him criminal. America is the father of the criminals. Where has this radicalism come from? Israelis are slaughtering Palestinians, kids, women and then the young Palestinians are becoming suicide bombers. Hang on, can you blame these youngsters? Israel made them like this, parents killed, their land is grabbed, their property is destroyed. Israel is the real criminal.

“The Islamic community never hates Westerners simply because they are Westerners or because they are white, or because of their religion. We hate the crimes they do against the Islamic world.”

There are nine families of last week’s victims — and the 202 who died on October 12, 2002, who might beg to differ.