Ba'asyir nonviolent: Muhammadiyah chief
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
An influential Muslim leader testified on Thursday at the South Jakarta District Court that he had not seen evidence of violent behavior by alleged spiritual leader of the Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) terror network, Abu Bakar Ba'asyir.
The leader of the fairly moderate Muhammadiyah, the country's second largest Muslim organization, Ahmad Syafii Maarif told the court that although Ba'asyir adhered to an extreme view of Islamic thinking, he, personally, had not seen that translated into violent acts.
"I have not yet seen any evidence that Ba'asyir is an extremist in his actions," Syafii told the court in South Jakarta.
Ba'asyir is currently on trial for allegedly planning and inciting his followers to carry out the Bali bombings in 2002 that killed over 200 people, mostly foreign holidaymakers, and the attack on American hotel chain JW Marriott in 2003, which killed 12 people, mostly locals.
The cleric could be sentenced to death by firing squad if proven guilty of the crimes.
Syafii also claimed that the United States government had meddled in the legal process against Ba'asyir.
He said that then U.S. Ambassador Ralph L. Boyce personally asked for a favor from Muhammadiyah in the runup to the legislative election in 2004 to persuade former president Megawati Soekarnoputri to keep Ba'asyir in detention so that he would not disrupt the country's fledgling democracy.
"We began talking and during our conversation, he asked me, as a public figure, not to allow ustadz (Islamic teacher) Ba'asyir to be released from detention until the April 5 2004 election," he said.
Syafii said that he turned down Boyce's alleged request.
"If I fulfilled Boyce's request, it would be similar to me selling the sovereignty of this nation," he said. Ba'asyir was detained at the time and kept in detention throughout the election process.
Later in the trial, a former U.S. State Department translator seemed to give credence to Syafii's allegations, when he said that "a U.S. presidential envoy" asked Megawati to hand over Ba'asyir to U.S. authorities.
Frederick Burks said that an unidentified envoy of President George W. Bush accused the cleric of involvement in church bombings in Indonesia in 2000 and asked for him to be secretly arrested.
Megawati declined that request.
The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta denied that Washington had attempted to influence the government in the Ba'asyir case.
"We have stated this before. If the question is 'Did we apply any pressure to Indonesia over Ba'asyir, the answer is no, absolutely no," spokesman Max Kwak was quoted by Agence France- Presse as saying.
Ba'asyir first stood trial in connection with his alleged terrorism activities to prove that he was the leader of JI and he had tried to establish an Islamic state by first launching a coup by planning to assassinate Megawati.
The court in September 2003 did not find him guilty for these primary charges, but found him instead guilty of violating the Immigration Law and sentenced him to four years in jail, but that sentence was reduced by higher courts.
On the day he completed his sentence for the immigration offense, he was rearrested in April last year after the police claimed to have found new evidence for his alleged involvement in the two bombings.