Govt 'lacks support' from Muslim organizations to fight terror

Wahyoe Boediwardhana The Jakarta Post/Malang/Jakarta

Islamic organizations are not giving their full support to the national fight against terrorism in the world's largest Muslim nation, an Islamic university rector says.

Intelligence agencies were also criticized for their inability to detect and counter terror threats in the country.

Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University rector Azyumardi Azra said Muslim organizations had so far adopted a defensive stance and refrained from giving their full support to the government's efforts to eradicate terror.

"Islamic organizations in Indonesia tend to be defensive. They only give statements that terror should not be linked to Islam and that terror is a conspiracy of Western countries to corner Islam, while it is clear that all those involved (in the attacks) are people connected to (Islam)," he said in Malang, East Java, on Saturday.

Azyumardi said there were no reasons for Islamic organizations to oppose the government's efforts to accelerate the national antiterror drive, following the latest Bali blasts that killed 23 people, including three suspected suicide bombers.

"This is seen from statements by many (Muslim figures) against Vice President Jusuf Kalla's move to call for the monitoring of several Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) in Indonesia," he said.

Kalla said last week that there were two to three pesantren believed to breed extremists and terrorists by brainwashing their students, and that they should be closely watched. However, he refused to name these schools.

Local and international attention had focussed on the Ngruki Islamic boarding school in Central Java, which jailed radical cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir once founded. Three of those convicted for their involvement in the Bali and J.W. Marriott Hotel bombings were former Ngruki graduates and convicted Bali bomber Amrozi confessed to police he often met Ba'asyir at the school.

The school is still operating.

In response, a number of Muslim leaders reacted negatively against Kalla's call, saying the monitoring of pesantren could revive the government's repressive measures against Muslims as taken during former dictator Soeharto's regime.

Among the critics was former president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid who formerly chaired Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, which has thousands of boarding schools across the country.

"The government should stay away from supervising pesantren and instead allow the people to do so," he was quoted by Antara as saying in Jakarta on Saturday.

Gus Dur said that if pesantren were closed, the people, not the government, should do it.

"The spirits for honesty and democracy lie in the pesantren, so the state should not interfere. Let the pesantren rule themselves."

Azyumardi said he agreed with the government's move to monitor extremist Islamic boarding schools as part of efforts to fight terrorism, but stressed that it should be carried out "selectively, clearly and measurably".

"They (Islamic organizations) should be more watchful of their surroundings -- whether there are people promoting such (extremist) thoughts," he said.

"Regarding Muslims who carry out suicide bombings, they (Islamic organizations) should be able to solve the problem and find the causes why and how such thinking could grow in Indonesia," he said.

Azyumardi also criticized the poor performance of intelligence agencies in detecting terror threats and preventing a series of bomb attacks in the country by clandestine terrorist groups.

"They (the intelligence agencies) are not sophisticated, so they could not sniff out the movements of terrorist groups," he said.

Muslim leaders reacted strongly after Ansja'ad Mbai, who heads the antiterror desk at the office of chief security minister Widodo Adi Sucipto, said recently 50 percent of Muslim clerics preaching at Friday prayers had often encouraged hatred and hostility against other religious groups.

Muhammadiyah leader Din Syamsuddin rejected such a statement as "groundless" and said it showed the government's failure to stop terrorism by trying to find "scapegoats".

"Many Muslim preachers give refreshing sermons and they generally raise issues for the goodness of the universe," he said.