JI behind 50 bombings in RI: ICG
JI behind 50 bombings in RI: ICG
Agence France-Presse, Jakarta
The Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) has staged some 50 bombings or
attempted bombings in Indonesia since April 1999 including the
Bali blast, an international research group said Wednesday.
The International Crisis Group (ICG), in a report entitled
"Indonesia's Terrorist Network: How Jemaah Islamiyah Works",
calls for the reopening of investigations into these blasts "as a
top priority" and with international help if possible.
It says intelligence resources must be strengthened but these
should go to the police and not to the National Intelligence
Agency (BIN) or military intelligence.
While BIN had done some important legwork on the Bali bombing,
"there is too much history between some of the JI players and BIN
to make it an impartial participant on this one."
ICG also says it suspects that "someone in the armed forces"
must have known that church bombings in the city of Medan were
being planned for Christmas Eve 2000 and saw an opportunity
falsely to blame them on the Free Aceh Movement (GAM).
It says there is a "curious link" in the Medan attack between
Acehnese figures close to JI and military intelligence, because
both bitterly oppose GAM.
While military intelligence was not necessarily working with
JI, "it does raise a question about the extent to which it knew
or could have found out more about JI than it has acknowledged."
Bombs were delivered that Christmas Eve to 38 churches or
priests in 11 cities nationwide. Nineteen people were killed.
The report urges authorities to "give more attention to
addressing corruption in the police, army and immigration
service, with a particular attention to the trade in arms and
explosives."
It says JI's spiritual leader Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, now in
detention as a suspect in the Christmas Eve bombings, knows far
more than he is willing to divulge about JI operations but is
unlikely to have masterminded attacks.
ICG says a "deep rift" has opened between the Indonesian
cleric and the JI leadership in Malaysia, who find him not
radical enough.
The report by the Brussels-based group says JI was set up by
Indonesians living in Malaysia in the mid-1990s and has links to
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
It has a network of supporters across Indonesia, Malaysia,
Singapore and the southern Philippines and has reached out to
Muslim organizations in Thailand and Myanmar, ICG says.
Top strategists appear to be proteges of Abdullah Sungkar, who
is now dead but who co-founded with Ba'asyir an Islamic boarding
school in Central Java.
They are mostly Indonesians living in Malaysia who are
veterans of Afghanistan from during or after the Soviet
occupation.
A second tier was apparently assigned as field coordinators
while the bottom rung -- those who carried out actual attacks --
were selected only shortly beforehand.
The ICG says the Bali investigation has shown how JI uses
family ties, old school ties and linkages to Darul Islam (which
staged an Islamic revolt in Indonesia in the 1950s) to wage holy
war.
"The reach of JI through these networks may be more extensive
than previously thought even though the number of senior JI
leaders appears to be very small."
Before Bali, the bombings appeared to have been revenge for
massacres of Muslim by Christians in the Maluku islands and the
Poso district of Central Sulawesi.
The ICG says JI members or sympathizers ran dozens of mostly
small camps across Indonesia, some of which included foreign
trainers, to teach weapons and bomb-making skills for use in
these areas.
But the US-led war on terror now appeared to have become the
main focus. The targeting in Bali of westerners rather than
Indonesian Christians "may be indicative of that shift."