Preachers to the converted
Dec 13th 2007 | JAKARTA
From /The Economist/ print edition
The persuasive powers of reformed jihadists are being used to “re-educate” terrorists.
MEETING Nasir Abas at one of Indonesia's trendiest hotels, it is hard to imagine that this polite man in casual Western clothes was once a leader of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the region's most dangerous terrorist group. Now his job is to persuade his former comrades to give up the idea of perpetrating violence against the West in the name of Islam.
As he explains in his mild-mannered way, he uses two lines of argument.
One is theological: he points out the verses in the Koran that forbid aggressive warfare, and which insist that the lives of non-combatants, especially women and children, must be protected. The other line is more strategic: to convince his listeners that not all Westerners are anti-Muslim, he stresses the fact that many Americans opposed the war in Iraq. And he challenges them: have terrorist bombs made people respect Islam more? Some prisoners angrily reject his arguments, he says—but as long as they are still prepared to listen to them, he thinks it worth continuing to try.
Indonesia's anti-terrorism police, like their counterparts in many other countries, have set up a programme to “deradicalise” Islamist militants. Just as the internet now provides “courses” designed to persuade young Muslims that terrorist violence is legitimate—by arguing, for example, that killing civilians might be necessary in some
circumstances—governments and traditional theologians are working hard to develop and use arguments that guide people the other way.
In many countries, moderate Islamic clerics are expected to do most of the persuading—and they must run the risk of being viewed as government stooges. The Indonesian authorities have taken the risky step of using ex-militants, some of whom have only slightly moderated their views on when violence is acceptable.
Like many of the jihadists round the world who enjoy sufficient “street credibility” to sway younger hearts and minds, Mr Abas won his spurs as a fighter in the American-backed campaign against the Soviet occupation
of Afghanistan. While some Saudi veterans of that campaign began directing their energy against their homeland, Mr Abas—who was born in Singapore but grew up in Malaysia—returned to his own native region to spread the ultra-Islamist fire. He set up a JI network in the Philippines.
He had moved to Jakarta by the time the group bombed a nightclub in Bali in 2002, killing 202 people. He insists he was not involved in that operation and always disapproved of attacking civilians. But as a leading strategist in the organisation and the brother-in-law of one of the main conspirators, Mukhlas, he was arrested and given a short jail sentence.
The 2002 bombing, followed by others against foreign targets in Bali and Jakarta, forced an overhaul of Indonesia's police and intelligence services. As JI members were rounded up, two new police squads decided to see if they could get some of them to co-operate. Through kindnesses, such as arranging family visits, they hoped to dispel the jihadists' assumption that all policemen are /thoghut/ (un-Islamic), and thereby to encourage them to reconsider other deeply held views. The next step was to get those militants who still believed in the rightness of the bombings to listen to those, like Mr Abas, who had disapproved of them all along, or other co-operating but harder-line militants like Ali Imron, who had become convinced that the attacks were wrong only more recently.
Unlike many other Muslim countries that are experimenting with deradicalisation schemes—these include Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Algeria—Indonesia has a relatively open political system where the actions of the police must face public and parliamentary scrutiny. There was uproar when the police handlers of the scheme were seen treating Mr Imron, who was directly implicated in the Bali bombings, to coffee at a fancy Jakarta mall in 2004. Since then he has kept a lower profile, staying at the capital's police headquarters. In another sign of Indonesia's openness, the authorities gave an independent think-tank, the International Crisis Group (ICG), enough access to make a broad evaluation of their scheme.
The ICG's report, in late November, was fairly positive, though it expressed some serious worries. Its main one was that the extreme corruption and disorder found in Indonesia's prisons may be negating all the scheme's attempts to persuade jailed militants that the system they are fighting is not utterly /thoghut/. With some prisoners rejecting attempts to deradicalise them, the ICG says the scheme may be
succeeding only on those who are not particularly dangerous. The ICG's Sidney
Jones says JI has gone “dormant”, so it may no longer make sense to focus efforts on its members. Meanwhile, the unreformed radicals may be recruiting among the ranks of ordinary prisoners as fast as the police-run scheme is deradicalising. And, outside the prison walls, other influences such as the dozens of /pesantren /(boarding schools) run openly by JI men, may be turning out more young militants.
A policeman close to the project admits that probably, more radicals are being created than are being won over to moderation. But he insists that the project has at least got prisoners to divulge valuable intelligence.
The country now has some policemen with insight into the militants' thinking—before, they hadn't a clue. This has helped police round up many of JI's leaders including, in June, the group's presumed military chief, Abu Dujana, who went on trial this week. And there have been no more bombs since 2005.
Still, any crime-fighting strategy based on the idea of “taking a thief to catch a thief” can encounter ethical dilemmas. In Indonesia, some of the people the police hired to deradicalise prisoners are only marginally less militant than those being lectured to. Mr Imron apparently still argues that bombings could be legitimate in
Indonesia—if there were sufficient public support for them.
The police's rationale for letting him argue this is that his fairly extreme views give him more credibility among his “pupils” than someone more moderate and pro-establishment could ever have. As the ICG report notes, the whole project is based on the assumption that, by bolstering a somewhat more moderate Islamic view of the world, the most radical, violent variety is weakened. That is hard to disprove—but by lending credibility to some relatively fundamentalist views by paying someone to argue them, the authorities may be in danger of appearing to endorse them.
For all the doubts, Indonesia's deradicalisation programme does at least seem more likely to produce positive results than the methods being tried in Thailand's Muslim-majority southern provinces. The army (which seized power in a coup last year) has scooped up hundreds of young Muslims merely suspected of “links” to the region's separatist uprising, and sent them to camps for compulsory “job training”. Last month a group of almost 400 of them won a court order declaring their detention illegal. If any policy is likely to turn locals against the authorities and act as a recruiting-sergeant for militants, this is it.
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