Why the Jemaah Islamiah is Still Alive in Indonesia

JAKARTA - The Jemaah Islamiah (JI) terror network continues to survive in Indonesia even after carrying out two of the bloodiest attacks in the country's history.

Though the Megawati administration was amongst the 47 governments worldwide that supported the United Nations' blacklisting of JI, the group is still far from being proscribed in Indonesia.

The UN blacklisting, which now applies to 34 outfits with suspected ties to Al-Qaeda, allows UN member nations to act against JI members and entities by freezing their assets, preventing their movement and blocking any attempts to sell or transfer arms.

But political considerations and concerns over shaking up the Muslim ground may be holding Jakarta back - at least for now.

Put simply, the nomenclature JI refers to an Islamic community. Any move to proscribe the group could hurt the sentiments of many Muslims - about 200 million of whom reside in Indonesia.

Professor Juwono Sudarsono, a respected international relations scholar from the University of Indonesia, said: 'The government views it as dubious to name JI as a terrorist outfit because it imposes an a priori stigma on the whole Muslim community in the country.

'It is saying that almost everyone here is a terrorist.'

That sentiment echoed after the JW Marriott Hotel bombing and revelations that JI was behind it.

The Indonesia Ulemas Council (MUI), the highest Muslim authority in the country, has been aggressively lobbying the police to stop using the term JI.

'Why don't they use another term?' said MUI secretary-general Dien Syamsuddin. 'They use the term rogues for officers who commit crimes instead of police or government officials.'

The recurrent use of the term JI in connection with terrorism would only give a 'bad image to Islam', he said.

MUI's response highlights the difficulty the government faces in dealing with JI.

The government is caught between a rock and a hard place. If it cracks down on the group, it risks offending the sensitivities of Muslims here.

One senior police officer described the policy being pursued now as a 'middle way', where individual JI members are hunted down for particular acts of violence like Bali or Marriott, but not the whole network.

This leads to a related point about JI's structure which today is a maze of 'amorphous network of cells' and overlapping affiliations with other militant groups in South-east Asia and the Middle East.

'We are not going after an organisation here,' said one intelligence official.

'It is not so black and white. We are going after individuals here who have been bonded by a common objective of creating an Islamic state. But it does not have an address.'

Observers would argue that the Majelis Mujahedin Council (MMI), which JI's spiritual leader Abu Bakar Bashir heads, comes closest to being that organisation.

As a public front that Bashir created for JI, it has a hardline ideological platform and is composed of people who hold 'a double membership - one with MMI and the other with JI.

But the government is all too cautious at this stage and though the ground has shifted against the radicals, it prefers to go slow.

Mr Ansyaad Bai, who heads the Counter Terrorism Cooperation unit, said: 'We must uphold the supremacy of the law if we want to categorise JI as a terrorist network.

'We need enough evidence to prove it is one. Political decisions must be made on evidence of the law.'

What law? Jakarta is bereft of tough laws like the Internal Security Act in Singapore and Malaysia to clamp down on JI. And evidence? There is plenty of it now. All of those standing for the Bali bombing trial are JI members.

Bashir is the spiritual leader of the outfit. And all fingers are pointing to JI as being responsible for the attack on the Jakarta Marriott last week.

The underlying motivation by the political elite continues to be the fear of 'stirring up the pot' and upsetting the Muslim ground ahead of an all-important presidential election next year.

Politics, in the end, will decide whether it enters the books here as a terrorist organisation.