Terror Link to Indonesia's Mystery Man?

Oct. 24, 2002 -- Barely two years ago, he was a largely unknown figure, one of thousands of Islamic clerics in the vast Indonesian archipelago whose popularity, for the most part, do not extend beyond their local congregations.

Today, Abu Bakar Bashir has become a key figure in the rapidly changing international war on terror, a man whose every move is followed by governments, intelligence agencies and news organizations around the world.

By some accounts, he could be one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants in Asia, and he is wanted for questioning in the wake of a bombing earlier this month on the island of Bali that killed scores of Western tourists. It was the deadliest terrorist attack since Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States.

An anti-American Islamic leader with a fair share of political clout in a country that is home to the world's largest Muslim population, Bashir is believed to head Jemaah Islamiyah, a shadowy Islamic group with alleged ties to bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

"Jemaah Islamiyah is al Qaeda-Southeast Asia," says Rohan Gunaratna, a former investigator at the U.N. Terrorism Prevention Branch, and author of Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror. "Originally an Indonesian group, it grew into a regional organization in the 1990s and its mission is to create a caliphate comprising Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia."

While the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia have been alert to the threat posed by Bashir for some time, the reedy cleric with a wispy white beard first caught the attention of international media last December, when he was linked to an alleged plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy and other Western targets in Singapore.

It was an allegation over which Bashir unsuccessfully sued the government of Singapore earlier this year.

Bloodbath in Bali

But it was the deadly Oct. 12 bombing of a crowded nightclub in Bali that swung the international spotlight on the 65-year-old Indonesian cleric of Yemeni descent who has based his operations in the central Javanese town of Solo.

Although Indonesian authorities have said there is no proof Jemaah Islamiyah was responsible for the bombing, which killed more than 180 people, Indonesian police have admitted the attack bore the stamp of the militant group.

Meanwhile, the United States and Australia — a country that lost more than 90 of its citizens in the Bali attack — have been pressing to have Jemaah Islamiyah declared a terrorist group by the United Nations.

Amid mounting international dissatisfaction over its post-9/11 anti-terrorism measures, Indonesia announced the arrest of the controversial cleric last week.

But police are still waiting to question Bashir in connection with a series of church bombings in the capital, Jakarta, in December 2000 and in an alleged plot to assassinate President Megawati Sukarnoputri.

Hours after authorities' desire to question him was announced, Bashir was rushed to a hospital in Solo, where he is being treated for respiratory and heart problems. Police are waiting for him to recover sufficiently for them to interrogate him and possibly move him to Jakarta.

‘Only a Schoolteacher’

For his part, Bashir has noisily denied any involvement in either the Bali blast or the alleged plot to kill Megawati.

In the past, attempts to link him to terrorist groups have been met with multimillion-dollar libel suits, including a $107.6 million suit he filed earlier this year against Time magazine.

He has no qualms, however, of expressing his unequivocal admiration for bin Laden, a man he has called a "true Islamic warrior" pitched against the "terrorist" United States.

But Bashir insists he has no al Qaeda connection, maintaining he is "only a schoolteacher" who has dedicated his life to bringing sharia, or Islamic law, to secular Indonesia.

Indeed, Bashir's pedagogical credentials are impeccable. In 1972, he co-founded Al Mukmin, an Islamic boarding school, or pesantren, as it known across Indonesia.

Like Pakistan's madrassas, pesantrens are mostly private schools offering Koranic education, although some of the larger pesantrens also offer the official state curriculum that enables students to take university entrance examinations.

Growing Popularity, Imprisonment and Exile

But while the religious instructions at pesantrens have traditionally been more moderate than those offered at madrassas, under the Indonesian system, the popularity of a pesantren depends, to a large extent, on the charismatic appeal of the kiyai, a sort of headmaster and cleric rolled into one.

"Pesantrens can close down if a charismatic successor to a former kiyai is not found," says Nelly van Doorn-Harder, a professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana. "On the other hand, when a kiyai earns prestige, then parents, alumni and the community donate gifts, and that's how small pesantrens get wealthy."

By all accounts, Al Mukmin is a very successful pesantren. In 1972, when Bashir and another cleric, AbdullahSungkar, opened the school, it had dozens of students. Today, experts estimate that around 2,000 boys are enrolled at Al Mukmin.

The Solo-based pesantren, experts say, is the public, ideological heart of Jemaah Islamiyah.

From his early days at Al Mukmin, Bashir's teachings ran afoul of Indonesian authorities and six years after the pesantren opened, Bashir and Sungkar were accused of subversion for advocating the creation of an Islamic state by then-President Suharto's government.

In 1982, he was put on trial and sentenced to nine years in prison. But he was granted an early release in 1985, when he fled to neighboring Malaysia.

In Malaysia, he is believed to have recruited students who had studied in Pakistani madrassas on their way to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. But in 1998, he returned to Indonesia after the fall of Suharto, when radical Islamists who were brutally suppressed by the Indonesian strongman resumed their public activities under the new era of democratic reformasi, or reforms.

Ideological and Political Leadership

According to Gunaratna, it wasn't until the early 1990s that al Qaeda made inroads into Jemaah Islamiyah along with other Southeast Asian Islamic networks in Malaysia and the Philippines.

"Al Qaeda co-opted the co-founders of JI — the late Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir — and absorbed the organization by providing training and finance," says Gunaratna, "and a number of Islamists were trained in the camps in Afghanistan."

Bashir's role, according to Gunaratna, is a bit like that of the blind Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison for plotting to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and bomb New York City landmarks, including the United Nations and bridges and tunnels. He was also considered the spiritual leader of the men convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

"Like Rahman, Abu Bakar Bashir provides ideological and political leadership for the JI," says Gunaratna. "Unlike Rahman though, he also has operational knowledge, although he definitely does not participate [in attacks]. But the real leader of the JI is Hambali, who holds JI and al Qaeda membership and serves on their shura [consultative] councils."

The Osama Bin Laden of Southeast Asia

Sometimes called "the Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia," Riduan Isamuddin, or Hambali as he is popularly known, is a fugitive wanted by Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines in connection with a series of bomb attacks in the last two years, although he has not been named a suspect in the Oct. 12 Bali bombing.

According to The Associated Press, U.S. counterterrorism officials believe Hambali helped plan a failed plot to attack at least one U.S. Embassy in Southeast Asia to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Most of the information about Bashir's and Hambali's ties to Jemaah Islamiyah is believed to have come from Omar al-Farouq, a Kuwaiti man who was arrested in Indonesia in June and is now in U.S. custody.

Groups on the Fringe

In the past, Indonesia has rejected the notion that al Qaeda was a presence in the island nation, although experts have been warning about the growing influence of Wahabism, a hard-line Islamic creed funded by Saudi Arabia.

While stressing that most Indonesian Muslims do not support a hard-line, political Islam, Van Doorn-Harder says many Indonesians in recent years have been "looking for a new identity" in their personal lifestyle choices as well as in occasional public displays.

Still, many Indonesian Muslims maintain that organizations like Jemaah Islamiyah are a fringe minority in the world's largest Muslim nation.

"This is something new to me," says Lily Zakiyah Munir, a member of the Muslimat Nahdlatul Ulama, the women's wing of the Nahdlatul Ulama, one of Indonesia's largest Muslim organizations.

"These extremist groups are disciplined, organized and focused, while we, the moderates, are asleep. But," she adds, "we believe these groups don't have popularity in Indonesia. We have been traditionally practicing Islam in Indonesia for centuries in a very different way."

Indeed, the Nahdlatul Ulama and the Muhammadiyah, which together claim more than 70 million members — or one-third of the Indonesian population — have officially supported the government's new anti-terrorism measures passed after the Bali attacks.

For many moderate Muslims, the Bali bombing was the last straw in an alarming rise in political and militant Islam in Indonesia that has seen paramilitary groups igniting ethnic and communal conflicts across the island nation since the fall of Suharto.

And they hope the arrest of the frail cleric from Solo will somehow bring back the old days, when Western tourists flocked to Indonesian beaches and the country enjoyed a reputation for multicultural tolerance.