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WPost: Attack Altering Politics Across Southeast Asia
By AP Guardian NZHerald
12/10/2001 11:26 am Fri

[Hasrat AS untuk memburu 'pengganas' itu ke sini akan menjejaskan masadepan Malaysia, khususnya sektor pelancungan, penerbangan dan ekonomi. Inilah kesannya daripada sikap Mahathir dan Norain Mai yang mengada-ngadakan benda yang bukan-bukan. Sekarang seluruh negara bakal terancam. - Editor]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40123-2001Oct10?language=printer

Attack Altering Politics Across Southeast Asia Muslims, Governments Adopt Issue

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 11, 2001; Page A21

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Oct. 10 -- To leaders of Muslim political parties in Indonesia, the U.S.-led military strikes in Afghanistan are a show of force lacking sufficient evidence to support them, an act of aggression against civilians and an effort to destroy Islam.

They're also a political boon.

The parties, which collectively form a large minority bloc in parliament, are hoping to capitalize on public opposition to President Megawati Sukarnoputri's decision not to condemn the U.S. attacks in Afghanistan and instead "assist in the global war on terrorism." That stance has prompted radical Muslim groups to stage rowdy street protests and threaten to attack U.S. citizens if she does not sever diplomatic relations with Washington, which in turn has caused thousands of Westerners to flee the country and the currency to slide.

Some officials with the Muslim parties see the demonstrations and the threats -- which have occurred not just near the U.S. Embassy but also in front of the presidential palace and the parliament complex -- as a way to destabilize Megawati's largely secular government. "It is a chance to raise questions about her leadership," said one party official.

Across Southeast Asia, a region that is grappling with growing conservative and radical Islamic movements, U.S. calls for a global campaign against terrorism have had the unintended consequence of providing new political ammunition to leaders of hard-line Muslim groups -- and those seeking to contain them.

In Malaysia, analysts said Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad could be aided in his controversial effort to crack down on the country's main opposition group, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, whose growing popularity is threatening his grip on power. Mahathir's government, which has portrayed the party as extremist, has detained without trial several party members who allegedly received military training in Afghanistan, accusing them of involvement in a series of bombings, robberies and the murder of a politician.

But Mahathir also has used the U.S. strikes on Afghanistan as an opportunity to reach out to conservative Muslims, many of whom have questioned the prime minister's support for Islamic causes. He quickly denounced the U.S. attacks and called for a U.N. conference to address global terrorism.

In the Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has rallied new support for her campaign to crush the Abu Sayyaf, a band of Islamic extremists with ties to Osama bin Laden that has kidnapped dozens of people, including several foreign tourists, in the past two years. Arroyo has generated increased domestic backing for U.S. military cooperation to fight the Abu Sayyaf, and she has pushed though a law on money laundering in an effort to choke off funding to the guerrillas.

"This entire thing has provided her a reason to represent certain items on her agenda as urgent," said Randolf David, a political commentator and professor in Manila. "The need to crush the Abu Sayyaf has never been more urgent than it is now."

Hundreds of Abu Sayyaf guerrillas are battling security forces on Basilan island, on the southern end of the Philippine archipelago. The group is holding two American hostages, Martin and Gracia Burnham, missionaries from Wichita who were seized at a luxury beach resort. Over the summer, the rebels claim to have killed a third American, Guillermo Sobero of Corona, Calif.

Philippine and Western intelligence officials believe the group has been funded by Islamic schools and charities linked to bin Laden and his terrorist network, al Qaeda.

Arroyo's national security adviser, Roilo Golez, said today the United States will send about two dozen military officers to the Philippines in the next few weeks to examine ways to better train and equip the Philippine military for its war against the Abu Sayyaf. The delegation, he said, will conduct "a very comprehensive evaluation with respect to the Abu Sayyaf."

Golez said the U.S. personnel would not take part in military operations against the group. "But we see a heightened cooperation . . . by way of providing to us special equipment to fight the Abu Sayyaf, training and sharing of intelligence information," he said.

Although the Philippines forced the United States to vacate its last two military bases in Southeast Asia in the early 1990s, it has warmed to the idea of having U.S. soldiers back on its soil.

In 1998, the two countries signed an agreement that allows U.S. forces to engage in short-term training missions in the Philippines. And last month, the Philippines became the first Southeast Asian nation to allow the U.S. military to use its air bases and seaports in the anti-terror campaign.

With extremist groups linked to al Qaeda operating in the Philippines and Indonesia, U.S. officials have expressed a new interest in assisting both countries in combating those organizations. But the effort, for now, will be limited to providing training, equipment and intelligence, one U.S. official said.

That could prove difficult in Indonesia. Congressional restrictions enacted after Indonesian militia groups rampaged through East Timor prevent the United States from providing military training and arms to Indonesia, although the Bush administration has been pushing to have the law waived.

Of particular concern to the United States are two armed Islamic fundamentalist groups that have received money and weapons from al Qaeda, according to U.S. officials. One is the Laskar Jihad, which is fighting to evict Christians from the Moluccas, formerly known as the Spice Islands.

Diplomats and intelligence sources say a few hundred members of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia have joined the Laskar Jihad in the Moluccas and on neighboring Sulawesi island.

The other group is the Islamic Defenders Front, a Jakarta-based organization that has organized anti-American protests and made threats against U.S. citizens. Western intelligence sources said several Front members have been trained by the Taliban at a small camp on the outskirts of Jakarta.

In Jakarta today, demonstrations against the U.S. military attack raged for a third day. Police fired tear gas to prevent about 1,000 students from storming the parliament complex. Other protests were held in front of the U.S. Embassy and in five other Indonesian cities.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40123-2001Oct10?language=printer

The Guardian (UK)

Islamists in SE Asia linked to Bin Laden

US believes al-Qaida planned an attack in Indonesia before September 11

John Aglionby in Jakarta

Thursday October 11, 2001
The Guardian

American government planners looking for new targets in their global war on terrorism have said they are looking at the links Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network has established with Islamist groups in south-east Asia, and in particular Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. Indonesia

The world's most populous Muslim country, and thus a crucial ally, Indonesia is probably the terrorists' most likely regional target even though the vast majority of its 175m Muslims are anything but radical.

The evidence that al-Qaida terrorists were planning an attack in Indonesia in August - well before the attacks on America - was so convincing that the US embassy was closed for a week while the threat was being assessed and combated.

Dozens of foreign Islamist fighters, mostly from the Middle East, are openly operating with local Islamist groups in various parts of the sprawling archipelago. The vast majority are in the eastern Maluku islands helping the militant Java-based Laskar Jihad (Holy War Force) organisation in its two and a half year sectarian war against local Christians.

So many have arrived that Laskar Jihad even opened a special welcome desk for them at the local airport. Foreigners have also been helping to coordinate some of this week's protests outside the US embassy in Jakarta and there are fears that they are planning to launch terrorist attacks, although no evidence has been produced to substantiate these suspicions. Demonstrations against the American and British strikes continued to grow yesterday but they were largely peaceful as the security forces showed an unprecedented willingness to crack down on the slightest hint of trouble.

Officers fired teargas into an angry crowd of about 1,000 students who were trying to storm the grounds of parliament in Jakarta to demand a tougher official stance against the attacks. They also arrested several protesters who were attempting to burn foreign flags and summoned the leader of the most aggressive Islamist group to warn him to stop his gangs of foreigners.

Commanders said they would enforce the law that prohibits the burning of national flags and pressurise imams to refrain from inciting xenophobia during their Friday sermons in mosques.

Hundreds of people took to the streets of at least five other cities in addition to Jakarta, including Yogyakarta where 500 protesters "sealed off" branches of Pizza Hut and McDonald's as part of a campaign to boycott American goods.

Western diplomats are surprised that Laskar Jihad - which, before September 11, was considered by far the most dangerous of Indonesia's Islamist groups - has been conspicuously silent this week.

The group's leader, Ja'far Umar Thalib, has trained with Bin Laden in Afghanistan while some of his subordinates have studied in Libya. But he has done nothing recently beyond a bit of token sabre-rattling, prompting speculation that he does not respect the Saudi dissident sufficiently to back his cause wholeheartedly.

Other radical groups, such as the Islamic Defenders Front, the Laskar Hizbullah and the Islamic Youth Movement - who have been leading the jihad calls since September 11 - openly admit that they do not have close ties to al-Qaida. But there is no doubt they would be extremely fertile recruiting ground for foreign operatives looking for assistance.

In the past two days, however, the police have shown a new willingness to crack down on these groups and there are signs that any attempts to threaten foreigners will be dealt with harshly.

Philippines

Attracting more attention is the Abu Sayyaf group, based in the southern Philippines, particularly since it was named last month as one of the two dozen terrorist organisations that the United States is especially keen to eliminate.

It was formed in 1991 when its leader, Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, broke away from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Since then Abu Sayyaf has claimed to be campaigning for a separatist homeland for the Muslim people in the southern Philippines. But since Janjalani was killed by the army in 1998, it has fractured and concentrated more on kidnapping for ransom and intermittently detonating bombs in the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic northern provinces.

Abu Sayyaf has known links with al-Qaida and other radical groups based in Pakistan and Afghanistan but, like all the Indonesian Islamist organisations, it has shown no sign of exporting its terrorism overseas. One Abu Sayyaf cell currently holds at least two American missionaries among 18 hostages on its main base of Basilan island.

Philippine intelligence agencies believe several small Islamic fundamentalist groups in the southern Philippines received financial support from Bin Laden through the International Islamic Relief Organisation. This was established by Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, who is Bin Laden's brother-in-law.

Washington is so concerned about the threat they pose that it is to send a general and a number of troops to the southern Philippines to help the local military crush the guerrillas, it was announced yesterday. But the Philippine national security adviser, Roilo Golez, stressed that the American troops would only be there in an advisory capacity and not participate in any operations.

Another reason for the focus on the Philippines is that one of the bombers in the 1993 World Trade Centre attack, Ramzi Yousef, is a Filippino.Yousef was also suspected of being behind a foiled plot to assassinate the Pope in 1995 and his attempts to blow up 11 airliners heading for the US.

Malaysia

Malaysia poses the least serious threat of the three countries. Malaysians have been charged in Indonesia for alleged involvement in several bombings in the past year and others have been arrested in Thailand and the Philippines for importing bombs but analysts give very little credence to the claims by the prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, that Islamist radicals are plotting a terrorist campaign to overthrow him.

Most commentators believe Mr Mahathir is exploiting the growing popularity of the fundamentalist opposition group, the Pan-Malaysia Islamic party, as an excuse for a crackdown. He has imprisoned several leading party figures, particularly in its youth wing, without charge and without giving any evidence to substantiate the allegations

http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39268-2001Oct10.html

Officials: SE Asia a Bin Laden Hub

By George Gedda

Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, October 10, 2001; 6:14 PM

WASHINGTON -- Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network has been bolstering Islamic insurgencies in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, U.S. officials said Wednesday. Southeast Asia has become a major operational hub for the terrorist network, they said.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said no military action is planned against the terrorist infrastructure in these countries in the near term. At the same time, he said, "We will seek out terrorists wherever they are located."

The U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Abu Sayyaf movement in the Philippines has sent insurgents to train at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan. They have also exchanged money, equipment, and people with al-Qaida in recent years, the officials said.

Terrorists tied to bin Laden's network and based in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia are among the likely targets of future covert and overt American actions, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Reacting quickly, Filipino National Security Adviser Roilo Golez said his government will not allow ground troops to take part in counterterrorism activities in the Philippines.

Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was among the first world leaders to pledge support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism, offering ports for use of the international coalition as transit points or staging areas.

She also said she is willing to deploy Filipino combat troops if the coalition needs them.

The Philippines is predominantly Catholic. The Abu Sayyaf rebels say they are fighting for a separate Islamic nation in the southern Philippines.

Outside the U.S. Embassy in Manila, some 200 Muslims and left-wing activists denounced the U.S.-led strikes on facilities of the ruling Taliban movement in Afghanistan for sheltering bin Laden.

Congressional sources who follow the terrorism issue said there were reports in August of Abu Sayeff operatives expanding kidnaping operations into Malaysia and of sending weapons to Muslim radicals in Indonesia.

Asked by a reporter what anti-terrorism measures the United States has in mind for Southeast Asia, Powell appeared to rule out military action.

"There are no plans that are about to come down the pike," Powell said, flanked by NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson.

One U.S. official said the Pentagon is developing a list of potential targets beyond Afghanistan where bin Laden's associates live.

The Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia are among those countries, but not the only ones, and the sources said that no decisions have been made at the Pentagon or the White House.

Powell suggested the administration is relying heavily on nonmilitary means to achieve its anti-terrorist goals in Southeast Asia.

"We will see what we are able to flush out as a result of intelligence activity, as a result of our law enforcement and financial activities," he said.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said dozens of potential terrorists in 23 countries have been arrested or detained as part of the anti-terrorist crackdown.

Ten were in Europe, one in East Asia, four in Africa, seven in the Near East-Middle East area and one in Latin America.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=221778

11.10.2001

US discloses plan to widen war on terror to Southeast Asia

By RUPERT CORNWELL and KIM SENGUPTA

WASHINGTON - In the days after the most devastating terrorist attack in history, President George W. Bush told the United States people that America's retaliation would be a war without beachheads, fixed battlefields and without limits.

Now Washington is fleshing out that threat, signalling it plans to open new fronts - both covert and overt - well beyond the Middle East, to Asian countries like the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia where associates of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network are operating.

The Government of the Philippines has confirmed that the US is sending a small team of military specialists, headed by an Army general, to Manila within the next few weeks. Its purpose will be to train and equip local troops fighting the insurgency of the Abu Sayyaf Islamic movement.

Hundreds of Abu Sayyaf guerrillas are fighting the Philippines Army in the southern island of Basilan, where they are holding two American missionaries hostage and may have killed a third.

The organisation, whose ostensible goal is to set up a separate Islamic nation within the Philippines, is believed to have organisational and financial links with al Qaeda, fed by Islamic charities and the proceeds of kidnapping foreigners.

Individual cases only support this thesis. Ramzi Yousef, convicted ringleader of the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in New York, plotted in Manila to blow up 11 jumbo jets en route to the US, while one of the men convicted of the 1998 US Embassy bombing in Kenya was a student in the Philippines when he was recruited into the bin Laden organisation.

This month, President Gloria Arroyo herself acknowledged that there were "traces of a relationship" between Abu Sayyaf and the group which planned the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. US intelligence experts describe Manila as a "major operational hub" of al Qaeda in its "holy war" against America.

For the public record, Filipino officials rule out any direct participation by US forces to root out the guerrillas, which would in any case be barred by the country's constitution. But as a host of precedents - from Vietnam and earlier - show, US trainers and advisers can very swiftly metamorphose into full-scale combatants by another name. The US moreover will be able to use its two former major installations in the Philippines, at Clark Air Base and Subic Bay, as bases for its operations.

The pattern is similar in Indonesia, where Islamic forces have been involved in some of the separatist violence which has long racked it.

Though Indonesian Muslims are mostly moderate, there are extremist militias believed to be linked with bin Laden's organisation.

One such group, Darul Islam, has owned up to having links with al Qaeda and the Taleban regime.

"Some factions in Darul Islam have had close contact with the al Qaeda movement and close contact with persons in Afghanistan," the group's spokesman Al Chaidar said.

"They have, several times, invited Osama bin Laden to Indonesia. But Osama, himself, has not had a chance to go to Indonesia."

A number of fringe Islamic groups have threatened to round up and expel Americans and other Westerners and have demanded that the country oppose the bombing of Afghanistan.

Though by the standards of street protest in Indonesia, the demonstrations against the US air strikes on Afghanistan have been on a small scale, they have been passionate and highly visible.

Students have protested outside Parliament in Jakarta, burning effigies of Bush and accusing America of terrorism and of conducting a war against all of Islam.

Malaysia is also involved. Al Qaeda suspects have used Kuala Lumpur Airport, and Khalid Al-Midhar, one of the hijackers of the American Airlines jet which was crashed into the Pentagon and who was already on a US Government watchlist of suspected terrorists, was videotaped at a terrorist meeting in the Malaysian capital last year.

The message from US officials is that all three of these countries - and by implication anywhere else where such al Qaeda cells may exist - could be the target of covert operations, carried out in collaboration with local security forces, or in exceptional cases by US special forces.

Bush himself will discuss the problem with their three leaders next week at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shanghai.

But intelligence sources in Britain say the previously unappreciated danger of al Qaeda comes in the widely dispersed way it had set up bases internationally.

There are al Qaeda cells or associated terror groups in Algeria and Egypt, Chechnya, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and in South America.

Cells are also believed to be active in Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania and possibly South Africa.

The intelligence source said: "They appear to have a policy of sending recruits away for training [to Afghanistan] so they escape the attention of their domestic security services.

"Afterwards they are dispersed to unlikely places like the Philippines again, so that they are away from the microscope of interested law enforcement agencies.

"It's almost like an international conglomerate in the way it moves its members around.

"There is a Pan-Islamic nature to the organisation - look at the multinational make-up of the 19 hijackers who attacked America. Recruits are told their loyalty lies not just to fellow Muslims in their country of origin but Muslims everywhere".

Al Qaeda members have also been spotted in northern Kosovo. There is unconfirmed evidence that bin Laden's group had plotted to carry out an attack on the US Embassy in New Delhi.

Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, said yesterday that: "This war will never really stop in any of its phases - military, diplomatic and financial."

Even as the plumes of smoke still hang in the air over Kabul and Kandahar, the realisation is sinking in. The US is in it for the long haul, across the global board.

- INDEPENDENT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39745-2001Oct10?language=printer

Bin Laden Said Active in SE Asia

By George Gedda

Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, October 10, 2001; 7:53 PM

Reacting quickly, Filipino National Security Adviser Roilo Golez said his government will not allow ground troops to take part in counterterrorism activities in the Philippines.

She also said she is willing to deploy Filipino combat troops if the coalition needs them. Bush plans to meet with Arroyo when she travels to Washington on Nov. 20 to mark the 50th anniversary of the mutual defense treaty between the two countries.