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Jakarta Attack Highlights Jostle To Lead Islamic State In Southeast Asia

Jakarta Attack Highlights Jostle To Lead Islamic State In Southeast Asia

By Randy Fabi

JAKARTA — Last week’s attack on Jakarta showed for the first time that Islamic State violence has arrived in Indonesia, but security experts believe the radical group’s footprint is still light here because militants are jostling to be its regional leader.

Police have identified Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian based in Syria, as the mastermind of the blitz of bombings and gunfire that left all five attackers and two civilians dead on Thursday.

But perhaps the region’s most influential jihadi is a jailed cleric, Aman Abdurrahman, who with just a few couriers and cell phones is able to command around 200 followers from behind bars.

He sits at the head of Jamaah Ansharut Daulah, an umbrella organization formed last year through an alliance of splinter groups that security experts believe could become the unifying force for Islamic State supporters.

“They want to internalize the conflicts in Indonesia so they can bring more people from the outside,” said Rakyan Adibrata, a Jakarta-based terrorism expert who advises parliament, referring to the militants who have joined forces under one banner.

“Just like Syria, you need to create a conflict zone very big that can be a magnet for all jihadi to come across the world to Indonesia to wage war. That’s their main objective.”

Police believe that Naim, himself an Abdurrahman supporter, was trying to prove his leadership skills to Islamic State’s leaders in Syria by plotting the Jakarta attack.

“In order to get the credit from ISIS, he needs to prove his leadership capabilities,” Jakarta police chief Tito Karnavian said, using a common acronym for the Syria-based group.

He said Naim’s vision was to unite the now-splintered groups across Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, that support Islamic State.

REGIONAL UNITY IN DOUBT

Islamic State, which controls tracts of Syria and Iraq, has accepted allegiances from jihadists in Nigeria, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, but has yet to formally recognize any radical groups in Southeast Asia.

Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) was the last transnational group to successfully launch major attacks in the region, including the 2002 bombings on the resort island of Bali that killed 202 people.

JI, founded by Indonesian and Malaysian militants who returned from battling the Soviet Union in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s and early 1990s, has largely become defunct due to internal rivalries and a sustained crackdown by security forces.

Governments in the region fear that Malay-speaking militants returning from fighting for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq could form a JI-like regional organization.

But security experts doubt there is much chance of a pan-regional group emerging that would bring militants from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines under one banner because there is too much that divides them.

“At this point, it’s hard to imagine any Southeast Asia affiliate would be formed,” said a senior Philippines army counter-terrorism official, noting that militants in his country are mostly interested in raising money from kidnappings.

“And one big obstacle to clear now is finding an amir that all of them can agree on,” added the official, who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

In Malaysia, former university lecturer Mahmud Ahmad is believed to be behind recent attempts to unite militant groups from three Southeast Asian countries, including the Abu Sayyaf group based in southern islands of the Philippines.

Abdurrahman remains perhaps the weightiest contender for leadership of Islamic State in the region.

While serving a 9-year prison term for aiding a militant training camp in Indonesia, he has managed to encourage hundreds of Indonesians to join the fight in Syria and Iraq.

“They can run the organization from the inside,” said terrorism expert Adibrata. “Couriers bring cell phones and they record every word Abdurrahman says.”

Prison authorities have tried repeatedly to silence Abdurrahman.

According to the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, 10 phones were confiscated from his cell in September 2014, but just a month later he got hold of a new phone and his sermons to followers inside and outside the prison resumed.

(Additional reporting by Kanupriya Kapoor in JAKARTA, Praveen Menon in KUALA LUMPUR and Manuel Mogato in MANILA; Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)

Photo: Armed police stand in front a house whose owner was arrested during a raid in the Langgen village in Tegal, Indonesia Central Java, January 15, 2016 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. REUTERS/Oky Lukmansyah/Antara Foto

‘The Look Of Silence,’ Which Revisits Suharto’s Brutality, Is Sure To Shock

‘The Look Of Silence,’ Which Revisits Suharto’s Brutality, Is Sure To Shock

By Kenneth Turan,n Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — The Look of Silence is a shocking and significant film, a further illumination of one of recent history’s great horrors, a documentary that will make a difference in the world. It is also an exceptionally difficult film to actually watch.

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, Silence is a companion piece to his earlier, Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing, the first film to bring into focus for Western audiences the nightmare that had overtaken Indonesia starting in 1965.

Within a year after a military coup had put Suharto in power, more than a million people the regime didn’t like, including writers, intellectuals, and union members, were labeled as communists and executed.

Though Suharto was driven from office in 1998, his establishment remained in control, and, as the director told Cineaste magazine, when he arrived in Indonesia in 2001, “I had the feeling that I’d wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power.”

Oppenheimer spent nearly eight years investigating and filming that world-turned-upside-down situation. Curious about how the perpetrators lived with their acts, he encouraged them to re-create on camera the killings they committed, a surreal endeavor that gave The Act of Killing its singularly unsettling dimension.

With Look of Silence, Oppenheimer wanted to flip the lens, to look at these events from the point of view of the victims who had to live with the pain of those killings in a country where speaking out was still unheard of. He carefully scheduled his filming to take place after he had edited the first film but before it was released, so his contacts within the establishment would still be viable.

Oppenheimer focused on a massacre of 10,500 near the Snake River in Northern Sumatra and specifically on the family of Ramli Rukun, a man whose death was more public than was usual for the military-run executions.

The film spends time with Ramli’s parents, mother Rohani and father Rokun, both over 100 years old and still coping with the pain of their eldest son’s death. “They destroyed so many people,” Rohani says, shaking her head, “but now they enjoy life.”

The protagonist of Silence is Adi Rukun, a quiet, dignified optometrist who is Ramli’s younger brother, born after his sibling was killed. As detailed in press notes and interviews (but, frustratingly, not in the film), Oppenheimer has been closely involved with Adi and his family for years, and that closeness is key to the film’s structure.

The Look of Silence begins with Adi examining long passages of footage Oppenheimer shot between 2003 and 2005 in which death squad members talk in detail about how they killed not only Ramli but whoever else they could get their hands on.

The graphic, horrific, excruciatingly detailed stories these killers tell take up a major chunk of this film, as they did with The Act of Killing, but without the mediating influence of that film’s bizarre re-creations, they are deeply disturbing to sit through.

At a certain point, Adi decides he wants to be in effect a one-man equivalent of the truth and reconciliation commissions that functioned in Rwanda and South Africa, and quietly confront the people who killed his brother.

As Oppenheimer explains in that Cineaste interview, Adi “wanted to know if the perpetrators could acknowledge that what they did was wrong. If they could, and if they could apologize, he could forgive them.”

Those meetings with the perpetrators, made possible by a combination of Oppenheimer’s contacts and Adi’s work as an optometrist (he ends up testing these people’s eyes as a kind of entree), are the most gripping parts of this film, and they do not necessarily end up the way Adi anticipated.

Almost as a rule, the killers tell Adi he is asking too many questions, with the most ominous response a terse “if you make an issue of the past, it will happen again.” Grueling and exhausting though The Look of Silence feels at times, this deeply troubling documentary exists because its creators (including numerous Indonesians who worked on it anonymously out of fear) felt no risk was too great to prevent just that from happening.

‘THE LOOK OF SILENCE’
MPAA rating: PG-13 for thematic material involving disturbing graphic descriptions of atrocities and inhumanity
Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
Playing: In limited release

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Indonesia Extends Airport Closures Due To Erupting Volcano

Indonesia Extends Airport Closures Due To Erupting Volcano

By Gde Putra Wicaksana, AFP

Denpasar, Indonesia — Indonesia extended to Saturday the closure of three airports, including on the holiday hotspot of Bali, due to drifting ash from a volcano, spelling more flight cancellations and travel chaos for thousands of vacationers.

Authorities closed the airport on Bali, the international airport on popular Lombok island, and three others serving domestic routes late Thursday as Mount Raung on Java spewed clouds of ash into the sky.

The closure of Bali airport came during peak season, when tourists flock to the tropical island to enjoy its palm-fringed beaches, and crowds of anxious visitors packed out the terminal buildings as they waited for more information about their flights.

The government initially said all airports would not be operational until late Friday. But later in the day, the transport ministry said that Bali and two small airports in East Java would remain closed until at least Saturday morning.

“All three of them will be closed until 10:00 a.m. tomorrow,” ministry spokesman J.A. Barata told AFP. “The air is still not clear.”

Lombok’s international airport, and a smaller one on the island, were re-opened earlier Friday.

Tourists described chaotic scenes at Bali’s Ngurah Rai airport. Katie Nagar, an American expatriate, described arriving at the domestic terminal to discover her flight to Jakarta on Indonesian flag carrier Garuda had been canceled and rescheduled to Sunday.

“There’s basically just hundreds of people camped out on the grassy lawns in front of the airport. There’s lines of hundreds of people waiting to talk to customer service,” she told AFP.

Many were also waiting in the international terminal, with some trying to seek information from airport officials while others were sitting or sleeping on the floor.

The travel chaos came at a busy time in Bali, with many Australians visiting the island during the school break and millions of Indonesians setting off on holiday ahead of the Muslim celebration of Eid next week.

Trikora Harjo, general manager at Ngurah Rai airport near Denpasar, Bali’s capital, said that 330 flights — 160 domestic and 170 international — had been canceled at the airport due to the ash cloud.

Garuda said it had canceled a total of 112 flights Friday. Most were to and from Bali airport, but 18 were to other airports affected by the ash cloud. AirAsia, Virgin Australia, Jetstar, and Air New Zealand also confirmed flights to Bali had been canceled.

Emitting Flames

Authorities raised the alert status of Mount Raung, a 3,300-meter (10,800-foot) volcano, late last month to the second highest level after it began to spew lava and ash high into the air.

Government vulcanologist Surono, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, said eruptions were continuing at the volcano Friday, and it was producing flames and a thundering sound. But authorities said no evacuations were necessary as those living in the area were already a safe distance away.

Air traffic is regularly disrupted by volcanic eruptions in Indonesia, which sits on a belt of seismic activity running around the basin of the Pacific Ocean and is home to the highest number of active volcanoes in the world, around 130.

It also occurs in other parts of the world — in 2010, the eruption of an Icelandic volcano caused the biggest closure of European airspace in peacetime, halting 100,000 flights and stranding 8 million passengers.

Australian carriers Virgin Australia and Jetstar began canceling flights earlier than other airlines, and had already axed a number of services in recent days even before Bali airport was fully closed.

Virgin Australia said in a statement Friday that “our team of meteorologists continue to work closely with the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in Darwin and monitor the situation. Once conditions improve, additional flights will be scheduled between Australia and Denpasar to ensure we can have guests on their way as soon as possible.”

Photo: Denpasar Airport, Bali, Indonesia via Wikimedia Commons

Indonesia And Malaysia To Allow Stranded Migrants To Come Ashore

Indonesia And Malaysia To Allow Stranded Migrants To Come Ashore

By Jonathan Kaiman and Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

BANGKOK, Thailand — Indonesia and Malaysia agreed Wednesday to allow thousands of migrants stranded at sea to come ashore, while the United Nations said it would repatriate Bangladeshis detained in three countries for entering illegally.

The announcements following a meeting of three Southeast Asian nations in Malaysia appeared to signal that a weekslong migrant crisis was easing after fishing boats packed with refugees from Myanmar and job-seekers from Bangladesh were abandoned by their captains and blocked from reaching land by governments unwilling to take them in.

Bowing to international pressure, Indonesia and Malaysia, which along with Thailand had said for weeks that the migrants were not welcome, reversed course and said they would be allowed in temporarily to receive humanitarian aid.

But the countries called on the international community to provide financial assistance to help shelter and care for the migrants, many of whom are suffering from severe hunger and dehydration after days or weeks at sea, and to repatriate or resettle them in a third country within one year.

“We commend the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia, in particular, for committing to continue to provide humanitarian assistance to the some 7,000 irregular migrants still at sea,” William Lacy Swing, director general of the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, said in Geneva.

The foreign affairs ministers of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia said in a joint statement “that necessary measures have been taken by the three countries on humanitarian grounds, beyond their international obligations, in addressing the current influx of irregular migrants and further underlined that the issue cannot be addressed solely by the three countries.”

Thailand’s foreign minister skipped a joint news conference following the meeting in Malaysia. Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman said Thailand had agreed to provide humanitarian aid but would not shelter refugees.

The Thai government has previously said it cannot take in any more migrants since it already hosts tens of thousands of refugees from Myanmar.

The IOM said it would bring back between 2,000 and 3,000 Bangladeshi citizens who are believed to be jailed in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia for migrating illegally to those countries.

Asif Munir, IOM spokesman in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, said the organization had set up a $1 million emergency fund to resettle the detainees.

“This is one of the recognized ways to bring back illegal migrants from the landing country to their motherland,” Munir said.

The fates of thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar, who are fleeing persecution in their home country, remained unclear. Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry officials said their nation would not take in the Rohingya, who are denied citizenship in Myanmar and face state-sponsored discrimination.

While many Rohingya refugees fled from Myanmar, others left on boats from southern Bangladesh, where some 500,000 are registered as refugees.

Bangladesh had faced intense criticism at home for failing to rescue its own citizens who were stranded at sea in recent weeks, after a crackdown by Thailand and Malaysia resulted in many of the boats being abandoned by their captains and left adrift in the Andaman Sea and Straits of Malacca.

Late Tuesday and early Wednesday, more than 370 migrants landed in Indonesia after floating for months on overcrowded boats, Indonesian officials said.

More than 3,000 migrants have reached land in Southeast Asia in recent weeks, about half of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province. Many have spoken of abysmal conditions on the boats. Some say smugglers beat and tortured them then fled off the coast of Thailand, leaving them adrift without food or water. Many have died, leading experts to warn of an epidemic of “floating coffins.”

The Thai government is planning a conference of Southeast Asian nations on May 29 to discuss the issue. Thailand’s deputy foreign minister said Wednesday that Myanmar, which had previously said it would not participate, had accepted an invitation to the meeting, according to The Associated Press.

(Los Angeles Times staff writers Kaiman reported from Bangkok and Bengali from Mumbai, India. Special correspondent Mohiuddin Kader in Dhaka contributed to this report.)

Photo: Jonathan Kaiman/Los Angeles Times/TNS