JEMAAH ISLAMIYAH

NEXT GENERATION RADICALS IN INDONESIA

Jacob Zenn

Asia Times, June 12, 2013

JAKARTA - Driven by strong exports and buoyant domestic markets, Indonesia is projected to be among the world's top 10 economies by 2025. While the future looks bright for Southeast Asia's largest economy, a growing tide of religious intolerance threatens to undermine those gains. Where officials have in the past attributed religious violence and terrorism to foreign influenced groups, now the threats to stability are more clearly homegrown.

In the late 1990s and 2000s Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) was the main threat in Indonesia. The radical group attacked foreign tourists in Bali in 2002 and 2005, the Australian embassy in Jakarta in 2004, the J W Marriott hotel in Jakarta in 2003 and 2009, and the Ritz Carlton hotel in the capital city in 2009.

JI was largely considered a Malaysian import to Indonesia, with most of the extremist group's key members having fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s or in the 1990s with the Taliban again its domestic rival the Northern Alliance. Most of JI's key members are now either in prison or have been killed by Indonesia's elite counter-terrorism force, Detachment 88 (or Densus 88).

In November 2012, one of JI's Indonesian-born and bred members, the Poso native Upik Lawanga (aka Taufiq Buraga), was captured trying to cross from East Kalimantan, Indonesia to Sabah, Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. Lawanga was allegedly involved in the beheading of three Christian students in Poso, church bombings in nearby Palu in 2005, the two hotel bombings in Jakarta in 2009, and suicide bombings at a mosque in a police compound in Cirebon and a church in Solo in 2011.

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