Indonesia Can't Cope With The 'Tiny Minority of Excremists'

ONE of the great failures of the post 9/11 decade all over the world has been the attempt to de-radicalise Islamist extremists. I have just returned from a week in Indonesia and I have to report to you that de-radicalisation there has been a bust.

As I have often written, and firmly believe, the overwhelming majority of Indonesian Muslims are naturally tolerant, pluralist, inclusive and believe in the rule of law. However, it is wrong to understate the problem of extremists. As my YPP friends told me, there are thousands of Indonesians who have been trained in jihadist values and some military techniques. That training has occurred in Mindanao in The Philippines, and within Indonesia in Ambon, Poso and other key locations.

Indonesia is intensely important to Australia. It has prospects for a good economic future and far more natural forces at work to blunt the sharpest edges of extremism than in the Middle East. Nonetheless, the practice of Islam in Indonesia is becoming more conservative and the numbers who practise intolerance, sometimes violently, are rising.

Here we come to one of the deepest conceptual questions about Islamist extremism: are we dealing with psychological pathology or with a hearts-and-minds strategy? Are violent extremists the psychological equivalents of members of Western cults or are they psychologically sound but have deliberately embraced an ideology of extremist Islam?

It is fair to say this is still an unresolved question among Western intelligence and analytical agencies. I think the numbers of intolerant Indonesians are simply too large for the cult analogy to hold up.

Islam is genuinely different from other religions in its inherent militancy, the call to its followers to create a political order according to the specific rules of Islam and in the interpretation of jihad as a violent struggle for Islamic supremacy that attracts at least a minority of Muslims. It may be a relatively small minority, but it is a minority big enough to cause endless trouble.

What is encouraging about Indonesia is that the good guys, who explicitly reject all this, are highly active. I don’t mean liberal Muslims exactly. Except for a tiny Jakarta elite, who are more liberal than Muslim, liberal Islam has all but died out in Indonesia. I mean the small-c conservatives who believe in human rights and in the rule of law and who are willing to campaign for that vision as their interpretation of Islam.

I met a brilliant, dynamic young man, Fajar Riza Ul Haq, who heads the Maarif Foundation, which campaigns for Muslims to see human rights as integral to their religion. He told me that when he first broaches this concept with schoolteachers they typically find it objectionable, seeing it as a Western concept. Indeed, he accepts the analysis that Indonesian Islam is generally more conservative today than a decade ago, and becoming more conservative still. He doesn’t equate being conservative with a propensity to violence, but he does think this conservative bent can be a precursor, as it were, to a more extremist view, that it shares a certain degree of cultural and even analytical commonality with the extremists’ world view.

He is also convinced, while avoiding conspiracy theories, that outside actors, especially elite players within Indonesian politics, intentionally stir up communal hostilities for their own political purposes. He comes originally from Solo, and while Solo is a centre for conservative Islam, it traditionally has not been the site of violent Islam-Christian clashes until recently. Fajar believes recent attacks on Christian churches have been carried out by groups from outside Solo who believe that, by engineering serious communal strife there, they can radicalise a large number of new jihadists, as my YPP friends told me happened in Ambon.

Fajar also reports a disturbing statistic: that 90 per cent of Indonesian youth, according to surveys, would be prepared to carry out violence in the name of Islam. That’s an ambiguous result, hard to interpret because of the imprecise nature of the question, but it’s not really reassuring.

That Fajar finds resistance among schoolteachers to his message on human rights shows how much work is still to be done. That he can generally talk them round over time, and that he is engaged in this work with energy and skill and commitment, is a powerful sign of hope.    20 comments on this story