Many Americans may know my country, Azerbaijan, for its oil wealth or for its conflict with Armenia over the territory of Nagorno Karabakh. A March 5 article in The Post portrayed a nation whose ruling family appears to own $75 million worth of luxury villas in Dubai. Few of us in Azerbaijan were surprised by a report that President Ilham Aliyev's family apparently invests assets abroad. What else should be expected from a leader who inherited power from his father through fraudulent elections?
Aliyev's brutal crackdown on the opposition and independent media began with his election in October 2003. Thousands of Azeris protesting the transfer of power -- more succession than an election -- were arrested and beaten. As opposition supporters languished in jail, then-deputy U.S. Secretary of State Richard Armitage phoned Aliyev to congratulate him on his "landslide" victory. Democratic voices of protest were stifled by the blows of police batons. Western powers were eager to work with a new leader they viewed as young and progressive.
Nearly two years later, on the eve of the 2005 parliamentary elections, Azeri democrats inspired by the support Western nations had given to the Rose and Orange democratic revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine decided to again challenge Aliyev's authoritarian regime. Events unfortunately played out along now-familiar lines: The government falsified election results; opposition protests were crushed; yet Washington praised the work of Azerbaijan's Constitutional Court, which had just approved false election results.
Aliyev apparently interpreted the international community's silence as carte blanche to turn a country with long-standing democratic traditions into a fiefdom. The government evicted major opposition parties from their centrally located headquarters. Independent media also felt the wrath. One outspoken editor of an opposition magazine was fatally shot in March 2005; several others received harsh prison sentences on trumped-up charges.
There was a time when Azerbaijan's future looked promising. In the 1980s, Azerbaijan was at the forefront of the democratic movements that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1992, we held our first democratic elections. Abulfaz Elchibey, leader of the Popular Front, won 59 percent of the vote. Elchibey viewed himself as a political heir to the founders of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1918. Azerbaijan was the first nation in the Muslim world to establish a parliamentary democracy that granted universal suffrage, preceding many Western countries.
But these days, the only vote that counts is that of Ilham Aliyev. After "winning" his second presidential term last year, in an election with no viable opposition alternative, Aliyev and his rubber-stamp parliament conspired to change the constitution, through a referendum, to lift term limits on the presidency.
The next parliamentary elections are to be held in November. The democratic opposition is once again preparing to challenge the regime. While there are no indications that the government's behavior will differ from that of years past, we have decided to participate in the election process because we recognize that this is our chance to fight for our ideals.
Our platform is simple: We intend to establish a functional democracy in our country. Azerbaijan has a resourceful populace, and we can and must decrease our nation's dependence on oil. We must break the economic monopolies controlled by corrupt officials. Our goal is to establish a free, market-based economy. We want Azerbaijan to integrate into the Euro-Atlantic community of nations, ending its status as a satellite of autocratic Russia.
As we continue our struggle for freedom, it is vital that the United States pursue appropriate action with regard to the largest nation in the South Caucasus. Bilateral relations have long been based on cooperation on energy, security and democratic development. Sadly, many Azeris see U.S. policy as driven by energy interests and the global war against terrorism. To us, it seems that democracy gets short shrift. We hope the Obama administration will make clear to Azerbaijan's leader that democratic reforms and human rights are a priority in U.S.-Azeri relations.
American policymakers should have learned from countries in the Middle East and other areas that authoritarian, corrupt regimes do not make reliable allies. Nor is their "stability" based on the consent of the governed. The democratic opposition in Azerbaijan does not seek intervention or financial assistance from the United States. What we need is the moral support of an America that stands by its own values.
Ali Karimli is chairman of the Popular Front Party of Azerbaijan and co-founder of Azadlig (Freedom) Political Bloc of Opposition Parties.
Recent Hispanic immigrants are more likely to return their census questionnaires than Hispanics born in the United States, according to a new study that suggests a census campaign targeting Spanish speakers has been wildly successful.
A telephone survey of about 1,000 people conducted in the third week of March by the Pew Hispanic Center also found that foreign-born Hispanics are less skeptical that their census information will remain confidential.
The study was released Thursday, which the government dubbed "Census Day" -- the day by which, officials hoped, people would have filled out their forms and mailed them in. To encourage participation, the White House released a photo of President Obama filling out his questionnaire.
The government will continue to promote the census throughout April, particularly in areas with low response rates. At the end of the month, officials will compile lists of addresses from which surveys have not been received by mail. Census-takers will be dispatched to those addresses to try to get survey questions answered.
Major Hispanic groups have said there is widespread fear among immigrants that data will be shared with immigration authorities. In response, groups have stressed the confidentiality of the census in a campaign called "Ya es hora. ¡Hagase contar!" or "It's time to be counted."
"It shows the work we have been doing has had an impact," he said of the effort that enlisted newscasters, entertainers and other prominent Latinos to spread the message that Hispanics should send in their forms regardless of their legal status. "It shows that this population understands what we need do as a community to move forward, to be counted and to be heard."
But, ironically, the survey suggests that the message did not get through so readily to U.S.-born Hispanics. While 91 percent of the foreign-born said they had returned their forms or would do so soon, only 78 percent of the U.S.-born said they would participate. Both figures would be an improvement over the last census, when 69 percent of Hispanic households returned their forms.
Hispanics are the largest ethnic group in the United States, as well as the fastest growing. About 35 million were counted in the 2000 Census, and they were estimated to number 47 million by 2008, or 15 percent of the population.
This year, the Census Bureau mailed bilingual forms to neighborhoods with a large Hispanic presence. It also spent more than $25 million, about one-fifth of its total advertising budget, for Spanish-language media.
The sharp focus on messages in Spanish may have created the disparity in how recent immigrants and natives regard the census.
Maria Teresa Kumar, executive director of Voto Latino, said that recent immigrants are the main consumers of Spanish-language programs aired on Univision and Telemundo, which introduced a census-taker as a character in its top-rated telenovela. Generations born in the United States tend to prefer English-language media.
"The more acculturated you are, the more you have the same views as the rest of mainstream America, and a lot of folks are distrustful of government," she said.
The Pew survey also suggests that a census boycott called by some Hispanic evangelical ministers to protest the lack of immigration reform has been a failure. Only 16 percent said they had heard calls for a boycott.
"We're not sure why it didn't gain traction," said Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. "We know that when it was announced, there was a very broad effort to counter it."
Carlos Aragon, general manager of Radio Fiesta, which broadcasts in the Washington area, said many Hispanics consider the boycott "ridiculous." He also said he hears myths that the Census Bureau will turn in undocumented immigrants to the authorities.
SEOUL -- Squeezed by food shortages and financial sanctions, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il appears to be reaching out to China and Chinese investors in a way that could mark an extraordinary opening in the insular nation's shuttered economy.
Kim might soon travel to China, according to the office of South Korea's president and U.S. officials. They cited preparations that appear to be underway in the Chinese border city of Dandong and in Beijing. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday it does not have information on whether Kim will visit China.
Such a trip could help restart six-party talks, hosted by China, aimed at persuading North Korea to denuclearize in return for economic and political benefits.
Kim is also attempting to accelerate Chinese investment and has ordered the creation of a State Development Bank. Officials from the new bank told a South Korean professor last week that they intend to allow the construction of foreign-owned factories in major North Korean cities. This would allow Chinese firms, many of which are running short of low-cost factory workers, access to North Korea's pool of low-wage laborers.
If the investments move forward, they would represent a major policy reversal by the government. For six decades, North Korea has sealed almost all its citizens off from the "poisons" of capitalism.
Outreach to China comes at a time of sharply increased pressure on Kim's leadership.
Inside North Korea, food shortages have worsened because of botched currency reform, which disrupted the private markets that feed most of the country's 22.5 million people. Kim's medical ills also include kidney failure, and he undergoes dialysis every two weeks, according to the head of a state-run think tank in Seoul.
And outside, U.N. sanctions are reportedly limiting the North's ability to profit from weapons sales. State trafficking in counterfeit cigarettes and illicit drugs appears to be dwindling. In addition, large-scale food aid from South Korea has been stopped until Pyongyang agrees to junk its nuclear weapons.
"Through this State Development Bank, North Korea is trying to lure foreign investment in agriculture, ports, railroads and also light industry," said Lim Eul-chul, a research professor at the Seoul-based Institute for Far Eastern Studies. He spent four days in Pyongyang last week, talking to officials from the bank and to Chinese businessmen.
They told Lim that the bank is offering itself to foreign investors as a one-stop investment shop. With its board including senior members of the military and the ruling party, the bank will be able to conduct transactions with foreign commercial banks and invest in major projects, North Korean state-controlled media have said.
"The North is now planning to open foreign-owned factories not just in closed-off special economic zones, but in major cities like Nampo and Wonsan," Lim said. Until now, the government has confined nearly all foreign business operations to sealed-off economic zones, such as Kaesong near the South Korean border. "The military is closely cooperating with the State Development Bank to try to increase foreign investment."
Although the repressive power of the army and security forces remains strong, the North's command-style economy is a ruin. There were unconfirmed reports of starvation deaths in some areas this winter.
Kim, 68, and showing the effects of a 2008 stroke, is in the early stages of handing power over to his untested 27-year-old son, Kim Jong Eun. But the legitimacy of the succession -- and of the state itself -- is being weakened by the growth of the markets and increased public access to foreign media.
Refugee surveys show that many North Koreans blame Kim's government for food shortages, corruption and incompetence.
"Kim Jong Il doesn't have many cards to play, so there is more and more pressure on him to return to the six-party talks," said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. "He is also aiming to get investment from ethnic Korean businesses in China."
In South Korea and China, there is widespread skepticism about North Korea's willingness to create modern banking systems and enforce laws that allow foreign companies to operate under standardized accounting rules.
Companies that have invested in North Korean mineral ventures have complained for years of corruption and outright theft by the government.
Special correspondent June Lee contributed to this report.
A reporter chronicles the revival of the world's most populous Muslim nation a decade after its disintegration
By David Lamb
Smithsonian magazine, April 2010
As reports of riots in Indonesia flashed across the world’s news wires, in May 1998, my wife telephoned the hotel in Jakarta where I was staying to make sure I was OK. “What do you see out your window?” she asked. Flames from burning department stores and Chinese shops and businesses owned by the family of President Suharto spread across the horizon like a magnificent sunset. Army tanks and soldiers with dogs filled the square below. “I see a city burning,” I said, “a city dying.”
At the time it seemed no exaggeration. Indonesia’s economy and its currency, the rupiah, had collapsed in a financial crisis that gripped all of Southeast Asia. In parts of the Spice Islands, which belong to Indonesia, tensions between Muslims and Christians were escalating. In the nation’s province of Aceh, and in Papua, site of one of the world’s richest deposits of copper and gold, the death toll mounted as secessionists skirmished with the army. East Timor was about to fall into anarchy, then secede from Indonesia as an independent country. In Jakarta, the nation’s capital, student protesters seeking to replace three decades of dictatorship with democracy were brutally put down by the military and government thugs, sparking clashes that would claim 1,200 lives and 6,000 buildings. Hardest hit was the Chinese minority, long resented for their entrepreneurial success; their businesses were looted and destroyed, and women were raped by hired military goons. Tens of thousands of Chinese fled the country.
I was then a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, based in Hanoi, and I was covering the civil unrest in Jakarta. One day I came upon an anti-Suharto demonstration at Trisakti, a private university. Students at other colleges sometimes taunted Trisakti’s students, belittling their lack of political involvement by waving bras and panties at them. But on this day Trisakti’s young men challenged the soldiers, standing shoulder to shoulder and pushing against their lines. “Don’t get so close. You could get shot and killed,” a friend of 19-year-old Trisakti student Elang Lesmana warned him. “That’s OK,” Lesmana replied. “I’d be a hero.” The soldiers, who had exchanged their rubber bullets for real ones, killed Lesmana and three other students. The deaths galvanized Indonesia, turning the tide of public and military sentiment.
Suharto’s top general, Wiranto—like Suharto and many Indonesians, he has only one name—told the president the military could no longer protect him and had no intention of staging a Tiananmen Square-style massacre in Jakarta. Nine days after the shootings of students, on May 21, Asia’s longest-serving leader resigned. He retired to the family compound in a leafy Jakarta suburb to live out his final decade watching TV, surrounded by a stuffed tiger and bookshelves full of cheap souvenirs and trinkets. Caged songbirds sang on his terrace.
For 32 years Suharto had run Indonesia like the CEO of a family corporation. The Suhartos’ fortune reportedly topped $15 billion, and they had a major stake in more than 1,200 companies. But Suharto left behind more than a legacy of corruption and a military best known for its deadly abuse of human rights. He had also been Indonesia’s father of development, building schools and roads, opening the economy to foreign investment, transforming dusty, tropical Jakarta into a modern capital and lifting millions of Indonesians out of poverty.
The world’s most populous Muslim country, with 240 million people, Indonesia has always been an ungainly place. The archipelago encompasses 17,500 islands—6,000 inhabited—that stretch 3,200 miles across the Pacific Ocean’s so-called Ring of Fire where earthquakes and volcanoes are a constant threat and tsunamis are born. The people—88 percent Muslim—speak scores of local languages and represent dozens of ethnic groups. As recently as the 1950s the population included tribes of headhunters. That this polyglot was born as a single nation in 1949, after 300 years of Dutch rule and four of warfare and negotiations with the Netherlands, was a miracle in itself.
After witnessing the Suharto-era meltdown, I did not return to Indonesia until October 2009, after I had begun hearing about changes unimaginable a decade earlier. On the surface, Jakarta didn’t seem much changed. Traffic remained gridlocked in the humid 90-degree heat. Shantytown slums languished in the shadow of marbled shopping malls where pianists in tuxedos played Chopin next to Valentino and Louis Vuitton shops, and white-gloved valets parked cars. The Indonesians I encountered were, as always, gracious and friendly, and I could walk virtually any street, even at night in a city of nine million people, with no fear for my safety. On one block you’d still find a mosque packed with men who considered alcohol and dancing ungodly, on the next, a nightclub like the Stadium that served alcohol 24 hours a day on weekends and boasted a disco pulsating with lights, thunderous rock music and writhing young bodies.
But beneath the surface, everything was different. Indonesia had recovered from half a century of dictatorship—first under Sukarno, then Suharto—and in the time I’d been away had become what Freedom House, a U.S. think tank, called the only fully free and democratic country in Southeast Asia. The outlying islands were generally calm. Soldiers no longer careered with abandon through city streets in cars bearing the red license plates of the military command. The unthinkable had happened: Indonesia had become one of the region’s most stable and prosperous nations.
People seldom talked about the dark past, not even of the apocalyptic end of the Sukarno regime in the mid-1960s, when the army and vigilantes went on a madhouse slaughter to purge the country of leftists, real and imagined. The killings spread from Jakarta to the Hindu-dominated island of Bali, and by the time order was restored as many as half a million had lost their lives. The mayhem was captured in the 1982 movie starring Mel Gibson and Linda Hunt, The Year of Living Dangerously.
Today Indonesia has joined the Group of 20, the world’s premier forum for economic cooperation. Blessed with an abundance of natural resources—petroleum, natural gas, timber, rubber and various minerals—and a strategic position straddling one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, it is one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies.
“There was great euphoria when Suharto stepped down, but it opened a Pandora’s box,” said Julia Suryakusuma, a Jakarta newspaper columnist. “Yes, we’ve got a real democracy. The world’s third largest after India and the United States. That’s pretty amazing. But what people worry about now is Islamization, the hard-liners who want an Islamic state.”
A soft rain was falling the night Fanny Hananto came to pick me up at my hotel. I jumped on the back of his motorcycle, and we slipped through lines of idling, bumper-to-bumper cars, headed for the mosque he attends. We passed a large group of women with small children, collectively called traffic jockeys, on a sidewalk. Hananto said solo motorists would pay a mother and child 25,000 rupiah (about $2.50 U.S.) to be passengers so the driver could use the lane reserved for cars occupied by three or more people.
I had met the 37-year-old Hananto through a friend. With his scraggly beard and a wife who dressed in black, everything covered but her eyes, and a daughter named for one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, Hananto seemed the very personification of Islamic purity. Had he always been religious?
“Not exactly,” he said. As a younger man, he had worked on a cruise ship, spent nights partying with drugs and alcohol and, referring to the crowd that hung out at the Stadium nightclub, said, “I was one of them.” But about a dozen years ago he grew to fear the wrath of Allah and did a 180-degree turn, embracing Islam through the Kebon Jeruk Mosque, to which he was now taking me. He so deeply trusted the imam who mentored him that when the cleric said he had found a good woman for Hananto, and showed him her picture, Hananto said, “OK, I will marry her.” He did so a short time later, never mentioning his past life to her.
I removed my shoes as we entered the mosque, fearing I might lose them amid the piles of footwear strewn about. Thursday evening prayers had attracted so many men, perhaps 2,000, that I could not even see the visiting Pakistani cleric preaching at the front. The men were members of an apolitical Islamic movement, Tablighi Jamaat, that strives to make Muslims better practitioners of their faith. I squatted on the floor, and men in long, loose-fitting white shirts and turbans nodded in welcome or reached out to shake my hand. Hananto introduced me to his friend, Aminudia Noon, a university professor of civil engineering. I asked him where the women were.
“They’re home praying,” he said. “If they were to come here, it would be like an arrow to the heart from Satan.”
Islam was brought to Indonesia not by conquest but by 12th-century Muslim traders who took cloves, nutmeg and other spices to the West. Its spread was gradual and peaceful. Rather than smothering local culture and religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, mysticism—it absorbed them. The Islam that took root was less doctrinaire and less intolerant than some forms practiced in the Middle East, and no one found it particularly unusual that Suharto meditated in caves and consulted astrologers and clairvoyants.
Both Sukarno and Suharto were leery of fervent Islam. Sukarno feared it could threaten the stability of his diverse, fragile country and at independence rejected the idea of making Indonesia an Islamic republic. Suharto kept his distance from the Arab Muslim world and for years kept Islamists at home on a short leash. Some went underground or left for more comfortable lives in neighboring Malaysia, which is also Islamic.
I told Professor Noon I didn’t understand how Muslim terrorists who had killed countless innocents in Indonesia and other countries could be considered martyrs. “Those who believe that have misinterpreted Islam,” he said. “The basic theme of Islam is love and affection. How can you put people who make bombs in paradise? Suicide bombers are not martyrs. They have lost the blessing of Allah, and they will receive His greatest punishment in the hereafter.”
Indonesia after Suharto’s fall was buffeted by drift, strife and communal conflict. Islamic extremists emerged from the shadows—and with them the country’s first suicide bombers. In Java, the island where Jakarta is located, mysterious assassins brutally killed scores of suspected black-magic sorcerers.
Meanwhile, between 1998 and 2004 three unlikely chief executives shuttled in rapid succession through the presidency—a millionaire engineer educated in East Germany, a nearly blind Muslim cleric, who often dozed off in meetings and was eventually impeached, and Sukarno’s daughter, whose most notable credential was her father’s genes.
Enter, in 2004, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, then a 55-year-old retired general who had been educated in the United States and who, as a youth, had sung and played guitar in a band named Gaya Teruna (Youth Style). He had a clean, graft-free reputation, a dedication to democracy and a belief that Indonesia’s traditionally tolerant, moderate form of Islam—Smiling Islam, Indonesians call it—was the true expression of the faith. The local news media referred to him as “the thinking general” and seemed delighted when, at a campaign stop in Bali, he sang John Lennon’s song “Imagine” in English. No one seemed to mind that it offered a distinctly atheistic outlook:
Imagine there’s no Heaven... No hell below us... And no religion too. Imagine all the people Living life in peace...
On September 20, 2004, some 117 million Indonesians voted in the largest single-day free election the world had ever seen to make Yudhoyono, who had promised to continue to reform the nation and the military and to rein in terrorism, the country’s sixth president. Five years later, he was re-elected in a landslide, collecting more direct votes (74 million) than any candidate had ever won worldwide. (The previous record had been Barack Obama’s 69 million votes in 2008.) In a nod to austerity, Yudhoyono’s second inauguration in October 2009 cost a mere $30,000.
Last year, Time magazine named Yudhoyono one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Not only has he continued with reforms to curb the military’s role in society, but he also struck a peace deal with anti-government rebels in Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra, ending a nearly 30-year war that had claimed 15,000 lives. Arrests, executions and raids had seriously weakened Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a homegrown Al Qaeda look-alike considered Southeast Asia’s deadliest terrorist group. (The name means “Islamic Community.”) Freedoms have continued for the Chinese minority, numbering about five million people or roughly 2 percent of the population, who had become free to use Chinese characters on its storefronts, celebrate Chinese New Year and openly teach the Chinese language. “Things are more secure, much better. We’ll see,” said Ayung Dim, 57, a merchant who had survived the 1998 riots by hiding with his family in his metal shop before fleeing to Malaysia.
The Indonesian government also patched up relations with the United States. It laid the groundwork for the return of the Peace Corps, expelled four decades earlier by the anti-Western Sukarno, who taunted the American ambassador, Marshall Green: “Go to hell with your aid!” Yudhoyono threw his support behind an anti-corruption commission, which caught some big fish, including his own daughter-in-law’s father. Indonesia’s democratic transformation and political reform have brought about a resumption of military cooperation with the United States, which had been suspended because of the Indonesian Army’s abysmal human-rights record.
The day before Yudhoyono’s second swearing-in, I took a taxi to the English-language Jakarta Post to see how the media had fared under him and what had changed since Suharto, when insulting the president or vice president was a crime and newspapers could be closed after printing three objectionable articles.
The privately owned Post, one of 16 national newspapers, had recently moved into a sparkling new building. I was surprised to find an empty newsroom. I asked the editor, Endy Bayuni, where everyone was. “They’re out doing what reporters are meant to do—reporting,” he said. “There are no government restrictions any more, no issues we can’t report on. With all the corruption here, Indonesia is a gold mine for investigative reporters, but our reporters don’t have the skills yet to do that kind of reporting well because we weren’t allowed to do it for so long. We’re retraining them.”
“In the old days,” he went on, “we became famous as the paper you had to read between the lines to understand. We’d push the invisible line as far as we could. It was the only way to keep your sanity as a reporter. Every segment of society has a voice now, even if it’s an unwanted voice” like that of Islamic extremists.
One branch of Islam has resurfaced here in its hard-core, anti-Western jihadist form. The terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah first captured the world’s attention in 2002 when a young suicide bomber with a backpack and a car loaded with explosives leveled two tourist bars, Paddy’s Pub and the Sari Club, on the Indonesian island of Bali. Over 200 people from 23 countries died. A marble memorial now marks the spot where Paddy’s stood, and a new bar has opened nearby with the name Paddy’s: Reloaded. In the next seven years terrorists launched several additional, deadly attacks—on restaurants in Bali and Jakarta, two at the JW Marriott and one each at the Ritz-Carlton and the Australian Embassy.
Though diminished by arrests and internal strife, JI and splinter terrorist groups still pose a big challenge to the fulfillment of Yudhoyono’s campaign promise that “God willing, in the next five years the world will say, ‘Indonesia is something; Indonesia is rising.’”
I met Nasir Abas in a dingy Jakarta coffee shop across the road from Cipinang Prison, which holds some of Indonesia’s toughest criminals and most incorrigible terrorists. Abas’ own terrorist credentials were formidable. He had trained on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, set up a military academy in the jungles of the southern Philippines and taught half a dozen of the young men who carried out the first Bali bombing how to kill. His brother spent eight years in a Singapore prison for plotting a foiled terrorist attack. (He was released in January.) His brother-in-law was executed for his role in the bombing of Paddy’s and the Sari Club. Abas, 40, brought along a sidekick, Jhoni “Idris” Hendrawan, 34, who had taken part in three deadly terrorist attacks in Indonesia and been arrested while counting the money he had robbed from a bank to finance a future attack.
These days Abas has a new role: he works for the police. Abas helped officers question suspects responsible for the second Bali bombing. He has testified against JI operatives in court, leading to their conviction and imprisonment. His encyclopedic knowledge of the terrorist network provided authorities with a trove of intelligence. He is one of the first on the scene of terrorist attacks and often finds clues that only a JI insider would recognize. In his spare time he visits terrorists in Cipinang and other prisons, trying to convince them that killing civilians and innocents is un-Islamic. Some prisoners refuse to talk to him and call him a traitor; others, like Hendrawan, have bought into Abas’ deradicalization program and have forsworn violence. “I thought the students I trained would take part in jihad against forces occupying Muslim lands, like in Afghanistan,” Abas said. “Then the Bali bombing. This wasn’t jihad. Prophet Muhammad said it is wrong to do anything cruel, wrong to kill old men, women and children. After Bali, I came to realize many of my friends and relatives had strange ideas and thought it was OK to kill civilians.”
His conversion, he said, came after his 2003 arrest. “I always thought the police were my enemy.” But they called him Mr. Nasir and, after beating him the day of his arrest, never touched him again. If they had tortured him further, he said he would have been silent or given them false information. “They said, ‘We are Muslim like you. We aren’t against Islam. We just want to stop criminals.’ Even the Christian cops didn’t use bad words about Islam. I changed my mind about the police, and that was one turning point.”
Another, he told me, was when Cipinang’s commander came to see him in prison. “Bekto Suprapto was a colonel and a Christian. He told the ten men guarding me to take off my handcuffs. Then he told them to leave. I’m thinking, ‘What a brave man, because if I want to do something to him, I’m sure I could carry it off.’ We talked about jihad, about Christians and Muslims. He gave me a Bible and I ended up reading it. I started wondering why God hadn’t let me die or be killed. I answered my own question. He hadn’t because there was something God wanted of me. It was to do what I’m doing now.” Abas’ change of direction also had a practical benefit: it won his release from custody.
Abas—and mainstream experts on terrorism—say JI continues to recruit at its 50 schools and in the mosques it operates. But, they add, its leadership and structure have been severely weakened by Yudhoyono’s three-pronged strategy: first, to aggressively pursue terrorists, which has resulted in more than 400 arrests, several executions and the shooting death of JI leader Noordin Mohammad Top in 2009; second, to undercut the popular appeal of militancy by exposing it as un-Islamic; and lastly, to ensure that the government does not create more terrorists by treating prisoners brutally.
Recent elections offer a glimpse into the public’s changing attitudes. In parliamentary elections in 2004, Islamic parties won 38 percent of the vote; in 2009, the percentage dropped to 23. In a poll of Indonesians by a group called Terror Free Tomorrow, 74 percent said terrorist attacks are “never justified.” In another poll, 42 percent said religion should have no role in politics, up from 29 percent the previous year. Apparently, most Indonesians continue to embrace moderation and tolerance.
Indonesia’s ulema, or leading clerics, were long on the fence about terrorism, believing no Indonesians nor any Muslims could have been responsible for the attacks. Many never denounced the Bali bombing but did condemn a police raid in East Java in 2005 in which JI’s leading bomb master, Azahari “Demolition Man” Husin, was killed as a U.S.-trained counterterrorism unit raided his hide-out. Yudhoyono’s vice president, Jusuf Kalla, invited leading clerics to his house for dinner. He spoke with them for 50 minutes. He showed them pictures of huge stockpiles of bomb-making equipment and weapons the police had found at the hide-out. Then he showed them videos of young suicide bombers saying their goodbyes before heading out on death missions in search of martyrdom. “Do you still believe the police shouldn’t have raided the house?” Kalla asked. The clerics all agreed that the raid was justified. It was an important government victory to get influential opinion-makers on the record with a condemnation of terrorism.
“Indonesia has done far better than the United States combating terrorism as far as abiding by the rule of law goes,” said Sidney Jones, a longtime U.S. resident of Jakarta and a conflict analyst with the Belgium-based International Crisis Group. “There have been no witch hunts, no Guantánamos, no water boarding.” The Yudhoyono government, she said, treats terrorism as a law-and-order problem for the police, and the police in turn use what they call a “soft approach,” as they did with Nasir Abas. Everyone is charged in open court with reporters present. “Because of the information coming out of the trials, the Indonesian public became convinced that the terrorists are Indonesians, not CIA and Mossad operatives,” Jones said.
The Indonesia I visited this past October was a different country from the one I left a decade ago. Although 32.5 million of the country’s people still live below the poverty line, most Indonesians no longer wake up hoping they can simply make it through the day. The students’ agenda of the 1990s—democracy, civil order, economic opportunity, respect for human rights—had become the national agenda. Everyone I met seemed aware that Indonesia had been given something some countries never get: a second chance. The optimism was palpable. “If Indonesia were a stock, I’d be buying,” said Eric Bjornlund, co-founder of Democracy International, Inc., a firm in Bethesda, Maryland, specializing in international democratic development.
But many challenges lie ahead. Yudhoyono’s popularity rating remains high—75 percent in early 2010—but has fallen 15 percent since his election, partly because of scandals within his government and criticism that he is indecisive. What if it continues to fall and he alters course, back-tracking into the dictatorial ways of his predecessors? What about deep-rooted corruption, which has drawn protesters into Jakarta’s streets; inertia in the civil service; the gap between rich and poor; and the continuing battle for the soul of Islam between moderates and extremists? In 2009, Aceh province, for instance, adopted a new Shariah law (law of God) that calls for death by stoning for adulterers. To the relief of moderates, concerned about tourism and foreign investment, Aceh has yet to carry out any stonings.
One day, I sat with six students in the shade of a kiosk at Jakarta’s Paramadina University, which includes in its curriculum a course on anti-corruption. The two young women present wore colorful jilbabs, the Islamic scarf that covers the hair and neck. All six spoke excellent English. They wanted to know if I was on Facebook and what I thought of President Obama, who as this story went to press was planning a visit in March to Indonesia, where he lived with his mother and Indonesian stepfather from 1967 to 1971. He has become popular in Indonesia since his campaign and election, and this past December a 43-inch bronze statue was unveiled in a city park, depicting a 10-year-old Obama wearing schoolboy shorts with his outstretched hand holding a butterfly. (A protest campaign that began on Facebook, arguing that Obama is not an Indonesian national hero, succeeded in getting the statue removed from the park. Officials transferred it to Obama’s former school in February.) I asked the students what their goals were. One wanted to be a computer programmer, another an entrepreneur, a third wanted to study in the United States.
“For me,” said 20-year-old Muhammad Fajar, “the biggest dream is to be a diplomat. Indonesia can have a big place in the world, and I want to be part of it. But first we’ve got to show the world that Indonesia is not just about poverty and corruption and terrorism.”
David Lamb, who traveled Asia extensively as a Los Angeles Times correspondent, is a regular contributor to Smithsonian.
By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly
Third time's the charm: Airliner attack while TSA is still directorless "could mortally wound a president's hopes for a second term" . . . Firewall: "The notion that terrorists have cyber-attack capabilities and are merely waiting to use them -- Osama bin Laden's birthday, perhaps? -- is silly" . . . What we're worried about this week: Nigerian driver crashes through airport security barriers and into parked airliner. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.
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President Obama has signed off on new security protocols for people flying to the United States, establishing a system in which intel data, not nationality alone, will prompt extra scrutiny, The New York Times’ Jeff Zeleny relates. Since Obama scolded agencies for overlooking warning flags heralding the underpants bomber, the checking of visa applicants against watch lists has evolved into a burdensome ordeal, The Washington Post’s Edward Cody surveys — as the Post’s Tara Bahrampour sees returning U.S. Muslims “facing new complications” at ports of entry.
Homies: “If there’s no one in charge [at TSA] of preventing [an attack], when something does happen, it’s a political disaster that could mortally wound a president’s hopes for a second term,” Time Magazine’s Mark Thompson assesses. Drug smugglers have set booby traps — barbed wire stretched like clotheslines across trails — for Border Patrollers on border roads near Deming, N.M., The El Paso Times’ Daniel Borunda reports — while Tucson’s KOLD 13 News has DHS earlier this week transferring 10 ATVs, four motorcycles, 50 global positioning units and an assortment of tactical equipment to Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Safety.
Feds: CIA counterintel officers recently concluded that agency interrogators risk exposure to al Qaeda through Guantanamo inmates’ contacts with defense attorneys, The Washington Times’ Bill Gertz reports. The CIA “ceased long ago to be the ‘rogue elephant’ unmasked in congressional hearings in the 1970s. On the contrary, since 9/11 the agency has been accused less often of sinister misdeeds than of incompetence,” The New York Times’ Sam Tanenhaus essays. The Pentagon is implementing new safety measures since a gunman opened fire there last month, its security chief tells The Associated Press’ Monica Norton. The Nevada Capitol was locked down late Tuesday after the FBI advised the nation’s governors they would be receiving letters from an extremist group demanding their resignations, The Nevada Appeal’s Geoff Dornan relates.
Close air support: A $20 million upgrade of the Colorado Springs airport’s checked bag inspection system “is focused on being more efficient and more private,” KKTV 11 News relates. A British Airways computer expert who allegedly offered himself as a suicide bomber is now slated to face trial next January, BBC News notes — while This Day reports a Nigerian man shouting “repent” while crashing his car through security barriers and into a parked airliner, and Gulf News has an elderly man desperate to go on hajj to Saudi Arabia jumping a New Delhi airport emergency gate.
Off track: “This week’s Moscow subway bombings raise several questions, but one of the most mysterious must be: Why hasn’t something like this happened here?” a Slate columnist probes — and see The Christian Science Monitor, again, on five ways to make mass transit safer. “Just as the Moscow bombers sent New York into a new round of terror jitters,” Gotham’s MTA removed weekend security details from the Queens Midtown Tunnel and the Verrazano Bridge, the Daily News learns — while CBS 2 News has 100 NYPD officers working a three-hour transit exercise Wednesday, supposedly planned before the Moscow blasts. This week, too, it was discovered that half of the NYC subway monitoring cameras were out of order, News.am briefs.
Say bye-bye, Jack Bauer: For viewers, “24” (FOX Entertainment) “is part sum of all fears, part wish fulfillment in an age of shadowy enemies . . . [but] the show’s trademark clock is about to stop ticking, The New York Times leads. “Let’s face it. Jack Bauer is not necessarily somebody it would be great fun to sit around and have a beer with, but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have with me [if] I realized someone had just slipped a small nuclear device into my carry-on luggage,” a FOX News contributor eulogizes — and see BuddyTV on “Jack Bauer’s Top 5 Human Rights Violations.” In a silver lining for bereft Bauer-holics, Kiefer Sutherland promises Hollywood Insider the series finale will tee up the “24”movie in the works at 20th Century Fox.
>Kulture Kanyon: “When last we left ‘V,’ the ABC remake of the ’80s miniseries . . . a vast fleet of Visitors’ spaceships was waiting to, presumably, swarm down on an unsuspecting Earth. Yikes — what’s the color for that emergency in the DHS playbook?” The Dallas Morning News curtain-raises. “Just like Hollywood, video game publishers capitalize on trends . . . Now there’s a new trend on the horizon, or message, if you’re a conspiracy theorist: Russia’s evil,” GameDaily essays. “It is hard for me, as a human being and a Middle Easterner, to portray these kinds of roles,” Arab American actor Said Faraj tells Aramica in re: the parts playing terrorists that has largely been his lot. Artist Robin Lasser presented a performance of her “Ms. Homeland Security” last Friday in Topeka, KTKA 49 News notes.
Nuclear Casual-Tea Party: “The National Rifle Association has unleashed a new campaign to allow all American citizens ‘their God-given rights to own an atom bomb!’” Glossy News notes. “The public is being bombarded with television, newspaper, movie and billboard ads pushing the new ‘right’ that the NRA feels should be passed through Congress. Already the FOX News channel has picked up the baton and is aggressively pushing for legalization of individual possession. Anyone challenging this new mandate has been ruthlessly booed down and hunted . . . People complaining about it have been told ‘Why do you hate America? Do you want only the terrorists to have atom bombs?’ Interestingly enough, the NRA appears to have bought the majority share of stocks in the first company to mass produce atom bombs for the general consumer . . . Once the personal possession atom bomb amendment is forced through Congress the NRA plans on pushing for the legal right to carrying concealed atom bombs on the street.
MINGORA, PAKISTAN -- Officially, the military operation to purge the Taliban from Pakistan'sSwat Valley ended last summer. But even as life in the lush region returns to normal, the army's footprint is everywhere.
The military is rebuilding roads, schools and libraries. It is buying computers for women's vocational institutes and solar-powered streetlights for villages. It is planting a million trees. The work has made soldiers hugely popular, but some wonder why the civilian government is not doing it.
"The mandate of the army was to clear the area and to hold the area for peace. To build should be done by the civilians," said Zia ud-Din, an educator and spokesman for the Swat National Committee, a civil society group. "How long will we depend on them?"
There are competing explanations for why the military remains in the lead. Some U.S. and Pakistani military officials say Pakistan's anemic civilian government is too corrupt and bureaucratic to build on military progress by improving services and quality of life. Others say the military is too accustomed to control and too enthralled with its popularity to cede any power.
Pakistani officials say their objective is to prevent the rebels from regaining a foothold. Pakistan's successes over the past year in battling Islamist fighters in Swat and in the remote tribal area of South Waziristan have won the country high praise from U.S. officials. But at the same time, some American and Pakistani experts say the enduring military presence carries worrying implications, because it ties down forces needed to battle militants elsewhere and raises awkward questions about the country's efforts to emerge from a decade of military rule.
"They are carrying guns at the same time they are carrying shovels. It's sending the wrong signals," said Rifaat Hussain, a defense and security studies professor in Islamabad. "The civilians are completely dependent on the army."
To be sure, government offices in Swat are open, and they have reclaimed their chaotic bustle. Naeem Akhtar, a top civilian administrator, said officials have reduced a large backlog of court cases, surveyed 10,000 destroyed houses and shops, and plan to distribute $1 million in total compensation to families of victims or survivors of terrorist attacks.
"In the entire district, every nook and corner, the government is functioning," Akhtar said.
But security analysts say that keeping insurgents at bay requires the government not just to resume its functions but to improve them -- and that is the worry.
Outside the government complex on a recent day, Ehsan Ullah paced with a folder full of documents. He was injured in a bombing in February 2009, he said, and had spent months submitting paperwork for compensation, only to be shuffled from one office to another.
"Corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption," fumed the young man, waving a cellphone that he said he planned to sell that day to feed his family.
Usurping authority?
Of 401 schools bombed by militants or left dilapidated, half have been rebuilt. But it was the military, not the government, that rebuilt them while also providing temporary tents for other schools. By some estimates, the army has carried out 90 percent of the building and rebuilding projects -- a list so long that it took 20 minutes for Lt. Col. Akhtar Abbas, an army spokesman in the region, to recite.
The army has also set up mobile clinics in rural areas that have no government hospitals. At the occasional checkpoints in the valley, soldiers stand alongside police officers, and the army is working to enroll and train police recruits. With 50,000 soldiers in Swat, the military presence there is now larger than it was during the offensive.
The military says it will leave Swat when the provincial government asks. Ud-Din, the activist, said the continuing troop presence has created tensions, with provincial workers complaining privately that the army has usurped authority by "putting their noses into everything," in an effort to create dependency.
In South Waziristan, officials say they are prioritizing a rapid buildup of civilian institutions. Tariq Hayat Khan, the law and order secretary for the tribal areas, said the federal government had pledged -- though not yet fully delivered -- millions of dollars for a post-operation plan to prevent residents from "being mercenaries for the miscreants." It includes vocational schools, a buildup of community police and road construction.
But in both Swat and South Waziristan, there also appears to be widely felt apprehension about too quick a military drawdown. In the hectic city of Mingora, civil officials say the army is providing much-needed security and carrying out reconstruction projects that could not otherwise be funded. A senior Pakistani military official, for his part, was disparaging about his civilian partners. "Whenever we give them the job, they're not capable of doing it because of corruption," he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter frankly.
"They completed this in two months," Mohammed Saeed, a principal in the village of Shamozai, said of the military's reconstruction of his school and renovation of its furniture. "I think if it had been done by the government, it would have taken 10 years."
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