Near Enough to View Militancy’s Many Faces

When President Bush made his swing through Southeast Asia this fall, he declared the region a new front in the war on terrorism. “We will not be intimidated by terrorists,” he told the Philippine Congress. But his schedule spoke otherwise.

His visit to Manila was condensed to a mere eight hours out of concern about terrorism. In Bali, Indonesia, where more than 200 people were killed in 2002 when Islamic fundamentalists bombed two nightclubs frequented by tourists, Bush didn’t venture off the airport grounds.

I recently visited the region, covering some of the same ground as the president. Not being as visible a target, I was able to venture a little farther afield. And the news from the front is mixed.

The principal enemy in the area is an Al Qaeda-linked group known as Jemaah Islamiah. It turns out we’re still learning what works in combating the group. The issues facing our allies range from such things as whether authorities should tolerate schools that have graduated known terrorists, to whether former Muslim insurgents can be transformed into seaweed farmers, to whether U.S. special forces can guarantee the safety of men dressed as women competing in a lip-synching contest at a village fiesta.

Indonesia has produced the most Jemaah Islamiah members. A struggling new democracy that is home to the world’s largest population of Muslims, the nation arrested some 200 Jemaah Islamiah members in the wake of the October 2002 Bali bombings and the partly foiled bombing of the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, which killed 12 people in August. But Southeast Asia expert Andrew Tan estimates that 300 to 800 trained Jemaah Islamiah bomb makers remain at large. As Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote in an October memo, the big question is the rate at which more terrorists are being produced.

In the town of Solo on the Indonesian island of Java, I visited Al Mukmin, an Islamic boarding school, or pesantren. It’s one of an estimated 10,000 to 14,000 pesantrens in Indonesia, but its faculty and alumni rosters differ from the rest. Many well-known terrorists attended the school, including the recently captured Hambali, who is said to be the only non-Arab in the top leadership of Al Qaeda; the Bali bombers; and a fugitive bomb maker who was killed in October in the Philippines. Its founder, Abu Bakar Bashir, is alleged to be the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah. Bashir is currently serving a three-year prison sentence for using forged documents.

On the day that we visited, Bashir’s preschool-age grandson followed us around, sometimes pausing to play with another toddler, who was wearing a faded Osama bin Laden T-shirt. The school’s director told us that Al Mukmin taught Islam and academic subjects, not military techniques. There were signs up that encouraged jihad but also signs saying, among other things: “Without Science There Will Be Darkness.” Everyone we spoke with there believed that the U.S. was waging war against Islam. The main proof they offered was that Americans suspected their pesantren of breeding terrorists.

The school presents a conundrum to Indonesian authorities. Because Indonesia is a democracy, they say, simply closing the school is not an option. The Indonesian public is already angered by the U.S. war on terror, and shutting a school in a country with too few educational opportunities would be seen as a direct attack on Islam. Authorities have instead opted to put police informants in the school to keep an eye on things.

Jemaah Islamiah also operates in the Philippines, but differently, given that the country is 95% Christian. Here, fighting Jemaah Islamiah depends on bringing peace to the southern island of Mindanao. Mindanao’s original inhabitants were Muslims, sometimes called Moros. But the arrival of settlers from the northern Philippines has given it a Christian majority. This, in turn, has inspired various Islamic guerrilla groups to launch anti-government insurgencies that have lasted decades.

Mindanao can be violent. It is not only roiled by shootouts and bombings and guerrilla insurgency but plagued with robberies and kidnappings by criminal gangs. When we bought our plane tickets in Manila, the airline people asked us if we were sure that we wanted to go. One of my colleagues was advised that as both an American and someone of Chinese ethnicity, she would be doubly at risk -- Chinese businesspeople are prime targets for kidnapping.

In short, Mindanao’s a mess. And under the cover provided by this disorder, Jemaah Islamiah has been able to operate -- using the island as a training ground in the way that Al Qaeda used Afghanistan under the Taliban. U.S. special forces have gone in to see what they can do.

Our first stop was Zamboanga, the City of Flowers, in southwestern Mindanao. At Zamboanga Airport there was a box of sand provided for passengers to clear rounds from their side arms before handing them to a flight attendant.

The area around Zamboanga is bedeviled by a small Muslim guerrilla group, Abu Sayyaf. The group, declared a terrorist organization by the U.S., kidnapped three Americans in 2001, which contributed to a U.S. decision to send 1,000 U.S. Army trainers to the area. Afterward, Philippine troops drove Abu Sayyaf off its stronghold on the neighboring smaller island of Basilan.

On our visit last month, we went to a Philippine military base outside Zamboanga. We drove in past stalls selling food and soft drinks -- the spot where a U.S. special forces member was killed in a bombing last year. Inside, a couple of special forces medics were training Philippine noncommissioned officers. The Philippine troops were in a good mood. One showed us a curved Moro knife he said he had taken from a dead Abu Sayyaf guerrilla.

The special forces major in charge said he had only 53 men left in the area: “We’re training ourselves out of a job.” The major said that Greater Zamboanga had gone from 75 bombing incidents in 2001 to a dozen last year to zero so far this year. “But don’t take our word for it,” he concluded. “Go ask people if they feel safer.” Later, we walked around downtown, passing many sites where there had been bombings. The streets were thronged. People told us, “Last year we wouldn’t be out after 5 or 6 p.m. Now look.”

Of course, there is still a bit to go. I was told I couldn’t jog on the streets. Instead, I jogged around the parking lot of my hotel while a security guard with a sawed-off shotgun watched.

One night, in our hotel lobby, we ran into a local congressman whose mother is the mayor of Zamboanga. He took us, along with his bodyguards, to a fiesta in a baranguay, a cross between a barrio and a village, where he was supposed to help host the talent contest. When we arrived, there were 2,000 to 3,000 people surrounding a stage in a mud plaza, which in turn was surrounded by shacks. On the stage, two men in drag were lip-synching pop tunes while dozens more waited their turn. The congressman called my colleagues up on the stage and introduced them to the crowd. Then we interviewed some of the performers. One who identified himself as Mariah Carey said that he definitely felt safer since the arrival of the U.S. special forces. Rumsfeld could have hoped for no more.

From Zamboanga, we flew to Cotabato in the middle of Mindanao. Here, our host drove us in a van with tinted windows and discouraged us from getting out anywhere people might see us. “We don’t want people to become interested,” he said. Cotabato is more unstable than Zamboanga, but we were also getting accustomed to things like eating in restaurants guarded by men with M-16s, while our fellow diners wore side arms. That’s just how life is.

Around Cotabato, the insurgent group is the 12,000-strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which has been fighting for decades for an independent homeland. The front has provided training bases for Jemaah Islamiah but has not been known to participate in action off Mindanao. One morning, a member of the liberation group came into Cotabato to meet us and direct us on mud roads to a village where the group’s political chief was meeting with community elders. He told us that because the group was fighting the Philippine military, it would take help from whomever offered it, citing Muslim groups and Middle East governments he declined to name. “But that doesn’t mean we are interested in ... fighting their fights,” he said.

It’s a distinction the U.S. State Department has recognized in not declaring the Moro Islamic Liberation Front a terrorist organization. Earlier this year, a flare-up in fighting between the group and the Philippine military produced tens of thousands of refugees. But since a cease-fire began this summer, the two sides are planning peace talks. A Philippine army general told us, “We recognize that poverty is the ultimate cause of insurgency.”

With that in mind, we visited the recently pacified outlying island of Basilan, albeit with six soldiers escorting us. There, a U.S. State Department program addresses some of the 40,000-plus members of an older guerrilla group, the Moro National Liberation Front. The aim is to transform some of them into seaweed farmers. At a seaside village, we embarked in small boats to inspect the seaweed crops. Eventually, as we bobbed along on tourist-perfect seas, a new feeling began to replace seasickness. It was hope.