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Vaudine England

Deep-rooted insurgencies and a history of military and state terrorism explain current Southeast Asian security concerns far better than the Bush administration's focus on the al-Qaeda network, veteran Asia-watchers say.

The Bali bombing, unrest in southern Thailand and the Philippines' Muslim rebellion show terror stems from local causes, not international conspiracy.

Fresh enunciation of this important analysis came last week in Bangkok, with a talk entitled 'State Terrorism/Private Terrorism', delivered by Southeast Asian studies expert Benedict Anderson, of Cornell University in the US.

He said that an internationally backed investigation of the October 12 Bali attacks had still failed to find any link between al-Qaeda and the Indonesian and Malaysian suspects in detention.

'The Balinese police general heading the Indonesian state investigation - widely respected for his brains, honesty and track record - has steadily resisted immense external pressure to endorse the Washington-Canberra view,' said Professor Anderson.

Fresh from a trip to Indonesia, he said that 'never in private conversation, and only rarely in the public press, did anyone accept the Washington doctrine -  that the bombing in Bali was centrally organised by a worldwide conspiracy operating under the aegis of al-Qaeda'.

These signs of resistance to an imposed theory have direct policy implications, Professor Anderson and others argue.

Instead of letting Washington dictate the terms of the terrorism discourse, why not look honestly at where Southeast Asia's home-grown terrors lie? Regional diplomacy since the September 11 attacks has focused on signing many US-backed anti-terrorism pacts. But it has chosen to ignore the real causes of terrorism for which Asian governments might be held accountable.

A first step would be the acknowledgement that the roots of the recent terrorism lie in decades of Muslim and separatist rebellion in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

'The Bali bombing is an aspect of domestic, not international politics, and behind it lie military groups with long experience in black operations, hi-tech violence and the manipulative use of affiliated civilians,' said Professor Anderson.

'The Bali bombing assumes importance mainly because white people were killed [as well as] brown, and because the US believes that its source lies in the international domain, not the local.'

Meanwhile, the world's ability to forget local detail has allowed decades of killing to take place in the Maluku islands, Kalimantan, Aceh, East Timor and elsewhere.

Coupled with vast ignorance about the roots of rebellion in poverty, and political manipulation - fed by US myopia and a pliant media - this bias leads observers to miss the point about the recent violence: it is no longer possible to draw a firm line between the terrorism of Muslim or other civilians and state terrorism, said Professor Anderson.

Long-standing links between the state and terror, which have sustained several Asian leaders in power, are seen as too difficult to tackle. Far easier, some politicians appear to be saying, is to follow Washington's line once more. At the same time, a kind of collective amnesia appears to have overtaken the region, in which earlier insurgencies are forgotten in the rush for economic growth.

This is the concern of many Asia-watchers, who see the rising hysteria about al-Qaeda and easy acceptance of the with-us-or-against-us ideology of the Bush administration.

They warn that violence in Southeast Asia has never followed the neat patterns imposed by outsiders. Instead of a clear delineation between 'freedom-loving people' and 'evil-doers', there are patterns of privatised terror often backed by organs of state.

Taking Bali as an example, Professor Anderson noted that those arrested who are allegedly attached to the regional Jemaah Islamiah network admit to an extremism which goes back to the Darul Islam rebellions of the 1940s.

'In other words, there is a tradition of Muslim 'extremism' which dates back to when Osama bin Laden had not yet been born,' he said.

In addition, Indonesia 'has a long history of murky affiliation between sections of the military and violent Muslim groups', he said.

In the anti-communist massacres that accompanied Suharto's rise to power in 1965-66, Muslim youths, who were armed, advised and steered by the military high command, played a key role. When the shadowy Komando Jihad group appeared in the 1970s, it was denounced repeatedly as a dangerous and murderous enemy of the state.

'It eventually transpired that most of these people had been recruited from prison by General Ali Murtopo, Suharto's special assistant for covert operations,' said Professor Anderson.

By the 1990s, when Suharto decided to favour Muslims instead of Catholics in his military, 'favour was shown to various 'Muslim' officers, including his own son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, who began to cultivate relations with various small extremist Muslim groups', he said.

A key point is that some of these groups, like Jemaah Islamiah, are genuinely ideological, while others are mercenary gangsters often funded by senior military officers.

Nor is this pattern of 'privatised' extremism confined to Muslim groups - witness the military-backed militia in East Timor and several factions in the Free Aceh Movement, which were armed by the local military for business and political reasons.

The story is no different in the Philippines, which 'has a 60-year-old flourishing tradition of so-called private armies employed by politicians for local political and business purposes', said Professor Anderson.

Successive Philippine presidents have 'made extensive use of deniable civilian terrorists against communist and Muslim rebels'.

'It is widely believed that the kidnappings of wealthy Chinese in Manila and the prevalence of death squads have their source in senior members of the police and the military, using their men out of uniform,' he said. 'The same pattern was evident in Thailand in the turbulent 1970s.

'In all these cases, what is striking is the use of off-duty state personnel and criminal or semi-criminal civilian or private terrorists, so that the line between private and state terrorism is quite hard to draw.'

Vaudine England is the Post's regional correspondent



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