Abu Bakar Bashir and Hambali, Indonesia's masters of war

One is the outspoken voice of militant Islam in Indonesia, the other is described as the real terrorist mastermind in the region. ANDREW LAXON and agencies profile Abu Bakar Bashir and Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali.

ABU BAKAR BASHIR

Abu Bakar Bashir is 64 years old, with white hair, gold-rimmed glasses and a white skullcap.

A grandfatherly figure, he runs an Islamic boarding school in Ngruki, south of the historic Javanese city of Solo, where the boys in green blazers look like students at a well-run private school in New Zealand.

The school seems similar to hundreds of others in Indonesia - except that one old boy, Fathur Rothman al-Ghozi, has been charged with a bomb attack in Manila which killed 22 people and injured about 100 others.

And its headmaster has been identified by the United States and Southeast Asian Governments as the leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, the group suspected of killing 183 people in last weekend's Bali bombings.

Bashir denies leading Jemaah Islamiyah or being responsible for the Bali bombings. He claimed at a press conference on Sunday that the United States engineered the explosions to bolster its claims that a terrorist network is active in Indonesia.

But many police, officials and diplomats in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines - and increasingly Indonesia - have no doubt that Bashir is actively involved in terrorism. Their only reservation is whether he is the movement's true leader or is simply the figurehead for his colleague, Hambali.

Police in several countries say Jemaah Islamiyah hosted two September 11 hijackers in January 2000 and bankrolled Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged planner of the attacks, who is now in American custody.

Singaporean authorities, who are holding 35 alleged Jemaah Islamiyah members accused of planning to blow up the US Embassy in Singapore, say several of the men have named Bashir as their leader. The Singaporean Government says Bashir was the "controlling figure" behind the plot.

Indonesian police suspect that Bashir may also be linked to a car bomb which destroyed the Philippine ambassador's residence, killing two people, in August 2000.

At the time the blast was blamed on local sympathisers of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which is fighting to establish an Islamic state in the southern Philippines. But al-Ghozi's arrest could lead back to his old schoolteacher.

Bashir openly supports Osama bin Laden. In January he praised the al Qaeda leader as "a true Muslim fighter" and called the US "the real terrorist". He frequently preaches the glory of dying as an Islamic martyr and his school, described as a training ground for young terrorists, teachers students the spirit of jihad, or holy war.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, Bashir grew up in a poor family. His formal education stopped when he dropped out of sharia law school to preach to the masses.

In the 1960s, he ran pirate radio stations broadcasting the call to jihad across central Java. He established his school in 1971.

He was jailed from 1978 to 1982 for trying to start an Islamic militia, and was convicted again soon after his release for subversive political activity. He fled with his closest collaborator, Abdullah Sungkar, to escape prison.

In their years in exile, the two men joined others to form a vision for an Islamic state in Southeast Asia. Sometimes they referred to themselves as Jemaah Islamiyah, which means Islamic Group.

The group, headed by Sungkar, took its inspiration from the Darul Islam, a violent movement that tried to establish an Islamic state on Java before it was crushed by nationalist soldiers in the early 1950s.

On their return home, they helped create the Indonesian Mujahideen Council (MMI), an umbrella group for organisations wanting to make Indonesia an Islamic state. When Sungkar died, Bashir became the movement's head.

One of the terrorism suspects now in Malaysian custody, Mohammad Iqbal Rahman, is a board member of MMI.

Western countries have been frustrated by Indonesia's reluctance to move against Bashir, despite what they regard as mounting evidence against him.

The problem is largely political. Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, a secular nationalist, faces opposition from Islamic fundamentalists, who revere Bashir because of his outspoken stand against the United States. If Megawati moves against him she may become vulnerable to attacks from politicians such as Vice-President Hamzah Haz, leader of the largest Muslim party.

This week Haz echoed Bashir's line, repeating his earlier statements that the elderly Muslim cleric had "never been involved in terrorism" and saying, like Bashir, that the Bali attack was politically "engineered".

But local politics may be changing after the Bali bombings.

Early yesterday Defence Minister Matori Abdul Djalil accused "al Qaeda with the cooperation of local terrorists" for the attack.

Parliament's speaker, Akbar Tandjung, also urged the Government to speed up work on anti-terrorism legislation, which would enable police to arrest suspected Jemaah Islamiyah members as Indonesia's neighbours have done.

RIDUAN ISAMUDDIN


In April this year an obscure Indonesian peasant named Riduan Isamuddin, also known as Hambali, joined George W. Bush, Bill Gates and other symbols of Western power and influence by being featured on the cover of Time magazine.

The story was not flattering, but it could turn out to be prophetic. Time described Hambali as a dangerous terrorist mastermind wanted by the US and four Asian Governments.

It said he had been linked to bank robberies and a political assassination in Malaysia and to bombings that killed scores in Indonesia and the Philippines.

Other plans had not come to fruition, but came frighteningly close.

They included an abortive 1995 scheme to plant bombs on 12 American airliners and a plan to detonate seven huge car-bombs in Singapore this year.

The magazine said Hambali - who it described as the chief Southeast Asian representative and logistical co-ordinator for al Qaeda - organised travel itineraries, accommodation and welcome dinners for two of the September 11 hijackers and a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole.

He also met Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, now in a Virginia jail.

In the same month the Christian Science Monitor featured Hambali, with his close colleague Abu Bakar Bashir, as one of three militant Muslim clerics - all exiled during the Suharto years - building a terror network with al Qaeda assistance.

Both articles reached the same conclusion. Bashir was the front man for Jemaah Islamiyah, the terrorist group that acts as al Qaeda's Southeast Asian wing and is the prime suspect for the weekend's atrocity in Bali.

But the real brains behind the operation was Hambali, who planned and executed the operations with Bashir's knowledge and remains out of investigators' reach.

"We worry about him all the time," a senior US official in the region told Time. "It's what keeps us awake at night."

And a few days before the Bali bombings, an intelligence official told the Monitor: "He's the linchpin. If I could interrogate only one guy, Hambali would be the one I'd pick."

Investigators say Hambali is al Qaeda's main link with Jemaah Islamiyah. He planned the failed attempt to truck-bomb the US embassy and other targets in Singapore last year and was the controlling figure behind a bomb attack that killed 22 people in Manila on New Year's Eve 2000.

Indonesian police say he organised a series of synchronised church bombings on Christmas Eve in 2000, timed to explode from 9pm as thousands arrived for services.

Within half an hour, 18 people were dead and 50 injured.

Terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna said then that the explosions suggested al Qaeda involvement.

"Every terrorist group has what is called a signature," he said. "If you look at this particular operation, it had the signature of al Qaeda - multiple, simultaneous bombings with mass casualties."

Gunaratna, a research fellow at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, has since described the Bali bombings, which followed the same procedure, as an al Qaeda attack.

Hambali grew up under the oppression of the Suharto dictatorship, when even mild displays of Islamic fervour were ruthlessly suppressed. As a devout young man, he deeply resented this.

After working in Malaysia for three years, he travelled to Afghanistan, where he met Osama bin Laden and returned transformed into a fiery advocate of bin Laden's Wahhabi brand of Islam, which preaches armed struggle as the only way to restore the pure faith.

He began working with Bashir towards the goal of an Islamic super-state across Southeast Asia and the building of a regional terrorist network supported by al Qaeda to achieve this goal.

Time says many of Hambali's schemes were launched from a humble wooden shack with a concrete floor in the village of Sungei Manggis, where Hambali and his Chinese Malaysian wife, Noralwizah Lee, lived on US$25 ($52.40) a month for 10 years.

At first he tried to make a living hawking Arabic and Indonesian patent medicines. Later he turned to selling kebabs from a pushcart outside the main mosque.

Hambali was also closely involved in the bombing of a Philippine Airlines plane in December 1994 which killed a Japanese businessman.

Police phone taps showed frequent calls from his business office in Malaysia to the Manila office of Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, whose charitable organisation was allegedly a front for al Qaeda funding.


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Feature: Bali bomb blast

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