Why Terrorists Quit

The Disengagement of Indonesian Jihadists

Julie Chernov Hwang

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501710834
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Terrorismus

Why do hard-line terrorists decide to leave their organizations and quit the world of terror and destruction? This is the question for which Julie Chernov Hwang seeks answers in Why Terrorists Quit.

Over the course of six years Chernov Hwang conducted more than one hundred interviews with current and former leaders and followers of radical Islamist groups in Indonesia. Using what she learned from these radicals she examines the reasons they rejected physical force and extremist ideology, slowly moving away from, or in some cases completely leaving, groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah, Mujahidin KOMPAK, Ring Banten, Laskar Jihad, and Tanah Runtuh. Why Terrorists Quit considers the impact of various public initiatives designed to encourage radicals to disengage, and follows the lives of five radicals from the various groups, seeking to establish trends, ideas, and reasons for why radicals might eschew violence or quit terrorism.

Chernov Hwang has, with this book, provided a clear picture of why Indonesians disengage from jihadist groups, what the state can do to help them reintegrate into nonterrorist society, and how what happens in Indonesia can be more widely applied beyond the archipelago.

1

The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of Jemaah Islamiyah

The purpose of this chapter is to chart the rise, retrenchment, and resurgence of Jemaah Islamiyah. In doing so, however, it will be necessary to address JI as part of a long-standing Indonesian fringe that imagined Indonesia as an Islamic state and was willing to use violence to make that a reality. At its height prior to the first Bali bombing in 2002, it had a membership of close to two thousand;¹ by 2010, those numbers were estimated to have fallen to two hundred.² By 2014, according to Indonesian police estimates derived from interrogations, its membership had climbed back to the pre-Bali bombing levels.³ It is important to note at the outset of this chapter that Jemaah Islamiyah was never united by a common view of the conditions under which violence is permissible. Instead, it is more apropos to view JI as a network that splintered off from a preexisting terrorist group, only to have more radical factions splinter off from it. Moreover, it was and is also part of a larger community of jihadist groups within Indonesia. This chapter will touch on this broader community as well.

In order to address Jemaah Islamiyah’s origins, we must first take a few pages to contextualize JI as a spinoff of Darul Islam. JI’s founders came from Darul Islam. Those who went to fight in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War did so as part of Darul Islam. Thus, we must take the time to understand those aspects of Darul Islam that laid the foundation for the emergence of JI.

Darul Islam is the name given to a series of rebellions in the provinces of Aceh, West Java, and South Sulawesi that sought to establish an Islamic state in Indonesia in the decades immediately following independence. Darul Islam disagreed with what it perceived as the secular basis of the nation that arose with the promulgation of the national ideology known as Pancasila.⁴ At its height in the late 1950s, Darul Islam controlled or partially controlled swaths of villages in West Java and governed them according to its understanding of Islamic law. However, the revolt ultimately failed because Darul Islam lacked the necessary financial resources, which led its members to resort to armed robberies, looting, and various taxes levied on the villages it controlled, in order to fund its operations.⁵ These activities alienated the public in those villages, which offered the government a means of entry by providing food and medical care in areas impacted by war.⁶ The public backlash and government tactics would eventually lead to the rebel group’s temporary implosion. When Darul Islam leader Sekarmadji Maridjan Kartosuwirjo was captured in 1962, and thirty-two of his top lieutenants renounced their struggle and pledged loyalty to the state in return for amnesty, Darul Islam went quiet.⁷

Less than a decade later, in 1971, Indonesian intelligence (BAKIN) funded a Darul Islam reunion, after several Darul Islam leaders professed privately that they would throw their support behind the dictator Suharto’s personal political party, Golkar.⁸ While Darul Islam had ceased to function as a movement during this decade, it continued to exist as a community bound by friendships, marriages, and familial ties. Propelled by the idea of this community voting in a bloc for Golkar and thus siphoning off votes from its Islamist rival, the United Development Party (PPP), BAKIN permitted the reunion to go forward. It was no surprise that on the sidelines of the official speeches, these supporters held discussions about reviving the old networks, and at the subsequent Mahoni meeting, they chose new leaders.⁹ The leadership took a long-term vision of their struggle, believing that while Darul Islam should wage jihad to bring about an Islamic state, it was necessary to first recruit more members and then accumulate sufficient resources and training to bring it about.

The Recruitment Drive

By 1975, Darul Islam had begun a recruitment drive, targeting youths and Muslim activists outside the movement.¹⁰ As part of this effort, Darul Islam’s leaders reformulated the movement’s doctrines to emphasize tauhid (the divine oneness of God) and its political implications for governance. In doing so, they drew on Islamic texts from outside Indonesia, notably the work of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistan’s Maulana Mawdudi, and Syed Qutb. This emphasis on tauhid enabled Darul Islam to appeal to modernist Muslims,¹¹ for whom the concept is particularly resonant and who were struggling to maintain a political voice in Suharto’s “New Order” regime. From 1967 onward, the Suharto regime took a series of steps that alienated Muslim modernists in particular. First, the regime refused to relegalize Masyumi,¹² the modernist Islamist party of the independence era that advocated most vociferously for both an Islamic state and adherence to democratic practices. Second, in 1973, the regime forced the amalgamation of the four Islamic parties, Parmusi, Nahdlatul Ulama, the Islamic Educational Movement (Perti), and the Indonesian Islamic Union Party (PSII), into one political party, thus eliminating the ability of the modernists to claim political space for their own agenda. That same year, Muslim–government relations would worsen after the People’s Consultative Assembly, the upper legislative house, proposed two controversial regulations. The first would have put traditional Javanese beliefs on par with Islam and other established religions. The second would have standardized regulations on marriage and divorce by curtailing polygamy and removing marriage and divorce from the purview of Islamic courts.¹³ Islamists took both these regulations as a gross insult, but the position of the regime had been duly conveyed. Muslims seeking the implementation of Islamic law could no longer work for that goal within the political system; but Darul Islam’s ideology and activities enabled them to work outside the system.

The majority of recruits from that period came from the modernist organizations: from Muhammadiyah; the Indonesian Islamic Students (Pelajar Islam Indonesia, or PII); the Islamic Youth Movement (Gerakan Pemuda Indonesia, or GPI); and the Indonesian Islamic Dakwah Council (Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia, or DDII).¹⁴ Two notable recruits during this period would go on to become Jemaah Islamiyah’s founders, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir and Abdullah Sungkar. It is notable that both Sungkar and Ba’asyir had been active in GPI, perhaps indicating that they might have joined a vital, active Masyumi, rather than a clandestine Darul Islam, had such an outlet been available.

With a large influx of new members, Darul Islam’s leaders discussed commencing a jihad against the government. In 1976 and 1977, the Medan branch, under the leadership of Gaos Taufik, formed a jihad organization, which carried out various acts of terror specifically targeting churches and entertainment venues. Another Darul Islam member, “Warman,” and a group of his associates also embarked on a campaign of fai— robbing “unbelievers” to fund the group’s activities.¹⁵ In the aftermath of the bombings and robberies, the perhaps inevitable crackdown ensued. It had become clear to officials in BAKIN that they had lost control of Darul Islam.¹⁶

In the 1980s, the Suharto regime’s approach to political Islam grew even more hostile. The 1985 Pancasila as Azas Tunggal law required all parties to take the national ideology of Pancasila as their sole foundation. This meant that the United Development Party (PPP), the Islamist competitor to Suharto’s Golkar party, was forced to remove all references to Islam from its charter and its symbols. The ruling was then extended to NGOs, mass organizations, and social movements. Some groups split over the issue, most notably the Indonesian Students Association (HMI), while others either acquiesced to the law or went underground. Muslims criticized the increasing appropriation of Pancasila by the regime for its own purposes. One particular flashpoint was the Tanjung Priok massacre, where police opened fire on Muslims protesting the desecration of an antigovernment mosque by a police officer. It was in this environment that Darul Islam adopted the usroh structure.

Amid the crackdown, as early as 1981, Darul Islam attempted to adapt to the newly restrictive environment by adopting the cell structure pioneered by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. They formed small usroh, of ten to fifteen members each, all of whom were dedicated to living according to Islamic law.¹⁷ This new method of organizing was secretive and more suited to a repressive political environment that was hostile to political Islam. It was also particularly useful at a time when much of the Darul Islam leadership was in prison, for the usroh structure did not require strong central authority. According to the International Crisis Group,

the usroh transformed Darul Islam and gave it new energy and a sense of purpose. To the young activists, expanding the usroh movement was not just a religious activity. It was a means toward the end of overthrowing the [Suharto] government and establishing an Islamic state, and as the number of recruits increased, that goal seemed more reasonable.¹⁸

Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir employed the usroh organizing method and used it as a means of recruiting and training new members.¹⁹ Sungkar and Ba’asyir also founded the al Mu’mim boarding school in the village of Ngruki, near Solo, and started a radio program criticizing the government. The two leaders were in and out of prison throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s for their activities. In 1985, the Indonesian Supreme Court prepared to rule against Sungkar and Ba’asyir in a long-standing subversion case; the two decided to flee. After traveling to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, they settled in Malaysia with a handful of followers and maintained a system of couriers who would go back and forth to Indonesia.²⁰

Becoming Mujahidin: Darul Islam Goes to the Afghan Front

With the escalation of the Soviet-Afghan War, Abdullah Sung-kar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir became the conduit for recruits who wanted to fight in the jihad against the Soviets. During their travels to Pakistan, the two men built a relationship with Abdul Rasul Sayaaf; he agreed to take on their recruits, sending them for training first at his camp, Harby Pohantum Mujahidin Afghanistan al Ittihad al Islamy, and later at As Sadaah. In total, Ba’asyir and Sungkar would send ten batches of recruits between 1985 and 1991. The Indonesian government contends that 360 Indonesians were sent to train in Pakistan and Afghanistan.²¹ Recruits were drawn from several sources: their usroh networks, Ngruki alumni, individuals from Darul Islam families, Darul Islam members outside their usroh, and personal contacts.²² Over their tours, the fighters were taught field engineering, logistics, communications, map reading, weapons, basic infantry tactics, and explosives and bomb making. They also came into contact with Islamist fighters from other regions. Imam Samudra, one of the masterminds of the first Bali bombing, explains the lure of the camps:

I did target practice with Kalashnikovs, M16s, handgun shooting, anti-tank grenade practice, grenade throwing and making bombs…. In Afghanistan, I met and was exposed to Islamic movements from all sorts of countries…. I met with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamic Group, the Egyptian Jihad Group and so on, they were all in Afghanistan.²³

The shared experience of training and living in Afghanistan bonded the Darul Islam members who participated, even though few took part in actual fighting at the front. The experience also exposed them to jihadi-Salafi ideology, notably its points on jihad. According to Solahudin, author of The Roots of Terrorism in Indonesia,

In the understanding of Kartosuwirjo, Darul Islam’s founder, jihad did not always mean qital or war. Jihad had a wider meaning: namely, all genuine efforts to do good deeds that accorded with Islam’s teaching….

In Afghanistan, Darul Islam cadres were taught that the correct understanding of jihad was war [qital]. They were also taught different categories of jihad. There was offensive jihad, which was fard al-kifaya—that is, a collective rather than an individual obligation, meaning that as long as the goals could be achieved with a particular number of fighters, it was not obligatory for each and every Muslim to join in. And there was defensive jihad, which was fard al-ain—obligatory for all Muslims. Defensive jihad was necessary when unbelievers attacked or occupied Muslim lands.²⁴

The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 felt like vindication for the Darul Islam jihadists; in their view, they had defeated a superpower.

Participation in the Soviet-Afghan War would have several net benefits for the group that would become JI. First, the Afghan veterans who would go on to form the core of JI were highly trained fighters bonded by their shared experiences and shared jihadi-Salafi worldview. Second, the relationships they built in the camps enabled them to form ties to other radical Islamist groups in Indonesia who also had Afghan veterans as founding members, as well as other jihadi-Salafi grou...