With a peppercorn goatee, oversized glasses and clad in white ankle-length robes and Islamic cap, Abu Bakar Ba’aysir, leader of Jemaah Islamiyah looks decidedly unthreatening.
But when the 64-year-old Islamic religious leader and principal gets on to the subjects of Islam and the United States, he becomes transformed into the fiery, fanatical and anti-establishment Muslim preacher he has been for more than 30 years.
Ba’aysir’s theory is simple. He is convinced the US wants to dominate the world and is looking for a scapegoat to give it the excuse to do so.
”It is the United States and not Islam that is responsible for the terror in the world today,” he told The Guardian newspaper in a telephone interview.
”They want to blame us Muslims for attacks like [last Saturday’s car bomb] in Bali, but we had nothing to do with it.
”Why would we want to do something like that? It is the United States and its allies that have a strong motive. They want to show Indonesia is full of terrorists and so gain sympathy for their attack on Iraq.”
In contrast, Ba’aysir said, his school, the al-Mukmin Koranic Boarding School on Java, and parallel organisation, the Indonesian Mojahedin Council, are committed to peaceful methods to achieve his goal, namely turning Indonesia and then the rest of the region into Islamic states.
”We do not have guns,” he said. ”We do not have bombs. We only have the power of prayer and faith in the prophet Mohammed.”
It is undoubtedly extreme and Ba’aysir is not shy about admitting to his radical past. As a youth he was a member of various Islamic groups and in 1985 he was convicted of violating Indonesia’s state ideology but fled to Malaysia before he could be detained. He stayed there for 15 years until Suharto, Indonesia’s dictator, fell.
Since returning he has focused on the boarding school, which extols the virtues of jihad, or holy war, and also has a paramilitary unit.
Fanatical this certainly is, but is it terrorism? Malaysia, the Philippines and now Australia and the US believe so. They regard him as the most dangerous man in South-East Asia; the alleged founder and spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, which many believe to be linked to al-Qaida. The Mojahedin Council is merely a convenient bluff.
Singapore and Malaysia have detained dozens of radical Muslims in the past year and, as Singapore’s Senior Minister, Lee Kwan Yew, said in May, both governments have no doubt the detainees were helping al-Qaida to plan terrorist strikes in the region.
But they have produced no convincing evidence linking Ba’aysir to the detained suspects, to any terrorist plots or to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
More damning evidence against Ba’aysir emerged last month when Time magazine published leaked CIA reports detailing the confessions of Omar al-Farouq, an alleged senior al-Qaida operative detained in Indonesia in June and deported to the US base in Afghanistan.
He reportedly said Ba’aysir was a key figure in his aborted plot to attack US embassies across South-East Asia last month.
Ba’aysir is denying all the charges and on Wednesday starting the process of suing Time for libel. ”It is all lies,” he said. ”They are making up everything. It is a big conspiracy.”
Ba’aysir has powerful supporters in the Islamic political parties that is forcing the authorities to tread carefully. But some independent analysts are also warning Jakarta, Canberra and Washington that they could find their unsubstantiated accusations against Ba’aysir being behind the Bali bomb boomeranging.
Said Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group: ”But if it’s just speculation against Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Bakar Ba’aysir then it’s reminding me of the Oklahoma bombing in 1995 where Middle East radicals were blamed initially [and the culprit turned out to be American].” — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002