arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

While the West anxiously hopes Islamic terrorism won't escalate in Southeast Asia, a new report suggests that such militancy has long been stoked by one force that the United States now wants to extinguish it - Indonesia's military.

"If you scratch any radical Islamic group in Indonesia, you will find some security forces involvement," Sidney Jones, country director for the International Crisis Group, said Monday.

The Brussels-based think tank said that a group known as Jemaah Islamiyah - accused of trying to carve out an Islamic state in Southeast Asia - was set up by Indonesian military intelligence in the 1970s in an effort to compromise opponents of then-dictator Suharto.

The report warned that efforts by governments to crack down on the Jemaah Islamiyah by fabricating evidence or using other illegal means could backfire and risks turning its members into national heroes. The document traces the history of Jemaah Islamiyah, which authorities in Malaysia and Singapore claim has links to al-Qaida. The group is also accused of plotting to bomb U.S. targets in Singapore. Dozens of alleged members have been arrested in Malaysia and Singapore.

The timing of the report, which raises serious questions about the military, could embarrass the United States, which has been trying to restore military-to-military ties with Indonesia since President Bush took office last year. Relations were severed after Indonesian troops laid waste to East Timor in 1999 and committed massive human rights violations.

Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Jakarta earlier this month and announced a new $50 million program to assist the security forces in the anti-terrorism struggle. Powell also signed an agreement with ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations security forum, aimed at boosting U.S. efforts to fight terrorism in the region. This week, Pacific fleet commander Adm. Thomas B. Fargo is due in Jakarta.

Jemaah Islamiyah has its roots in the Darul Islam rebellion in Indonesia in the 1940s and 50s which sought to transform the nascent nation into an Islamic state, said the report. The religious uprising sparked a bloody war against republican authorities before collapsing in the early 1960s.

In 1966, Gen. Suharto seized power in Indonesia amid an army-organized massacre of 500,000 leftists.

By the 1970s, Suharto was eager to give his dictatorship a veneer of legitimacy, and the regime set up a secular and a religious party to act as the loyal opposition to the ruling Golkar Party.

Still, Suharto's cronies were concerned about the possible popular appeal of the opposition parties and set about to discredit them, said the ICG report.

Intelligence chief Gen. Ali Murtopo used his agents to persuade former Darul Islam members to reactivate themselves, ostensibly to prevent communist infiltration. When they did so in 1977, the security forces arrested 185 activists and accused them of seeking to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state.

The name Jemaah Islamiyah first surfaced in court documents as the organization the activists thought they were setting up at Murtopo's behest, the report said.

Most of them were released in the 1980s, and some - radicalized by their experience in prison - attempted to fight the dictatorship. These included Abu Bakar Bashir, a Muslim cleric now accused by Singapore of being Jemaah Islamiyah's ringleader.

Jones said that senior Indonesian military officials retained close ties to the group at least through the 1980s.

"These links need further investigation," she said.

The Bush administration's moves to renew military ties came despite criticisms from Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who sponsored the law ending military ties, and Robert Gelbard, who served as U.S. ambassador here until last year. Both men claim the army remains the main obstacle to democratic reform in Indonesia.

With Suharto's overthrow in 1998 after massive pro-democracy protests, the brutal repression of political rivals that characterized his dictatorship ceased.

But Jones warned that Jakarta was now under pressure from Washington to re-institute arbitrary measures against Bashir and his followers.

"Inside Indonesia, there is very little hard evidence of any direct engagement (by Jemaah Islamiyah) in criminal activities," Jones said in an interview. "There is a big leap between having communication with people who know other people who may have had links to al-Qaida, and planning actual attacks."