US claims of terror plots stir up hostility
Claims from Singapore and US intelligence groups about alleged Muslim terror plots in Indonesia are again being greeted with increasing scepticism and hostility in Jakarta.
Reports that Muslim radicals were planning to assassinate Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri have been laughed off in some Jakarta circles.
Moderate Muslim leaders say the claims of a CIA intelligence report are seen as provocative and misleading 'propaganda tricks'.
'If Indonesia is continuously bothered, certain parties, including moderate elements, may take adverse actions against the US,' said Hasyim Muzadi, of the Nahdlatul Ulama moderate Muslim group. 'We greatly deplore these moves because they amount to US interference [in Indonesia's domestic affairs].'
Warnings by Western embassies of security threats to their nationals in central Java were part of the propaganda, he said.
Time magazine, citing the CIA, said an alleged al-Qaeda senior operative, Omar al-Faruq, admitted planning to kill Ms Megawati in May 1999 when she was running for the presidency.
But far from convincing readers of the alleged al-Qaeda threat in their midst, Indonesian political and Islamic figures see each new revelation of alleged terrorism as a ploy by the United States to put Jakarta on the defensive and to surrender alleged militants to Singapore and US interrogators.
'I don't believe it. She was not a controversial figure,' said Ahmad Syafii Maarif, the head of Muhammadiyah, the other mass moderate Islamic organisation. 'I'm afraid it is an attempt to divide Indonesia.' He said the United States was exaggerating its war on terrorism because it lacked self-confidence.
The debate provides grist to the nationalist mill in Indonesia, playing into long-standing fears of how the West only wants to use Indonesia or break up the nation for its own purposes.
Similar passions were aroused by the international diplomacy and later armed intervention surrounding the route to independence of East Timor.
The Time report, and reports from the Singapore government surrounding last week's arrests of 21 alleged militants, are pinned on 'regional intelligence reports' and interrogations of suspects under unspecified conditions, forms of sourcing that conspiracy theorists in Indonesia find easy to discount.
Even Singapore's details of why it carried out the latest arrests include the admission: 'None of these efforts is known to have led to a fully developed or finalised plan for attack.'
Yet its arrests bring to more than 100 the number of alleged militants arrested in Malaysia and Singapore in a year, most held without charge under draconian internal security laws.
US intelligence reports assert these figures and many more in Indonesia are part of a network they call Jemaah Islamiyah, which they also claim is linked to al-Qaeda.
One young Malaysian, Taufik bin Abdul Halim, who lost a leg in a failed bomb attempt in central Jakarta last year, is also now accused of being part of the Megawati assassination plot.
He made no such claim at the time, saying his goal was to hit Christian churches as a continuation of the anti-Christian campaign in Indonesia's Maluku islands - a vicious four-year domestic war that has no proven link with al-Qaeda.
At the weekend he described any attack on Ms Megawati as 'unimaginable'.'How could I have a target as high as that?' he told the Koran Tempo newspaper.
Results of interrogation of suspects such as al-Faruq are no more convincing to many in Indonesia. Human rights lawyer Munir said even if al-Faruq had said he and his colleagues were plotting to kill Ms Megawati, most of his information would be of dubious quality.
