Why Indonesia banned ISIS

New Mandala
New perspectives on Southeast Asia
http://www.newmandala.org
Why Indonesia banned ISIS
Like in all democracies, the proscription of terrorist groups in Indonesia is a politically
delicate and legally ambiguous process. It requires the government to articulate convincing
justifications for a ban, as well as provide adequate legal mechanisms for its
implementation. An examination of both suggests that when Indonesia banned ISIS in
August 2014, it did so for much more complex reasons than fear of violent terrorism.
When ISIS captured large swathes of territory in Syria and northern Iraq and images of shocking
violence made news around the world, the Indonesian public, and the government, remained
largely pre-occupied with its most fiercely contested presidential election campaign in a decade.
Despite signs throughout the first half of 2014 that Indonesia would eventually be forced to address
the ISIS threat, the government and the public remained relatively uninterested. Back in March,
even a public demonstration by ISIS supporters at the Hotel Indonesia roundabout in central
Jakarta drew neither the media’s nor the government’s attention. It took the appearance of a
1/5
New Mandala
New perspectives on Southeast Asia
http://www.newmandala.org
video on Youtube, titled ‘Join the Ranks’, in which an Indonesian ISIS fighter in Syria urged fellow
Indonesians to join ISIS, to sharply focus the government’s attention on the growing ISIS-threat to
Indonesia.
On the face of it, the video should not have been a shock to officials or the public. It had been
widely known that some elements of Indonesia’s Islamist community supported the various
factions engaged in the anti-Assad insurgency that had been raging in Syria for years, and that at
least 50 Indonesians had traveled to the region to take up arms. Jamaah Islamiyyah (JI), the group
responsible for the Bali bombings, has in recent years renounced violence in Indonesia, but the
closely allied organisation HASI have since 2012 channeled humanitarian volunteers and financial
aid to the region. When ISIS split officially from the Al-Qaida aligned Jabat Al-Nusra (JN) in
February 2014, Indonesian Islamists were similarly divided, breaking into pro-JN and pro-ISIS
camps. While JI largely supported JN, JI’s former spiritual leader, Abu Bakar Ba'asyir made
headlines from prison with a pledge of allegiance to ISIS. His two sons, meanwhile, split with their
father as did many in Ba'asyir's organisation Jamaah Ansarut Tauhidand, and joined a new rival
organisation, Jamaah Ansharasy Syariat. Many other organisations, such as Majelis Mujahidin
Indonesia (MMI) vehemently reject ISIS.
Despite remaining indifferent for months to these increasingly complex – and dangerous – links
between the conflict in Syria and Iraq and Indonesia’s Islamist community, within days of the video
making headlines, pressure mounted on Minister for Communication and Information Tifatul
Sembiring to block the video, and on the government to take firm action against the apparent
growth of ISIS support in Indonesia. On 4 August the government’s most senior officials fronted
the media and announced that henceforward ISIS is “banned” in Indonesia.
There are two important points to note about the announced ban. First, while local and international
media reports of the announcement framed it as an unequivocal “ban”, it has become clear over
subsequent weeks that it amounted to little more than a political statement. While the seniority of
the ministers present at the announcement - the line-up included including Coordinating Minister for
Political, Legal and Security Affairs, Djoko Suyanto, Head of the Military, General Moeldoko,
National Police Chief General Sutarman, Chief of the National Intelligence Agency (BIN) Marciano
Norman, and Minister of Religious Affairs, Lukman Hakim Syaifuddin - succeeded in placating the
Indonesian public as well as Western observers, the lack of a clear legal framework for law
enforcement agencies and the judiciary means than in practice, uncertainty remained over what
legal sanctions Indonesian supporters of ISIS would face.
Second, Indonesia arguably has more experience with the threat posed by the return of its
nationals from foreign wars than most other countries. During the 1990s, Indonesians who returned
from Afghanistan after joining the fight against the Soviet Union, were instrumental in providing the
ideological inspiration and organisational know-how for a generation of jihadists in Southeast Asia,
2/5
New Mandala
New perspectives on Southeast Asia
http://www.newmandala.org
culminating in a series of mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Indonesia, including the Bali bombings.
The threat that Indonesians with battlefield experience in Syria and Iraq would pose upon their
return to Indonesia was clear to experts. But instead of justifying the ISIS-ban based on the threat
posed by returning fighters, such as those that had appeared in the video, statements during the
announcement emphasised ISIS’s ideological incompatibility with Indonesia’s national ideology of
Pancasila. For example, Djoko Suyanto stated that ‘the government rejects and bans the
teachings of ISIS [...] ISIS is not in line with state ideology’. The most in-depth analysis of ISIS in
Indonesia, a September 2014 report by IPAC, concluded that
it was not that IS was more violent or more of a security risk than earlier movements,
although both may well be true; it was that it constituted a direct challenge to national
loyalty that so alarmed officials.
But focusing on the threat posed by ISIS’s ideology, rather than its advocacy of violence, seems
contradictive. After all, the government hasn’t banned any of the dozens of Islamist organisation
that reject violence, but adhere to broadly similar ideological doctrines and goals as ISIS. One such
organisation is the transnational Islamist organisation Hizbut Tahrir. In early June, month before
ISIS declared the caliphate, Hizbut Tahrir’s Syria chapter was raving about the imminent
declaration of the Caliphate:
Note that we in Hizbut Tahrir have been preparing for this moment a long time ago, and are
competent, with Allah's support to rally support for the new growing Khilafah state from all
the countries of the Muslim world, in many different forms and shapes... Muslims are
watching eagerly Ash-Sham [Syria], the abode of Islam, waiting for this final decisive
moment that will change the world's history, and are ready to sacrifice all to reach the great
victory.
A prominent 2013 publication by a Solo-based publisher associated with JI, entitled Strategi Dua
Lengan (The Two-Arm Strategy), was widely discussed amongst Indonesian jihadi’s and makes
brief reference to the relationship between non-violent groups like Hizbut Tahrir and violent groups
like ISIS. In laying out a roadmap to establishing a Caliphate in Syria and Yemen through violent
means, its author notes the ‘important legacy left by the intellectuals of Hizbut Tahrir [...] around
the idea of the Caliphate’. But despite Hizbut Tahrir's enthusiasm for the imminent declaration of a
caliphate, only weeks later, when ISIS leader al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate on 29 June, Hizbut
Tahrir distanced itself from ISIS, claiming that it fails to fulfill certain conditions, such as total control
over the territory, and the provision of security to the population living under it.
Hizbut Tahrir’s Indonesia (HTI) branch is registered as a legal organisation at Indonesia’s Ministry
of Internal Affairs, and holds public seminars, which are sometimes attended by Indonesian
3/5
New Mandala
New perspectives on Southeast Asia
http://www.newmandala.org
politicians or police officials, in which it promotes the need for the establishment of an Islamic
Caliphate. But despite the group’s close ideological and organisational guidance from its Middle
Eastern branches, Indonesian officials have not characterised Hizbut Tahrir’s vision of an Islamic
Caliphate as an ideological threat. Evidently, unlike ISIS, the group is seen as an organisation,
rather than a state-like entity that competes for the loyalty of Indonesia’s citizens. In addition,
ISIS’s lack of an organisational structure or community support means that the firm government
response against it carried few political costs for the government. In contrast, groups like Hizbut
Tahrir have effectively leveraged their elite political connections and organisational networks in the
wider community to avoid state-repression.
Ironically, while Hizbut Tahrir has downplayed ISIS’s claim to statehood, the Indonesian
government appears to take the claim much more seriously. On 25 August, at a seminar attended
by several Western ambassadors and diplomats, Indonesian deputy Foreign Minister Dino Patti
Djalal carefully explained that ‘diplomatically, Indonesia would not recognise ISIS’. At the same
seminar, Ansyaad Mbai, head of Indonesia’s Counter-Terrorism Body BNPT argued that
Indonesian’s who pledge allegiance to ISIS could be charged with makar (rebellion). On a different
occasion, Minister of Religion, Lukman Hakim Saifuddin, in referring to the act of baiat, the Islamic
act of pledging loyalty to a Caliph, which several Indonesian Islamists had publicly done, suggested
that ‘taking an oath and pledging loyalty to a foreign state or part of a foreign state can lead to the
loss of Indonesian citizenship’. Such statements suggest that officials assessed the threat from
ISIS as stemming from its claim to statehood, rather than its call to violent jihad.
That the threat from ISIS is defined as stemming from its ideology, rather than its violence, is
already evident in the kinds of initiatives taken against ISIS. The first major trend in Indonesia’s
response to ISIS, as already mentioned, has been the vigorous reaffirmation of the orthodox stateideology of Pancasila. For example, on 9 August, Commander of the Armed Forces, General
Moeldoko, announced he would visit schools and pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) to provide
‘guidance’ – presumably meaning the dissemination of Pancasila material. A second trend has
been the excessive pursuit and attempted criminalization of symbolic expressions of support for
ISIS, such as the arrests of Indonesians in possession of ISIS flags.
In Depok, ice-cream seller Firman Hidayat was arrested for hanging an ISIS flag on his balcony.
After determining that Firman is merely a ‘fan’ who ‘idolises’ ISIS, police released him, but
continued to monitor and ‘guide’ him. Near Surabaya police arrested Egy Darwanto, a fisherman
who flew an IS flag on his boat. At his house, police found hundreds of books about terrorism. Egy
was released, with a police official stating that ‘we haven’t found any criminal violations or
violations under the terrorism law, so he is just forced to report regularly’.
But the pattern by which the Indonesian government responded to the ISIS threat is not new, nor
inexplicable. In fact, the language Indonesian officials use to explain the threat posed by ISIS, and
4/5
New Mandala
New perspectives on Southeast Asia
http://www.newmandala.org
some of the responses on the ground, follow a very particular script. The language mirrors
narratives officials frequently apply to several obscure, and indeed frivolous, “rebellions”, such as
isolated groups of separatists in Maluku who express loyalty to the Republic of South Maluku
(RMS) and obscure factions of the Islamic State of Indonesia (Negara Islam Indonesia, NII) in West
Java - both remnants of long-defeated 1950s rebellions. Both movements, which in reality consist
of little more than handfuls of isolated, unarmed and poor individuals, are routinely described by
officials as a “state-within-a-state”, and hence rebellious. In recent years, dozens of RMS and NII
members have been charged with makar(rebellion) – the same law some officials have recently
suggested should be applied to ISIS supporters. In court proceedings, state prosecutors routinely
point to the possession of RMS and NII flags and other paraphernalia as evidence for the crime of
rebellion. Despite their lack of organisational capacity, community support or intent to commit
violence, security officials and political elites consistently characterise these tiny groups as
dangerous threats to the national ideology and the "NKRI" (Negara Kesatuan Republic Indonesia,
The Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia).
That government officials have described ISIS in much the same terms as those used to describe
worn-out anti-state rebellions suggest that officials similarly perceive ISIS as a threat against the
NKRI. The alarming difference is, of course, that unlike the RMS sympathisers in Maluku and
obscure NII factions in West Java, ISIS presents a real threat. The spectre of violence committed
by returning Indonesian ISIS fighters is surely of concern to many officials. But some seem to be
more concerned that returning fighters will re-enter Indonesia not as members of a terrorist
organisation bent on committing mass murder, but as representatives of a foreign state.
.................
Dominic Berger ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political
and Social Change at the Australian National University.
5/5
Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)