Fear of a Abu Bakar Bashir backlash

Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s pardon for the extremist cleric dismays all sides.

Abu Bakar Bashir arrives for treatment at a Jakarta hospital last year. Picture: AP

The last time Abu Bakar Bashir stepped out of an Indonesian jail, less than four years after 202 people died in the 2002 Bali bombings, he was greeted by a crowd of adoring supporters and feted as a hero.

The notorious Islamist widely acknowledged as the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah — the terror group behind the 2002 and 2005 Bali bombings, the 2004 Australian embassy bombing and a string of deadly attacks targeting foreigners and Christians — immediately resumed his hardline sermons against infidels and in support of turning Indonesia into an Islamic state.

Thirteen years later, Bashir — elderly, ailing but unbowed — is again preparing to walk free from jail after Indonesia’s moderate President, Joko Widodo, announced last weekend that he would grant the 80-year-old an unconditional pardon this week.

Whether that will now happen depends on the political calculations of a president who, in his zeal to win votes, appears to have underestimated the depth of popular opposition to Bashir’s release.

Indonesian Law and Security Minister Wiranto was the first to backpedal on Monday night, telling waiting media — just hours after a series of senior government figures confirmed Bashir would be unconditionally pardoned — that the decision would now be subject to an “in-depth and comprehensive” assessment.

Bashir’s lawyer Achmad Michdan said yesterday he was still hopeful the cleric would walk free tomorrow, adding that the government would owe “everyone an explanation” if it reneged on its offer.

“The initiative came from the President. From our conversations with (the President’s lawyer and campaign manager) Yusril (Ihza Mahendra) we were under the ­impression everything was taken care of. They are the ones who ­announced the plans. They are the ones making comments to the media.”

Bashir, who has served nine years of a 15-year sentence for funding a terrorism training camp, has done none of the things an ­Indonesian terror prisoner must do to deserve a privileged early ­release.

He has not asked for a pardon. He has refused to admit guilt for the crimes of which he has been convicted. And he has refused the conditions of parole, which require him to declare his loyalty to the Indonesian state and the founding principles of Pancasila.

In fact, he refuses to recognise the authority of the Indonesian state, its democratically elected government or the judiciary because he believes Indonesia should be an Islamic state governed by sharia law. That has not prevented him, however, from instructing his lawyers to challenge every conviction.

President Joko Widodo and his running mate Ma’aruf Amin during a televised debate last week. Picture: AP

He has shown no inclination to disavow violence, nor has he participated in deradicalisation programs while in prison.

Yet, listening to lawyers for the extremist this week, one could almost believe Bashir was doing a favour by agreeing to leave prison early.

“We proposed that he be released Wednesday,” his lawyer Muhammad Mahendradatta said on Monday after the President confirmed Bashir’s imminent release on humanitarian grounds.

“Bashir promised he will start packing today so if the decision is issued Wednesday he can immediately go home. However, he will only wait until the end of the week because that is what we were promised. If (the decision) is not ­issued by the end of the week we regret to say that we might reconsider the offer.”

Emboldened perhaps by the government’s apparent eagerness to assist Bashir, his lawyers also have threatened to sue anyone who links the ageing extremist to the first Bali bombing.

The firebrand cleric, who founded Jemaah Islamiah while in exile in Malaysia, was arrested in the wake of the 2002 Kuta Beach blasts that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, but prosecutors were unable to make a string of terrorism-related allegations against him stick.

While a lower court convicted him of terrorism in relation to the 2002 Bali bomb, and the 2003 Marriott hotel bombing in which 12 people were killed, that conviction was overturned on appeal.

In the end the man who also founded Indonesia’s al-Mukmin Ngruki madrassa — dubbed the Ivy League of terrorists for having schooled some of the country’s most dangerous Islamic militants — served concurrent sentences between August 2003 and June 2006 for immigration violations and supporting a terror training camp in the southern Philippines.

Indonesian terrorism expert Sidney Jones says at the time of Bashir’s trial “Indonesian courts were still sceptical of terrorism charges. Judges were only convicting people where there was clear evidence of direct involvement in a violent act”, and not necessarily for encouraging those acts. Jones, who heads the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, tells The Australian it is unclear whether a presidential pardon would grant Bashir immunity from future prosecution should he speak in favour of Islamic State after his release — which, under current counter-terrorism laws, could lead to his rearrest.

But it almost certainly would “give him another 15 minutes of fame”, Jones says. “He will go home to a rapturous reception. He will be welcomed by every extremist under the sun, from age 12 to age 102, and he will preach jihad.

“Whether he preaches pro-ISIS (Islamic State) jihad is one of the questions because he wound back support for ISIS”, though it is said he privately still supports it.

The President’s move to grant Bashir a pardon appears to have pleased almost nobody. His moderate supporters are outraged, the counter-terrorism authorities are confused, and hardliners and moderates alike have accused Widodo of a cynical ploy to woo conservative Muslim voters ahead of April’s presidential elections.

Scott Morrison has urged Indonesia to “show great respect for Australia in how they manage this issue”, given 88 Australians died “horrifically” in the two massive bomb blasts detonated by JI terrorists outside Bali nightclubs.

“We have been consistent always, governments of both persuasions over a long period of time, about our concerns about Abu Bakar Bashir and that he should serve what the Indonesian justice system has delivered to him as his sentence,” Morrison says.

Faced with such opposition, the Indonesia government appears to be wavering.

Just hours after the President’s chief of staff told The Australian that “every risk had been calcul­ated” in the decision to release Bashir, Wiranto said the early release was now subject to review.

“Based on humanitarian grounds the President truly understands the request made by the family,” he said on Monday night.

But he added: “The President will not automatically adhere to the request because he needs to consider other aspects as well. Therefore, the President instructed the relevant officials to immediately conduct a more in-depth and comprehensive study to respond to that request. That is what is happening at the moment.”

Human Rights Watch’s Andreas Harsono says his best guess is the President moved to release Bashir because it did not want him dying in prison and becoming “another unnecessary martyr” to the extremist cause. But in doing so the usually astute politician had clearly miscalculated.

The most compelling critique came on Monday night from Jones, who wrote in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter blog that Bashir’s release would send a “message that if one defies the state long enough, it will eventually capitulate”.

Harsono says the widely respected terrorism expert’s evisceration of the decision — which Jones describes as “misguided, legally questionable and politically inept” — will have shaken up the security establishment in Jakarta.

“It emboldens those who see democracy as incompatible with Islam, because that’s what Bashir has been arguing all his life,” Jones writes. “It gives jihadists back their hero, his status elevated still more by apparently winning his freedom without having to accept Pancasila, the state ideology, or pledge loyalty to the Indonesian state.”

“It makes the President seem either Machiavellian enough to do anything in exchange for a few votes, or so politically deaf and blind that he had no idea of the consequences.”

As a vote-winning strategy ahead of his re-election bid, it looks like a PR disaster for the President, also known as Jokowi. As a political diversion strategy, it might be more effective.

Bashir is not the only one slated for prison release this week. Former Jakarta governor and Jokowi loyalist Basuki Tjahaja “Ahok” Purnama is scheduled to walk free tomorrow after serving 20 months of a two-year blasphemy sentence.

By dangling the prospect of a pardon for one of the country’s most infamous Islamists, Jokowi has at least drawn attention away from Ahok’s own much-anticipated early release.

Managing the potential political fallout of that event three months before the elections was bound to be difficult for Jokowi, who did little to protect his former gubernatorial deputy from the orch­estrated attacks of his political opponents.

Just how big a problem became clear last month when the Islamist 212 Brotherhood drew hundreds of thousands of people to Jakarta to mark the anniversary of its December 2, 2016, rally in which a half-million people gathered to pray for the Christian, ethnically Chinese Ahok’s prosecution for blasphemy.

The demonstration emphasised the growing political power of Islamists in Indonesia, who convincingly have demonstrated their ability to attract mass support.

Jokowi, a moderate Muslim, has never been popular with conservatives and hardliners.

He was accused during the 2014 election campaign of secretly being a communist, a serious accusation in a country where up to a million people accused of communism were massacred in 1965, and also of being a Christian.

Although he enjoyed a comfortable lead against his challenger, Prabowo Subianto, the opposition’s attacks began to bite, and Jokowi’s eventual majority was far narrower than expected. Curiously, Prabowo, a former military commander who is once again running for president, is favoured by Islamists, notwithstanding the fact his brother and sister are Christians.

Yet if pardoning Bashir was an attempt by Jokowi to win over conservative Muslims, it has backfired. Slamet Maarif, a spokesman for the radical Islamic Defenders Front and chairman of the 212 Brotherhood, says he is “suspicious about the timing of it all” and believes — as do many others — that Bashir’s proposed release was politically motivated.

“If Jokowi truly believes that Abu Bakar Bashir deserves to be released on humanitarian grounds, why didn’t he do this early on? Bashir has been very ill for more than a year. Why do it close to the election?

“It seems he is trying to get Muslims’ votes but I’m sure Muslims will know better. They know not to trust the leader who has criminalised so many clerics during his administration.”

Yusril, the presidential aide who is also a former justice minister, denies the pardon is politically motivated and points to government efforts last year to negotiate house arrest for Bashir.

Those efforts failed when the cleric refused to sign a letter declaring his loyalty to the Indonesian state.

“The truth is Bashir could have been released many months ago. He was supposed to be eligible for parole in December,” Yusril said this week.

“That’s why it’s not fair to say the release is political. This is purely out of compassion.

“After Bashir refused to apply for parole, the President called me and told me: ‘Go and visit him in jail, talk to him and see what is it that he wants and report back to me.’ And so I did. Jokowi said: ‘Fine. Just release him without condition.’ He said this out of compassion and humanity.”

Few other Indonesian prisoners have been afforded the same privilege.

A Jakarta Post editorial this week noted: “It is not impossible to pardon the ailing cleric on ­humanitarian grounds, but the timing and circumstances of the President’s decision are so ­suspicious that one wonders whether his health condition was a factor at all.”

It contrasted Jokowi’s willingness to intervene on Bashir’s behalf with recent public outrage over the jailing of a Lombok teacher convicted of breaching the privacy of her sexual harasser after a recording she made of him harassing her over the phone was uploaded to the internet by another colleague.

Jokowi refused to grant her clemency, citing a reluctance to interfere with the law.

Like many survivors of the Bali bombing, Phil Britten says he is horrified at the thought of Bashir walking free.

Britten was in the Sari nightclub on Kuta Beach for an end-of-year footy trip when the two bombs ripped through the packed bar.

The then 22-year-old lost seven friends and received burns to 60 per cent of his body.

“Everyone I have spoken to is disgusted that he may soon be back in the community,” he says.

“(Bashir) was like the head of the snake. He was able to influence people to do terrible things to many, many people.

“Every day I look in the mirror and I see the burn scars on my body that he had a part in inflicting. Every year I go to the memorial park and mourn the loss of my friends, of 88 Australians and the 202 people who died. I look into the eyes of the fathers and mothers who lost their children.

“The least Bashir should do is serve his full sentence.”