No country seems safe from extremists’ reach

Sholto Byrnes reflects on the rise of extremist militants in South East Asia

An Indonesian soldier stands guard at Ngurah Rai International airport in Bali. J Chris / EPA

Reports of terrorist atrocities appear almost daily now. In the past weeks, hotels have been taken over by militants who murdered guests and staff in Bamako, Mali and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. A Jewish teacher escaped being killed in a machete attack in Marseille on Monday only by shielding himself with the prayer book he was carrying. An oil terminal in Libya was set ablaze by ISIL last week in an act that could cost the country, already severely affected by the low price, three million barrels.

And where I am, in Malaysia, everyone is mindful that it is less than two weeks since bombs went off in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital and a city familiar to the many who travel there for business or leisure.

SouthEast Asia – home to around 250 million Muslims – has been here before. Having suffered bombings twice, in 2003 and 2009, Jakarta has long imposed airport-style security screening at hotels and shopping malls. Bali was hit in 2002, when 202 perished in nightclub bombings.

The names of the terrorist groups in the region who falsely claim religious justification are well-known: principally Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, and Abu Sayyaf and Biff (the Bangsomoro Islamic Freedom Fighters) in the Philippines.

The current threat from ISIL does, however, feel different. Early last year, I wondered how it was that no successful terrorist attack had taken place in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur. Was it just luck, or were the security forces doing an exceptional job unknown to the general public?

A little while later, a briefing from a special branch officer corrected any misconceptions I may have had. The stream of recent arrests – including that of a suspected seven-member ISIL cell last week – confirms, as Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Tun Razak, put it on Monday when he opened a conference on countering violent extremism, that “the threat is very real”.

One difference from the past is that some of the region’s terrorist groups are purely locally-focused. Biff, for instance, is a faction of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front that broke away because it would not accept autonomy for the Muslim-majority southern Philippines; it wants full independence instead. Abu Sayyaf, on the other hand, is considered by some experts to be a group of kidnappers and extortionists driven by greed rather than principle.

Abu Sayyaf are a risk to anyone in the seas around eastern Borneo – they recently beheaded a Malaysian hostage, Bernard Then, reportedly because negotiations for his ransom had broken down. They have also supposedly pledged allegiance to ISIL. But unless their modus operandi and capabilities have significantly changed, neither they nor Biff are deemed historically likely to mount attacks in major urban areas.

ISIL’s success in recruiting people through the internet and social media changes the equation. The young man in Marseille had no known links to extremist groups and no police record, and was a good student. His parents had no idea he had self-radicalised. The Jakarta attacks, meanwhile, were planned and directed from Syria by an Indonesian member of ISIL, Bahrun Naim.

Much more than before there is a sense that, in terms of a terrorist strike, “it is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’”, as Singapore’s home minister, K Shanmugan, put it in a speech a week ago. Whether it is the 200 or so Malaysians and Indonesians who make up Katibah Nusantara – the Malay Archipelago unit of ISIL – or the lone teenager spending too many hours on the internet, we have been warned that our cities are their targets.

The announcement by a Malaysian minister that Bangsar, a Kuala Lumpur suburb where my family shop and dine out regularly, was high up the terrorists’ list, particularly struck home. Could taking our five-year-old son to his favourite restaurant put our lives in danger?

Deradicalisation programmes are well established in the region, and Kuala Lumpur will soon host a regional digital counter-messaging communications centre that will play an important role in fighting ISIL’s all-too-effective use of social media.

But the real changes are going to be a toughening of surveillance and police measures throughout the region. Singapore, already tightly monitored, has said that it intends to strengthen its security forces, intelligence-gathering and border protection.

At the end of last year, Malaysia’s Mr Najib came in for criticism from human rights groups over the passing of the National Security Council Act, which will allow the declaration of “security zones” in which the authorities would have a wide remit to arrest, search and seize without a warrant.

Mr Najib is adamant that the new law is necessary – and recent moves by the Indonesian government suggest others in the region agree. “Our law didn’t allow us to arrest anyone before a crime is committed,” said Indonesia’s security minister, Luhut Pandjaitan, recently. This would be changed, he explained, “because we understand the security agencies need more authority to carry out pre-emptive operations”.

At the counter-extremism conference on Monday, Mr Najib was firm. “It is right to talk about striking a balance between civil liberties and national security,” he said. “But, let me tell you this: there are no civil liberties under Daesh, and they are no shield against those who are set on committing acts of terrorism. The best way to uphold civil liberties is to ensure the safety of the ­nation.”

As long as the shadow of ISIL persists, that is likely to be the new normal in Malaysia and the region – just as it is in France, Belgium and the many other countries that have decided that the balance must err on the side of precaution. One assumes that the families of the four civilians who died in Jakarta would agree.

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia