It’s difficult not to like Al Jazeera. Their journalists avoid the self-indulgent habits of TV reporters elsewhere by not talking about themselves all the time. They also like to break news stories, that mainstay of the news business that seems so out of fashion these days.
This week, they’ve been at it again, reporting from Indonesia that senior retired generals were attempting to oust President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono from office by secretly backing hard-line groups to incite religious violence, ferment a rebellion and topple his government.
The reasoning should come as no surprise. Yudhoyono is being seen as too weak, secular and too reformist by those whose zeal was forged out of the days of President Suharto and his bunch of thugs -- men who truly believed Indonesia could only be held together by force.
Compiled by Step Vassen, the report says the Islam Defenders Front (FPI) held the powerful backing of the disgruntled few that showed that ‘behind the religious violence a dangerous political power play is happening.’
The FPI has been linked to a series of attacks, particularly against Christians and Ahmadis, declared by the Indonesian Ulema Council as a deviant practice for preaching that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is the last prophet, not Mohammad as most Muslims believe.
Ahmadiyah has about 200,000 followers.
Sadly, groups like the FPI appear to be filling a vacuum of notorious religious militancy that was left vacant by the demise of Jemaah Islamiyah, which ran amok across the archipelago for more than a decade and whose ranks have been obliterated by government forces, particularly Detachment 88.
Vassen also spoke with Chep Hernawan of the Islam Reform Movement,who claimed the generals had decided to back the anti-Ahmadiyah factions after previous attempts at fermenting a backlash against Yudhoyono through issues like corruption had failed.
Apparently the generals who want to see the back of Yudhoyono are fed up with ‘the president’s lies’. Chep said a three-star general had approached him in January, opining the Ahmadiyah had to be disbanded in order to avoid a revolution.
‘He told me that we should keep fighting jihad, we should not back down so the liar can be toppled,’ he reportedly said, referring to the president.
Yudhoyono hasn’t commented on the report,but any response is likely to be ruthless and make a mockery of claims by the generals that the president is perceived as weak. Anyone who doubts this need only look back to early last year when ambitious militants tried to establish what became known in some quarters as the Coalition of the Leftovers on the home ground of Acehnese separatists on the north east tip of Sumatra.
Jihad remnants of JI, the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and an assortment of other outfits had gathered at a paramilitary training camp in the mountains of Aceh, determined to re-group.
Among their plans was an attack on the Presidential Palace and State guests who would be gathered there during Independence Day ceremonies in August. The police were tipped off and nearly all who attended that meeting have been killed or jailed.
I’ve no reason to doubt the veracity of the Al Jazeera report, and if the generals in question have any common sense left, it’s not the back of the president they should be worried about.
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notan SBYfan
A little strange that this report came out not long after Wikileaks released US Jakarta Embassy cables highlighting massive corruption by SBY and his family. Or the wide-spread flack he received for doing NOTHING to protect Ahmadyi or Christians who have been victimised by the alarming increase in attacks since he began his second term.
Let’s be frank. SBY OWNS the armed forces. His cabinet and all the top armed forces spots are littered with either his Academy classmates of ‘73 or personnel under his command while he was instituting martial law in Aceh.
The old armed forces guard from East Timor are either aligned with him or are no longer in positions of significant power.
As Western pundits have long held that he is a reformer bent on stamping out corruption and forwarding democracy and the removal of the military from the political arena, is it not also strange that it was his government that drew up the 2008 decree banning Ahmadayi, or that his 2009 coalition was made up of Islamist parties that push for sharia law? I mean, he picked a lot of these nutters to take on cabinet posts in the first place.
The report also states that elements from within the military met with hard-liners in January, when these attacks have been commonplace for years. It also states that they are dissatisfied with him for being “weak and a reformist” when the House failed to pass a single bill in 2010 and virtually every political and corruption scandal involving ANY party resulted in either acquittals, very light sentences or nobody being charged at all.
How much of a reformer can he be? His wife, son and brother-in-law have been implicated in cases of corruption in the past 12 months. OOps, so has he and his vice-president and three other members of his party, which was built solely as his own political vehicle and counts his 27-year-old son as it’s secretary general and presumed successor.
This retired general was only made chief because his mentor, Wiranto, who also groomed SBY and helped Wahid choose his cabinet, was rebuffed when he initially suggested SBY for the post (Yudo was eventually made Minister of Mines and Energy).
I am a fan of AJ, but in Indonesia’s complex, obscenely corrupt, conspiracy-drowned political world of misinformation and ideological horse trading, I would expect them to come up with more than a few third-rate fundi sources, who make their living off of fear, and a former black ops guy who makes his living off of misinformation.
Doesn’t anybody find it odd that they haven’t been charged with sedition even though they are plotting a revolution?
I think he is a master of playing both sides of the fence. A reformer for the West and a Javanese general sympathetic to the hard-line aspirations of thuggish outfits such as FPI for a local audience.
Aboeprijadi Santoso
One wonders why there could be a real chance of a retired-generals’ coup d’etat only on the basis of one unknown muslim source and one retired general’s assertion. I suspect it’s not a coup that they are targeting. Neither should one be worried about a coup. It’s the rumor about a possible coup, rather than a real coup which some Indonesian media, not just al Jazeera, speculate, that those sources wanted to trigger in Jakarta politics. All one has to do is to study the Indonesian military (Army’s) politics and history and realize the zero significance of the story.