Bombshell

by Mia Bloom

  For several days, Menake stalked the ritzy quarter where the prime minister lived. However, in a neighborhood where jeans and miniskirts were the norm, Menake’s salwar kameez made her look like she did not belong. On the third day of her reconnaissance, the authorities stopped her outside the prime minister’s mansion. They demanded her ID card. When it showed that she was from Jaffna, a Tamil and LTTE stronghold, she was taken in for questioning. The cyanide vial around her neck meant only one thing: that she was an LTTE operative. At the Boosa detention center, Menake revealed her plan and, eventually, informed on her handlers.

  THE END OF THE REBELLION

  From 1983 until 2009, the LTTE fought the Sri Lankan government for a separate state for the Tamil minority. In that time, more than 70,000 Sri Lankans were killed, tens of thousands fled abroad, and some 600,000 were displaced internally. Children on the way to school were routinely abducted and forced to become child soldiers—by both sides. Sri Lanka became infamous for its number of disappeared. More than 60,000 people were abducted by government militias, never to be seen again. Before its decimation in May 2009, the LTTE was considered one of the most ruthless terrorist organizations in the world. By using persuasion and extortion throughout the Tamil diaspora (notably in Canada, the UK, Australia, and the U.S.), in what the Tigers referred to as the Nandavanan system, they also become one of the world’s most successful and prosperous.

  Although a promising peace process was launched in 2002 under the auspices of the Norwegian government, politics and personalities ultimately intervened. The process was annulled in 2006, not by spoilers within the terrorist organization, as one might expect, but by the Sri Lankan government’s extremist wing. While denying that a military solution was the best solution, the government launched major offensives against the LTTE throughout 2007 and 2008 and finally destroyed the organization in 2009.

  After army commander Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka barely survived an assassination attempt by LTTE in May 2006, government forces actively sought to assassinate as many of the organization’s leaders as they could. That same year they killed the LTTE’s political chief, its military intelligence leader, and the head of its naval unit, known as the Sea Tigers. In May 2007, they killed the leader of the Charles Anthony Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Nakulan (whose nom de guerre was Nagulan), a personal friend and comrade of Prabhakaran. Brigadier S.P. Tamilselvan, the LTTE political chief, was assassinated on in November 2007 in a targeted aerial bombardment by the Sri Lankan air force. Tamilselvan had been one of the chief negotiators between the Norwegian SLMM (Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission), the Sri Lankan government, and the Tigers.

  From 2006 until 2009 the government targeted the women of the LTTE specifically. In September 2006, an alleged government death squad killed V. Thangaratnam, a female leader who had organized protests against the Sri Lankan Army’s occupation of private land.82 In May 2007, government troops killed “Mala,” the leader of the Sothiya regiment.83 In January, an LTTE area leader, Sudarmalar, and eighteen others were killed by government troops during clashes in Mannar. On May 25, 2008, government troops killed Lieutenant Colonel Selvy, deputy leader of the Sothiya regiment, during a battle at the Mannar “forward defense line.”84

  In May 2009, everything changed for the female Tigers and for the organization as a whole. During a pitched two-hour gun battle with Sri Lankan special forces in which a rocket was launched into his armor-plated ambulance, Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed. Several of the LTTE’s highest-ranking lieutenants; Prabhakaran’s son and heir apparent, Charles Anthony; and as many as three hundred cadres also perished in the battle.

  The battle followed several months of intense fighting, targeted assassinations, and attacks against the civilian population in areas where the LTTE were most popular. Among the dead were both militants and peacemakers. The Sri Lankan army did not discriminate between those with “blood on their hands” and those members of the organization who were working toward reconciliation to end the twenty-six year civil war.

  Although the organization has been decapitated and hostilities have officially ceased, Tamil calls for separation have not come to an end. According to the public opinion surveys that I conducted, both Indian and Sri Lankan Tamils want regional autonomy and devolution of central power. The Tamil diaspora in Canada, the United States, the UK, and Australia remains steadfast in its demand for autonomy and freedom.

  While the LTTE is gone, its legacy lives on. Irish expatriates in the diaspora became radicalized in the 1920s after British atrocities (the term for human rights abuses at the time) in Ireland. The Palestinian movement was directed from abroad for forty years until they inspired a second generation of Palestinians to rise up against the Israeli occupation. If the underlying grievances that first led the Tamil groups to abandon parliamentary opposition and turn to violence are not addressed, the conflict will become multigenerational, as was the conflict in Northern Ireland and as is the conflict in Palestine. Although the West (outside of Canada and the UK) paid little attention to the conflict in Sri Lanka, there is much to learn from the ways in which the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam integrated women into nearly all the echelons of the struggle.

  Although some women willingly gave their lives for the cause, they were only represented within the military leadership, especially at the lieutenant-colonel level. There were few, if any, female political leaders at the very top. Women provided more than support: they had their own tank battalions; they were snipers, trackers, and spies; they planted claymore mines; they engaged in hand-to-hand combat; and they killed on demand, just like the men. The female tank unit of the LTTE successfully routed the Sri Lankan Army several times and won great battles. But off the battlefield, the women did not experience the same level of equality one would expect from an organization that depended on their fighting spirit and that regularly paid lip service to the principle of gender equality.

  THE CRUCIAL LINKS

  An Islamic state must be the goal of all people … Once that has been achieved, we will live together in peace.

  —Paridah binti Abas, 2005

  Our family is not afraid of execution. Because life and death [are] only in the hands of God.

  —Paridah binti Abas, 20081

  PARIDAH

  Paridah binti Abas is a classic example of a female member of the terror group Jemaah Islamiya (JI). Born in Singapore on September 30, 1970, into a middle-class family, Paridah was one of six children of Abas bin Yusuf. She attended a secular high school and grew up planning to become a kindergarten teacher. Her father, Abas, had participated in the study groups established by two radical clerics, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir and Abdullah Sungkar, in Malaysia. He was so inspired by Sungkar’s teaching that he promised Paridah in marriage to one of Sungkar’s most ardent students, Ali Ghufron bin Nurhasyim, infamously known as Mukhlas. In her autobiography, Paridah writes that this marriage was arranged without her consent and was the occasion of intense parental pressure.2

  Paridah found out that she was getting married one night when she was out for a drive with her father. Abas informed her that he had chosen an Indonesian preacher named Ali Ghufron to be her husband. “Mukhlas” was devout and Abas told his daughter that he respected the young man’s dedication to Islam and the cause. Paridah met Ghufron only once before the wedding, and only for five minutes, when she served him tea at her parents’ house. On their wedding night, Paridah warned Ghufron that she was not like other girls. He supposedly replied that this was music to his ears: “Thank God,” he said. “You are the one I am looking for.”3

  Ali Ghufron had trained at bin Laden’s camp in Afghanistan between 1986 and 1989. He regaled anyone who would listen with stories of the two mujahideen (meaning himself and bin Laden) fighting side by side. Paridah eventually grew to love him. She writes in her autobiography that she wants to thank her father for forcing her to marry Ali Ghufron. She never regretted the marriage. “Being the faithful wife of a man who is an earnest exampl
e of His Messenger is beautiful … I thank you, father.”4

  After the marriage, Paridah’s brothers also became involved in JI’s terror network. Hashim went to Afghanistan and eventually became mixed up with another radical cleric, Imam Samudra, and took part in terrorist attacks in Batam and Pekanbaru, Indonesia, in December 2000. Her other brother, Mohd Nasir bin Abas, became the head of JI’s third division, Mantiqi 3. Her sister, Nurhayati, married a Malaysian preacher, Shamsul Bahri bin Hussein,5 who also became involved in the network. Shamsul Bahri was eventually sentenced to three years in an Indonesian prison for helping plan the 2003 suicide bombing at the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, which killed twelve people.

  In 2003, Paridah herself was tried for falsifying immigration documents and faced a possible five-year prison sentence.6 She was acquitted. Her more serious crime was likely aiding and abetting her husband’s activities in Bali, where he organized the bombings that took 202 lives in October 2002. On the evening of the bombing, Paridah recalls hearing the blasts and the ambulance sirens, but suffering from nausea and being too pregnant to care. When her son was born, she named him Osama.7

  Her children consider their father to have been a hero. Even her youngest children allegedly support what he did. Paridah called her autobiography orang bilang ayah teroris, (People Say Father’s a Terrorist). In its pages, she explains that Mukhlas was not a terrorist but a mujahideen, a Muslim guerrilla warrior. She claims her children feel that Indonesia owes a debt of gratitude to their father and should say thank you rather than vilify him and blacken his name. Paridah admits that her husband might have wanted to teach the tourists in Bali a lesson but claims that he had not intended to kill as many people as he did. In fact, both Paridah and Ghufron’s brothers propagate the theory that the CIA added explosives to the bombs to make them more powerful and kill more people. Shockingly, there are people in Indonesia who prefer to credit this proposition and see conspiracies everywhere, than admit that there is an Islamist problem in their nation.

  Paridah now lives in Malaysia, in Ulu Tiram, three hundred kilometers south of Kuala Lumpur, with her six children. She has had to raise her family on her own: Ali Ghufron spent five years on death row, from 2003 to 2008, before exhausting the avenues for appeal. He was finally executed by a firing squad on November 9, 2008, for his responsibility in planning the Bali bombings.

  SCHOOLS FOR JIHADIS

  Jemaah Islamiya is practically the ideal model of jihadi terrorism, and yet few Westerners have even heard of it. A shadowy militant underground organization consisting of loosely assembled cells and individual militants spread across Southeast Asia, it originated in a radical Islamist group called Darul Islam, established just after Indonesia’s independence. In the 1980s, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (al Ikhwan al Muslimun) became influential throughout the region.8 At the same time that radical Egyptian clerics and their ideas arrived from the east, similar religious teachings arrived from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Unlike many other societies, which were reshaped by the coming of Islam, most of Indonesia’s existing social norms and values remained relatively unchanged. The Indonesian version of Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamism was rendered almost completely local and retained a particularly regional flavor.9 Society and gender relations did not change radically, and upper-class and high-caste Indonesian women were able to preserve their public roles.10 Unlike other radical Islamist groups in the Arab world and South Asia, which tended to be male-centric, JI is consequently more “woman-friendly.”

  With no headquarters, no main office, no public outreach, and no official spokesmen to represent it, it is a wonder that the group flourished as it did. JI’s success depended on strong kinship, marital, and familial bonds. The women of JI ensure its survival by forging critical links between disparate and geographically isolated groups. Marriage alliances, in particular, serve as the glue that holds the organization together. Women also make a crucial contribution to JI’s solvency by engaging in cottage industries, making and selling Islamic headscarves, marketing Islamic herbal remedies, and undertaking a variety of piecework at home.11 In many ways, JI operates like the Sicilian Mafia, using family connections and strategic marriages to make the organization cohere. It thus owes its success to the women, who form the links that reproduce both the ideology and the children for succeeding generations. JI is not a static terrorist organization but rather has evolved into a social organization that engages in economic activities, public relations, and social outreach. The International Crisis Group asserts that the women of JI are also critical to its ability to evade arrest.12

  Al Qaeda is said to have commenced operations in Indonesia as early as 1988, when Osama bin Laden dispatched his brother-in-law, Muhammed Jamal Khalifa, to the Philippines to establish contacts with local militant groups throughout Southeast Asia. Unlike other affiliates all over the world that were directly controlled by Al Qaeda, however, JI functioned semiautonomously, pursuing its own local agenda. In addition to Al Qaeda, it associated with several other terrorist groups, including the Filipino organizations the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Abu Sayyaf, with whom JI members trained and shared tactics and safe houses.

  The 9/11 Commission Report linked JI to the 1993 World Trade Center bombers and to mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammed (popularly known by his initials, KSM), who spent some of his formative years as a terrorist in the region before he was even a member of Al Qaeda. KSM hatched the preliminary plot for 9/11 in the Philippines with a plan, Operation Bojinka, to ram commercial airplanes into buildings.13 In 1994, several key members of Operation Bojinka formed a front corporation called Konsonjaya, a trading company that supposedly exported Malaysian palm oil to Afghanistan and traded in Sudanese and Yemeni honey. All these countries were important nodes in Al Qaeda’s global network. (Bin Laden actually resided in Sudan at the time, and ran several companies that exported these products.) As late as 1998, KSM still used Konsonjaya as a cover for his international travels. The names on its board of directors read like a who’s who of the Al Qaeda network, with jihadis from Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Indonesia.14

  Over time, JI developed a closer association with Al Qaeda, sharing members and jointly planning operations. Riduan Isamuddin, a.k.a. Hambali, was a member of both Al Qaeda and JI and provided the key link between KSM and the terrorist-cell leaders in Southeast Asia.15 JI’s leaders circulated bin Laden’s speeches and writings. Many JI operatives were trained in Afghanistan and worked closely with the Afghan Arabs as part of the international brigade during their nine-year fight against the Soviets.16 In the training camps, the new recruits pledged a bay’ah, a formal oath of loyalty, to bin Laden and to Al Qaeda.17 As many as three hundred Indonesians “graduated” from the jihadi camps in Afghanistan.18 The two groups shared tactics and expertise and created a jointly operated training camp in Poso, on the coast of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

  JI can also be linked to 9/11 more concretely. Yazid Sufaat, a former Malaysian army captain and microbiologist, was instrumental in aiding the 9/11 plotters. He hosted Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called twentieth hijacker) on his way to flight school in the United States. Time reported that Sufaat was a member of Jemaah Islamiya and that Moussaoui stayed at the Sufaat house several times, where they discussed Moussaoui’s dream of crashing a plane into the White House.19 Sufaat and his wife, Dursina, had both attended California State University in Sacramento in the 1980s and understood the ins and outs of entering the country with a foreign visa. When Moussaoui was arrested in the month before the attacks, he carried with him a letter of employment on letterhead from Sufaat’s company, InFocus Tech, to legally sponsor his entry to the United States.20 The letters of introduction named Moussaoui as InFocus Tech’s “marketing consultant” for the United States, Britain, and Europe. Sufaat had signed the letters as the company’s managing director and provided Moussaoui with a $2,500 monthly stipend during his stay in the United States, along with a lump sum of $35,000 to get him started at the fligh
t school.

  FBI chief Robert Mueller singled out JI as Al Qaeda’s principal Southeast Asian partner. The organization received more than 1.35 billion rupiahs ($140,000) over three years from Al Qaeda, and still it remained off the radar screen until the Bali and Jakarta bombings. Even though several of JI’s leaders were arrested in Singapore in 2002, many Americans only really became aware of Indonesia after it was struck by the tsunami in December 2004, and few understood anything about the terrorist movement there until it was too late.21

  By the beginning of the millennium, the group had bombed as many as thirty churches in Jakarta, West Java, North Sumatra, Riau, and Bandung, killing eighteen people in the process.22 In 2000, it perpetrated terror attacks throughout Indonesia, including a car bomb at the Jakarta Stock Exchange and Christmas Eve bombings in East Java and Nusatenggara. At 11:05 P.M. on October 12, 2002, Paridah’s husband, Ali Ghufron, masterminded the deadly explosions at Paddy’s Irish Pub and the Sari Club across the street from Paddy’s Pub in the Kuta district of Bali. “A Saturday night at two popular nightclubs ended with friends ripped to pieces and burned to death. Dozens, maybe hundreds, were dead, and an entire block of buildings was gone.”23 The carnage was “incomprehensible.”24 For terrorist leader Imam Samudra,25 echoing comparable statements by Osama bin Laden, the Australians, who were the majority of the casualties of the nightclub attacks, were suitable targets due to their country’s efforts to separate East Timor from Indonesia.26 The attack comprised three separate blasts, a hallmark of Al Qaeda operations, intended to wreak the maximum carnage by killing people fleeing the scene as well as any first responders to the initial explosion. The same modus operandi was repeated in 2005 when Bali was bombed again.