Islamic vigilantes in Indonesia turn to extremism, think tank warns

Jan 26, 2012, 14:26 GMT

Jakarta - Some Islamic vigilantes involved in a campaign against vice in Indonesia have turned into extremist militants, a conflict resolution think tank said Thursday.

International Crisis Group said in a new report that ideological and tactical lines within Indonesia's radical community were blurring, making it harder to distinguish so-called 'terrorists' from hardline activists.

The report cited a group from the West Java city of Cirebon, which has been accused of being behind the 2011 suicide bombings of a mosque and a church as an example.

Those attacks killed only the bombers.

'The Cirebon men moved from using sticks and stones in the name of upholding morality and curbing 'deviance' to using bombs and guns, and this may become the common pattern,' said Sidney Jones, Crisis Group's senior adviser.

The Cirebon men represent a generational shift from militants trained abroad or those who fought a decade ago in two major communal conflicts pitting Muslims and Christians in eastern Indonesia, the group said.

They were radicalized through public lectures by radical clerics and the two suicide bombers in the church and mosque attacks taught themselves bomb-making from the Internet, according to the think tank.

The Crisis Group said the government needs to crack down on hate speech and religiously-inspired crimes, however minor, to stop the radicalization of such hardline groups.

Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority country, has been hit by a string of bomb attacks blamed on Islamist militants since 2000.