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U.N. places Jemaah on terrorism list

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE Oct. 26. The counter-terrorism efforts of some key states in the Asia-Pacific region received a new political thrust with the United Nations Security Council today designating the Jemaah Islamiyah as an outfit with links to the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The Jemaah Islamiyah will now come under a sweeping array of U.N. sanctions. The decision by a Security Council committee, which monitors the U.N. sanctions on the Al-Qaeda operatives in various guises and disguises, has been catalysed by a high voltage counter-terror campaign from several quarters in South-East Asia and the United States. The terrorist organisation, which is presumed to operate under several names, has been in focus in the region since the Singapore authorities first tracked down the group's suspected activists last December.

More recently, the terrorist mayhem in Indonesia's holiday resort in Bali has brought the outfit under intense regional scrutiny, although the group has not so far been formally charged with complicity in that carnage. A leader of the organisation, Abu Bakar Baasyir (Bashir), is still convalescing at a hospital in Indonesia's Central Java, pending his formal detention under that country's latest anti-terror ordinances. While Mr. Bashir, an Islamic cleric, has disclaimed any terrorist agenda and sought to dispute the very existence of the Jemaah Islamiyah, the intelligence communities in some South-East Asian States have named an elusive "Hambali" as the group's prime suspect and most active purveyor of terror.

For the U.N., it became easy to initiate the latest action against the Jemaah Islamiyah after Indonesia, presumably a key base for the group's operatives, asked the global organisation to move against the network. In making that plea, Indonesia maintained that no one particular place could be seen as the nucleus of a network with an apparent transnational spread. Indonesia was the last to join the international chorus of voices against the outfit after the United States as also Australia and Singapore had called upon the U.N. to act. The U.N.'s fiat marks the most significant counter-terrorism initiative by the global organisation since its designation of an anti-Beijing outfit, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, as a terrorism-sponsoring unit in China's Xinjiang province.

With the Asia-Pacific leaders addressing their concerns about international terrorism at the APEC summit in Los Cabos in Mexico today, Malaysia once again called for the identification of the "root cause of terrorism''.

This did not, however, place Malaysia on a course of collision with the other counter-terror champions such as Singapore or Australia as also the U.S. The U.N.'s updated sanctions are aimed at starving the terrorist groups of funds.

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