Terrorists in our midst

The most worrisome aspect of the explosion in Zamboanga City Wednesday night is the possibility that it was a suicide bombing. The bomb had been rigged in a motorcycle. All the reports said the bomb went off after the rider had parked the bike. The rider was one of three fatalities (so far) in the explosion that destroyed a karaoke bar.

Why would a suicide bomber bother to leave the vehicle bearing his bomb? I ask this question to convince myself that it was not a suicide bombing. Amid the global terrorist threat, my friends and I have found some comfort in the thought that our homegrown Islamic extremists seem to enjoy life too much to think of suicide. Our local terrorists kidnap, rape, pillage, mutilate and murder, but they don’t kill themselves.

The motorcycle rider, however, was reportedly checking something in his bike when the bomb exploded. It’s possible that the bomb had gone off prematurely, so it’s still possible that he was a suicide bomber.

But even if the Zamboanga explosion was a suicide bombing, I still cling to the hope that the madman must have been a foreigner, or at least had lived too long abroad where he got his crazy ideas. Reports said he was in Zamboanga simply to renew working documents for Malaysia.

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You can deal with terrorists who kidnap for ransom, who are motivated by profit and a desire to retire one day in a mango orchard. Greed we can understand. But how do you deal with zealots who are not driven by self-preservation, who think their highest reward will come only after death?

Both the police and military have tagged the Abu Sayyaf as the culprit, with authorities pointing to a four-member urban terrorist squad affiliated with Jemaah Islamiyah as the bombing team. Normally I would dismiss these early pronouncements from investigators as mere efforts to please the commander-in-chief and calm a jittery public. But based on details about the explosion, it doesn’t appear to be the handiwork of communist rebels or rightists out to destabilize the administration. There was some talk about a personal grudge against the owner of the karaoke bar. Do Filipinos bomb packed restaurants to settle a personal grudge?

And you thought the Abu Sayyaf had been neutralized. This is one dramatic comeback.

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Terrorists are in our midst. The mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center stayed in a Malate apartment and narrowly evaded arrest when explosives he and his cohorts were handling accidentally started a fire. Nineteen people were killed in December 2000 when a bomb ripped through a coach of the Light Rail Transit (LRT) in Manila, about three city blocks from where I grew up. The bombing has been blamed on Jemaah Islamiyah, the Islamist group affiliated with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network, which operates in Southeast Asia. Fifteen people died when a bomb exploded at the Fit Mart mall in General Santos City. For some reason, the city has been attracting al-Qaeda/JI members.

Yet I have always felt a sense of detachment from the Islamist threat. I thought if terrorists came here, it would be chiefly for R&R.

Years ago when intelligence agents gave me details about the Malate explosion and the flight of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, I thought the agents had simply seen too many spy thrillers. This year I finally started believing after reading the same details about Yousef and his terrorist plots code-named Oplan Bojinka in Simon Reeve’s book The New Jackals.

When police rounded up men in a Muslim community and blamed them for the LRT bombing, I thought we had been treated to the usual suspects. My suspicions turned out to be true; the suspects were subsequently released. But the cops weren’t entirely off the mark: Jemaah Islamiyah has since been held responsible for the bombing.

Other books and articles have discussed Bojinka and the road to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 last year. Meanwhile, suspected terrorists being interrogated in the United States have since provided information about the operations of Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia — particularly in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.

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There lies a big part of our problem: Indonesia. The men believed to be running Jemaah Islamiyah live in that country, some of them openly. As CNN and Time magazine have reported, there’s Abubakar Ba’asyir, said to be JI’s spiritual and political leader; he lives in a town on the island of Java. There’s Riduan "Hambali" Isamuddin, believed to be al-Qaeda’s field marshal in Southeast Asia, and there are JI/al-Qaeda trainer Parlindungan Siregar and commander Omar Bandor; all three are believed to be staying in Indonesia.

These men and their other cohorts have been identified and their pictures disseminated, but the Jakarta government appears powerless to go after them. Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri is no Asian Iron Lady; she dares not rile the Muslim fundamentalists in her country by going after Jemaah Islamiyah. If she goes after the Islamists, she risks a revival of the violent unrest that has rocked her country for decades, and the possible collapse of her government.

As we have seen in many instances in the past, unrest in Indonesia also pulls down the rest of the region. But if Megawati allows her country to become the new Islamist haven, I don’t think she will maintain her hold on power too long either, unless she’s willing to serve as a puppet president of the Indonesian equivalent of the Taliban.

The Philippines can intensify cooperation with Singapore and Malaysia to fight Jemaah Islamiyah. But if Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, will serve as the new base of al-Qaeda and the Islamists, the region is in for a long fight.

Earlier this year a Manila-based foreign journalist told me seriously he wasn’t ruling out the possibility that one day Osama bin Laden would turn up – in the Philippines, with a Filipina wife. These days I’m so convinced – or paranoid – about the terrorist threat I can’t even laugh at the journalist.