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Indonesians went to the polls on February 14 to elect a brand new president and vp, with some 204 million of the nation’s 270 million inhabitants registered to vote.
Forward of the election, which was the only largest one-day election of its type on this planet, there had been some fears that polling stations might be the targets of terrorist assaults, though these luckily proved to be unfounded.
Not solely did terrorists fail to disrupt the “pageant of democracy,” because the election was dubbed throughout the nation, however some former members of hardline teams even went to the polls themselves to solid their votes –a few of them for the primary time.
In East Java, convicted Bali bomber, 57-year-old Umar Patek, solid his vote alongside his spouse. Patek was convicted of blending among the chemical substances to make the bombs that killed 202 individuals in Bali in 2002 and injured one other 200, and was sentenced to twenty years in jail in 2011 earlier than being launched on parole in December 2022.
Patek proudly instructed The Diplomat that each he and his spouse have been first-time voters within the election, which isn’t notably stunning, as Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the hardline Islamist group behind the Bali bombing, has historically shunned and refused to acknowledge the Indonesian state.
JI, which is assessed as a terrorist group in Indonesia, has lengthy adopted an ideology that preaches the destruction of the Indonesian state and the institution of a caliphate on this planet’s most populous Muslim nation, and frequently attacked police stations and armed forces posts throughout its heyday within the late Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s.
Any type of authorities group or political equipment, together with democratic elections, has lengthy been outlawed for members of JI, which makes Patek’s choice to vote (which isn’t obligatory in Indonesia) much more fascinating and maybe persuasive by way of Indonesia’s strides in tackling radicalization in recent times.
And Patek was not the one one to make his option to the poll field.
Within the metropolis of Surakarta in Central Java, which is often known as Solo, Abdul Rohim Bashir, the son of Abu Bakar Bashir, the so-called “religious godfather” of JI, instructed The Diplomat that each males additionally solid their votes, getting up early to get to the polls very first thing within the morning on February 14.
Abu Bakar Bashir, who co-founded JI with Abdullah Sungkar in 1993, was launched from jail in 2021 after serving two-thirds of a 15-year jail sentence for terrorism-related expenses that weren’t linked to the Bali bombing, and in addition publicly threw his help behind presidential candidate Anies Baswedan earlier than the election – one thing that may have been unthinkable 20 years in the past.
When the Bali bombing befell, Indonesia didn’t have sturdy anti-terrorism laws, which was solely drafted in 2003 and utilized retroactively, and didn’t have deradicalization applications throughout the nation.
Nevertheless, within the years that adopted the Bali bombing, and within the wake of different assaults such because the 2003 assault on the JW Marriott in Jakarta that killed 11 individuals, the Indonesian authorities labored with different international locations, together with Australia and the USA, to create deradicalization applications for these convicted of terrorism-related offenses which have extensively been praised for being largely profitable and for considerably decreasing assaults throughout Indonesia.
Whereas the “success” of deradicalization will be troublesome to measure, the final JI assault was in 2011 when a police station in Cirebon was bombed, with the suicide bomber being the one casualty, and the Indonesian authorities do seem to have snuffed out the big scale assaults of the 2000s.
In Jakarta, Ali Imron, who was sentenced to life in jail for his function in orchestrating the 2002 Bali bombing, instructed The Diplomat that he had deliberate to vote for presidential candidate Ganjar Pranowo, and that he had participated in voting in earlier presidential elections from jail the place he’s incarcerated on the Larger Jakarta Metropolitan Police Headquarters.
This 12 months, nevertheless, Imron stated that he had been unable to solid his vote attributable to a scarcity of poll papers.
Removed from the times when he would have refused to take part in such a nationalistic spectacle, Imron expressed some frustration concerning the scenario, saying that he had been trying ahead to casting his vote.
Relatively than refusing to take part in civil society, evidently among the most senior members of JI are embracing their rights and reintegrating into society, one of many cornerstones of Indonesia’s deradicalization applications. The applications additionally stipulate different actions with a purpose to obtain remission time corresponding to attending flag-raising ceremonies for Indonesia’s nationwide day on August 17 and swearing an oath to the Indonesian state.
Whether or not the Indonesian authorities have managed to fully rid the nation of terrorist cells is a separate matter for debate, however the lack of assaults on the election and the flurry of former JI members keen to show up on the polling stations means that they’ve at the very least managed to alter among the pre-conceived notions held by as soon as radical extremists.
To many individuals, turning up at a polling station to train one’s proper to vote largely evokes emotions of democratic freedom, however to others, it comes laden with deep and radical connotations of state management.
If framed as a part of the work of deradicalization, of which Indonesia has all the time been on the forefront, former terrorists fortunately handing of their poll papers is to not be underestimated.
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