Malaysia Releases 17 More Members of JI & KMM

By Zachary Abuza

On 18-19 October, Malaysian authorities released 17 members of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) and an affiliated group the Kumpulan Mujihidin Malaysia (KMM). The 17 had been held under Malaysia’s draconian British-colonial era Internal Security Act (ISA). The ISA allows for detention without charge or trial for up to two years and can be renewed indefinitely. Several of the detainees had been held since mid-2001. According to the Malaysian government, they were released on the orders of Prime Minister (and concurrently Internal Security Minister) Abdullah Ahmad Badawi because
"The government was satisfied that all of them are no longer a threat to national security."

The release of four individuals in particular raises several questions; but more importantly, what does the release of 17 people say about Malaysia’s ongoing CT efforts?

The press has focused their attention on one individual, Nik Adli Nik Aziz, the son of the Kelantan state Chief Minister and the spiritual leader of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, better known as PAS. Nik Aziz is a firebrand and vehemently anti-American cleric. His son’s arrest in August 2001 was widely seen as political. The Then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad, was ailing in the polls, and went after PAS, which did very well in the 1999 elections, winning 2 of Malaysia’s 13 state governments. As PAS wrote in their paper, "The ISA was used to tarnish the image of PAS and its leaders. It was an attempt to brand PAS as a terror group." The ISA is the bête noir of all opposition parties, as well as human rights organizations, and it has always been used for political purposes. Much of the Malaysian populace was skeptical regarding JI and KMM and refused to believe that Nik Adli’s arrest was anything but political. But Nik Adli was no innocent. He was trained in Afghanistan and had close ties to the current leaders of Thailand’s insurgency. He trained with the GMIP, whose leader Nasori Saeseng was also with him in Afghanistan. He was the master of the family-founded madrassah, SM Arab Darul Anwar, in Kelantan. The school, which the author has visited, is a very hard line school that has graduated a disproportionate number of militants. It was thought to be an important feeder school for JI and the KMM.

There are three other individuals whose release raises some eyebrows:

Zainon Ismail, with Nik Adli, was a veteran of the Afghan Mujihidin and a founder of the KMM. Forty-five members of the KMM, nearly half of its membership, either fought against the Soviets or had trained in al Qaeda camps there in the 1990s. The KMM trained with the GMIP in southern Thailand and kept their stockpile of weapons there. I think we have to see his release in the context of the Thai peace talks that the Malaysian government is negotiating. The GMIP and the BRN-C, the two leading insurgent groups, have not come to the peace table, despite the great fanfare in the media.

Abdul Manaf Kasmuri is one of the most interesting. He was a Malaysian army colonel, educated at Sandhurst, UK where he won three batons of honor on graduation, including best foreign student. In the early1990s, he led Malaysia’s peacekeeping unit in Bosnia where, after witnessing the UN and the West’s inaction, started to secretly support the Bosnian Mujihidin. He was recalled and forced to retire in 1995, but immediately returned to Bosnia, where under the guise of being an aid worker, he continued to support the Mujihidin. He was a frequent traveler to Pakistan, and admired the Taliban. At the time of his arrest he was the human resources manager for an Islamic youth organization based in Kuala Lumpur, and the director of Excelsetia, a JI/AQ front company, registered in the financial black hole of Labuan, Malaysia’s offshore banking center. The other directors were Zulkifli Marzuki, one of Al Qaeda and JI’s most important money men in Southeast Asia, and Yazid Sufaat, who was part of Al Qaeda’s anthrax production team and in whose apartment the USS Cole and 9/11 operations were planned. Yazid Sufaat is still under ISA detention while Marzuki is still at large.

Little is known about Alias Othman, but the circumstances of his arrest are interesting. Many have always wondered why JI or Al Qaeda has never targeted Malaysia, and the government has always downplayed the threat. But Othman was arrested with a cache of weapons, including, chemicals that could have been used to make a poison gas.

The release of 17 individuals raises questions in its own right about Malaysian CT efforts. In general, there is a lack of transparency regarding Malaysia’s internal security and CT operations. Yet Washington has given the Malaysians credit for doing a good job in combating terrorism. The release of so many people does cast some aspersions on Malaysia’s commitment to combating terrorism. The fact that only 80 people were arrested in the country where JI was founded and incubated has always been of concern. Malaysia in many ways is a very permissive environment. While the release was not politically motivated, I think that one must look at such a large release in the context of the ongoing political feud in Malaysia between Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi and his predecessor Mahathir Mohammad and their competition for support amongst the Malay electorate.

The most obvious question is whether Malaysia’ rehabilitation project works. According to my data base, albeit not perfect but which I corroborate using press reports and the reporting of two Malaysian human rights organizations, there have been 72 people related to JI-AQ-KMM who have been detained since mid-2001 under the ISA. Most press reports use the figure “over 80” and the occasional press-report will say “over 100.” 70-80 is a fairly accurate figure.

By my records, of the 72 that I have confirmed were detained under the ISA, 37 have been released, either unconditional releases or with restrictions on their travel, etc. Of the 35 who are still under ISA detention, 12 were part of the Darul Islam cell arrested between March-April 2006; i.e. they have been detained for just over half a year. In sum, with the exception of the DI-12 cell, well over half of the JI-AQ-KMM members have been released.

The earliest releases came in July 2004, thus people had been detained for roughly three years. Most have been released after 4-5 years.

There has been little transparency about the re-education/de-programming process. It obviously involves some theological study and counseling. But a fair bit of evidence is that fear and coercion play a very important role. People are not necessarily convinced of the error of their ways, or are any less militant, but that the state’s coercive powers are an effective deterrent. Moreover, there are still a large number of hard cases, so there are obvious limits to the program. A few of the detainees have appeared in the press, but only in state-controlled media.

Singapore, too has released a large number of their JI suspects. Of the 66 detained under the ISA in conjunction with terrorism, 35 (53%) are still under detention orders. There has been slightly more transparency about Singapore’s re-education program, but still there are many questions that need to be asked.

Without legal proceedings and public testimony, journalists, researchers and analysts are deprived of important information. So much of our knowledge about JI has come from court transcripts and proceedings in Indonesia, where more than 200 people have stood trial. More importantly, the ISA detentions and the subsequent lack of transparency continue to reinforce the public’s perception that the ISA is a political tool, and that the suspects are detained for political reasons, not because they are legitimate security threats to the state and public.

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