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| Southeast Asia |
| Rohan Gunaratna arrested, deported from Indonesia |
| 2005-09-09 |
| This pisses me off to no end. Rohan identified all the principles in the Bali bombing nearly a year before the blast, yet Indonesia deports him and Jones but cuts Bashir's jail sentence because of his back pains? My guess is he started finding or it looked like he was going to find ties between the Indonesian government or military and the various Islamist groups fighting in the Moluccas. Indonesia will deport a prominent Singapore-based counter-terrorism expert and author of a book on al Qaeda who was detained in the Moluccas for doing research while holding a tourist visa, a police official said on Friday. Moluccas police spokesman Artstianto Darmawan said police arrested Rohan Gunaratna earlier this week in the region, where vicious communal fighting between Muslims and Christians from 1999 to 2002 killed more than 5,000 people. A peace agreement in early 2002 halted the fighting in the Moluccas, which at its height had attracted militants linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan, is the author of "Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror", and is a frequent commentator on Islamic militancy and terrorism in Asia. "We arrested him a few days ago ... because of visa violations. He was using a tourist visa while doing research here," said Darmawan. "He's going to be transferred to the immigration office and be deported soon." Gunaratna's detention follows the June 2004 expulsion from Indonesia of Sidney Jones, the Southeast Asia director of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group thinktank. Jones, who had been based in Jakarta, was expelled under a different administration after a series of hard-hitting reports on terrorism in Indonesia. She was recently allowed to return and live in Jakarta. Indonesia also barred Australian academic Edward Aspinall, an expert on the civil conflict in Aceh province, from entering the country earlier this year. In both cases, the government defended its right to admit whom it chose but officials had been vague about precisely what either had done to cause the expulsions. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 I find it amusing that the democracy that Bill Clinton imposed on Indonesia has seen Islamist terrorist attacks on Westerners, the return of al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists to Indonesia, the closure of churches and the persecution of Sunday school teachers. All so that Clinton could carry out his pastime of screwing America's long-time allies (Indonesia, for one) and sucking up to its long-time enemies (China, for one). In time, Clinton's reign will be seen to have far more negative and far-reaching consequences than Carter's. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-09-09 01:29 |