- [Woman] Welcome to the Deakin Alumni
Webinar with Professor Greg Barton.
Professor Greg Barton is Research
Professor and Chair of Global Islamic
Politics at the Alfred Deakin Institute
for Citizenship and Globalisation.
He is one of Australia's leading scholars
of both modern Indonesia and of terrorism
and countering violent extremism. Over the
past 20 years he has undertaken extensive
research on Indonesian politics and
society, especially in the role of Islam
as both a constructive and disruptive
force. He has been active in interfaith
dialog initiatives and has a deep
commitment to building understanding of
Islam and Muslim society.
Now over to you, now, Greg.
- [Professor Barton] Thank you, everyone.
It's really nice to have a go at this
first webinar for the year. And, as usual,
I have a large slide set with more slides
than we probably need, but these slides
are available to you to look through in
your own time. So they're really a framing
device to move quickly through a big topic
today. I want to try and do several
things, I want to talk about the
particular problem we face in the Asia
Islamic State in our region,
in Australia and in Southeast Asia, and
talk about some specifics,
a little historical background, but also
touch upon what we understand about
countering violent extremism. As opposed,
for example, to countering terrorism as a
tactical response that's well developed,
countering violent extremism tries to go
more holistically upstream as well as
downstream and address issues of
preventing, as far as possible,
recruitment, radicalization, and of course
violence, and then working with existing
dynamics to try and work within it to turn
things around. So I'll get into that at
the end of things, but I want to start by
looking at making sense of the threat of
terrorism in general terms.
Because I think there's a real danger that
we can be so gripped by our sense of
anxiety about terrorism that we take it
out of proportion. And of course that's
what terrorism is about, it's about
invoking terror because people want to try
and bring about some sort of political
change. That political change may be
couched in religious language or other
ideological language, but one of the
definitions of terrorism is it's the use
of violence or the intimidation,
threat of violence, to bring about some
sort of political change.
As opposed to, for example, a hate crime
or regular criminal violence.
So one of the best ways of framing this
issues is to look at the Global Terrorism
Index done by the Institute for Economics
and Peace. It's three editions out now,
the last edition late last year. Based on
data from the START Maryland,
University of Maryland, international
database on terrorism. So when you look at
the data, and the map makes it very clear,
there's five countries that in recent
years they accounted for pretty much
four-fifths of all deaths from terror
attacks. So we have Nigeria, which has
suffered from bad governance.
A new government now and struggling to
reform, but still a long way to go.
We have unfortunately recently conflict in
Yemen which has made things very much
worse there. But before that the pairing
of Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and
Pakistan together with Nigeria accounted
for almost 80% of all deaths from
terrorism. So when you do the
international ranking you see those five,
now six, countries coming out
disproportionately at the top of the list.
And for the purposes of our discussion,
notice that Southeast Asia gets a look in
there. Moving down the list, with Thailand
and problems in the south of the
Philippines putting them on the list at
number 12 in the Philippines,
number 15 for Thailand. So serious
problems, but nothing like the existential
threat represented by terrorism in those
half-dozen countries.
If we look at another product from that
same institute, the also annual Global
Peace Index. Which is a similar sort of
thing, but concerned with violence more
generally. We can see that the two maps
largely line up. A difference though when
it comes to the Global Peace Index in our
region is that most of Southeast Asia
shares the same level of high levels of
peace, low levels of violence and
instability, as does Australia. Whereas
there have been relatively more terror
attacks in Southeast Asia. But the
takeaway from this is that our corner of
the world is fairly benign. Terrorism is
an ongoing problem that we'll be talking
about. It can't be ignored, but it's not
an existential threat in our corner of the
world. Violence is a problem, the Global
South suffers disproportionately from
terror violence. The countries I
mentioned, but also other countries in
Africa and in Asia and the Middle East
suffer disproportionately from terror
attacks. Of course we've had horrible
things happen in Paris, in Nice,
in Orlando, etc., but the regular
reoccurring attacks occur in the Global
South. And in the case of Islamist
movements like Islamic State,
a fundamentalist extremist movement,
claiming to defend Muslims,
but most of its victims being fellow
Muslims, fellow Sunni Muslims,
and it's something we need to frame.
Violence in general terms is an enormous
global problem, so the Institute for
Economics and Peace breaks it down this
way. When you look at it you realize that
if we could, and this is the whole reason
for the institute, if we could work on
conflict resolution and peace building,
we'd get an automatic economic dividend of
very substantial amounts.
But most of the violence comes from
military conflict. Not necessarily state
on state, but civil wars and from
interpersonal violence. So domestic
violence, violent assaults, which tend to
be predominantly driven by people who are
relationships and know each other even
more than stranger violence.
These are enormous problems. And of course
you could add to that,
in a different realm, problems of youth
suicide, which is a serious problem in
Australia. Against all of that, terrorism
is really a minor problem.
So we need to put terrorism in context.
It's not an existential threat,
it's not the biggest concern about
violence and harm. It's a fact that we're
going to have to live with and it's going
to be around for a long time.
We need to make sure that our response to
it is as proportionate as it can be and as
effective as it can be and that the things
that we do in responding to violent
extremism are, as far as possible, things
that make society better,
not degrade it. In Southeast Asia there
are other problems to do with violent
extremism beyond terrorism. So we've had
famously in Indonesia protests against the
Chinese Christian Governor of Jakarta as
he runs for election to that office.
He replaced the elected Joko Widodo, who's
now President, and became,
as his Deputy, became the Governor. So now
he's facing for the first time election
for that office. Very popular, very
successful, but his opponents have taken
sectarian politics as a way of targeting
him, seeing it as his weakness.
So 12th of December last year, massive
rallies in Jakarta. More than half a
million, perhaps three-quarters of a
million people. It has to be said they
were peaceful, and that's a very good
thing. But it's still a worrying sign of
one of the issues of our time, which is
populist politics. We see it with Donald
Trump, we see it with Brexit, we see it
with Marine Le Pen's tilt for power in
France, etc. , etc. And it's mostly not
violent. But it makes those who would
pursue violent ideologies, it gives them
more cover and more material to work with.
In the case of Islamic State in our
region, the basic argument of this
movement, given its ideological position,
is to claim to be the authoritative
interpreter of Islam. And specifically it
claims that those who don't follow their
caliphate, their vision, are not proper
Muslims at all, they're kafir,
they're murtads, they're apostates. So
this accusation of accusing somebody of
not being a proper Muslim is called
takfir, or takfiri behavior.
And it's regarded as very poor form
throughout Islamic history,
to presume to judge somebody else's faith
is regarded as very poor form.
Of course modern fundamentalists break
with good grace and good practice.
We have some specific terror threats, as I
alluded to earlier,
in Southeast Asia that are really quite
serious, and that's why the Philippines
and Thailand feature as highly as they do.
In the case of the Philippines,
there have been long-running problems in
the south of the Philippines,
largely to do with Muslim minority claims
on territorial control.
Most of those claims have been addressed
through a series of peace processes,
but at the same time we've had the series
of splint breakaway groups that have
resisted the [Inaudible] peace
processes. And then the most significant
splinter group at the moment is, or at
least one of the more violent groups,
is the Abu Sayyaf group, responsible this
week, once again in sad news,
the decapitation murder of a European
hostage. You might ask the question why
this group could be successful in
maintaining a presence, given years of
work against them. It's because they
control a small archipelago where they
have a degree of superiority with their
technology. They are a criminal ragtag
group that looks more like a criminal
kidnapping-for-ransom group than it does a
disciplined ideological movement. But
they've aligned, in the last few years,
with the Islamic State and that threatens
to give them discipline and focus in a way
that that criminal group by itself
wouldn't have. They make use of asymmetric
technology. So, for example, very fast
shallow draft boats, as the one you see
captured in the photograph. Which means
they can zoom in in waters that they're
familiar with and basically hijack a boat
and take people prisoner and make money
from kidnapping for ransom. One of the
reasons that there's concern that this
problem may get worse rather than better
is that the new President in the
Philippines, President Duterte, has
famously launched a very violent so-called
war on drugs and threatens to do the same
thing with the problems in the south,
and that could end very badly. At the same
time he's aligned with China and has
openly spoken of breaking with the U.S.
Just at the time, of course,
when the U. S.has a new President who may
respond to such rhetoric by saying,
"Well, if you don't want to support us,
then we'll get out of here." Now that may
be resolved through military leadership on
both sides, as opposed to the civilian
presidents. But the prospect is that just
as things are getting worse in the
Philippines, political responses may mean
that there's an opportunity space for
Islamic State to jump in. Now Islamic
State in general has worked on two tracks.
It's had an insurgency which has given it
actual territory in Iraq and Syria,
which it's now losing steadily as it loses
first East Mosul, now West Mosul,
then in coming months this year the city
of Raqqa. But a global insurgency,
which it's likely to increase its efforts
at as it loses territory in the Middle
East. The Middle East was its major
branding exercise in having a caliphate.
But even if it loses that territory, it's
a threat in our region as it is around the
world. Not as much as a threat as it is in
Northern Africa or the Middle East,
but still a threat. And Southeast Asia and
Australia really need to take this threat
seriously without being paranoid and
exaggerating the threat. One of the
reasons it's such a threat is that more
than any other group in modern history
it's growing foreign terror fighters at a
very large scale, probably of the order of
38,000 over the last three, four years. A
third of those may now be dead.
A good proportion, in the case
of Europe, will have returned home.
Half of them come from North Africa
and the Arabian Peninsula,
but the other quarter, the other half or
one-quarter, come from Europe and a
quarter come from Central and Greater
Asia, including Southeast Asia and East
Asia, in ways that are very complex.
Australia has rates of recruitment that
look like rates of recruitment in Europe,
despite the fact that we would think
ourselves a wealthy and stable country
that wouldn't be so vulnerable.
So there, of course, was a precursor to
this with the conflict in Afghanistan in
the 1980s that saw the birth of al-Qaeda.
But the problem in Iraq and Syria has
developed three times more quickly with
three times the number.
It's like the Afghan conflict on steroids,
and this time it's in the age of the
Internet and of social media. So it's a
globally connected insurgency in a way
that the fight against the Soviet
occupation in Afghanistan wasn't.
We've seen at least 600 foreign fighters
from Indonesia, maybe 1,000,
no one really knows for sure. We've seen
an emphasis on taking families,
children, young children. This vision of
building a perfect utopian state,
a caliphate, for a while there at least,
was an alluring appeal.
It's lost some appeal as they're losing
territory, but it's still a rising threat
in terms of its capacity to energize
movements across Southeast Asia.
One of the reasons it's been so effective
is that Southeast Asia,
like most parts of the Global South, like
most parts of Asia but Southeast in
particular, is very big on social media
and has some has some of the world's
largest Facebook and Twitter communities
and Islamic State has exploited those
social media connections very effectively.
At the same time global politics,
it has to be said in an age of populist
demagoguery of ultranationalist politics,
has made it easier for Islamic State to
recruit. So when Donald Trump banned
immigration from seven Muslim-majority
states, ISIS turned around and said it was
a blessed ban because it made their
recruitment and their support so much
easier to build. And there's a lot of
truth in that. Going back a little bit,
the Pew Trusts did research on expressed
support for Islamic State.
As we'd expect, in Syria where there's a
civil war it's very high,
some people feel that ISIS is the only
defender they have. Other troubled
countries, such as Nigeria or Tunisia,
it's high. But it's hard to see why 11% of
Malaysians, more than 1 in 10 Malaysians,
and therefore a higher portion of young
Malaysians, would express positive
sentiment about ISIS. And of course even
in Indonesia, which is altogether more
stable, 4% express support for ISIS.
Which is a small number, a small
proportion, but a large absolute number in
a country of 265, 270 million people.
We've seen a focus in ISIS propaganda,
too, in Southeast Asia that's different,
for example, from al-Qaeda.
So beginning in September 2015 they spoke
explicitly about targeting Jakarta,
Malaysia, at the same time talking about
attacking places like Dubai.
Which in the past al-Qaeda never would
have deemed sensible to do because it uses
such places for rest and recreation, for
recruitment and for support,
for banking, for logistics. There was an
attempted bomb attack in KL last June.
It was a hand grenade that didn't kill
anyone, fortunately. It looked like a
criminal problem, but it turned out the
person who threw the grenade was an ISIS
supporter. This is the first time ever
that an international terror group has
launched an attack in Kuala Lumpur and it
surely won't be the last time such thing
is attempted. We've seen very significant
levels of recruitment in Malaysia,
hundreds of individuals, some of them
serving in the military and the police
force have been persuaded that somehow
this so-called caliphate is legitimate.
And there are complex reasons why they're
such a success in Malaysia in recruitment,
but the way in which religion has been
politicized has opened an opportunity
space for extremism. So although Malaysia
is a successful multicultural nation that
certain has a population that is
peace-loving and wants to avoid violence,
there are points of vulnerability that
sees it struggling with a problem much
larger than it's ever had to deal with
before. Indonesia acknowledges that it has
a problem, but it doesn't know how large
the problem is because it's very hard.
A country like Australia, struggles with
tracking who's leaving the country,
who's arriving. For Southeast Asia it's
must harder, again. So the Indonesians
acknowledge that people are slipping under
the radar, both leaving the country and
coming back. Of course people could leave
Indonesia via a small boat to Malaysia or
the Philippines or Thailand and come back
by a complex route, it's not necessarily
going to be obvious they're returning from
Syria or Iraq. What we are seeing,
and this has to do with a lag in
legislation, is open recruiting for
Islamic State right in the heart of
Jakarta. So this mosque here in Menteng,
the old moneyed center of the city, we see
people recorded on film swearing an oath
of allegiance to Islamic State. We see a
massive online presence with thousands of
radical sites. Of course some of them can
be shut down, but they can be replaced as
quickly as they can be shut down. It's a
very difficult problem to solve.
And we see a background to Islamist
extremism in Southeast Asia,
a small scale but significant, that gives
a basis for Islamic State to build upon.
So a quick recap of that is useful for
framing this problem. Of course we were
aware, or became aware, of the sort of
problems that Southeast Asia,
particularly Indonesia, was facing in
October 2002 with the Bali bombing.
At the time it was thought it may have
been some sort of odd elite political
contestation, given that Suharto had only
stepped down four years earlier and
there's still some fluidity. Some said it
was foreign interference.
There was a lot of open skepticism that
there could be a domestic group capable of
such a large and devastating event. It
turned out, of course, that it was a
domestic group, that it came out of
historical roots, the Darul Islam movement
of the 1940s, '50s, and early '60s, a kind
of separatist movement that became
increasingly Islamist as it faced
oppression. The Indonesian government at
the time thought that brute force had
eliminated that movement,
of course we see in hindsight that
multiple generations arose out of it that
carried on at a smaller scale. Things
became a little bit more obvious in the
1970s when ironically out of a
counterinsurgency program the military,
there was a re-energizing of ostensible
support for extremism led by Abdullah
Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir. They were
arrested in the late '70s,
they were successfully able to contest
their sentencing and they got out of jail
in '82 and they fled shortly afterwards to
Malaysia. This is at a time when the
conflict against the Soviet occupation in
Afghanistan was reaching a height and they
recruited hundreds, perhaps around 300,
Southeast Asians from not just Indonesia
but from Malaysia, from the Philippines to
travel. And in 1993 they broke with the
Darul Islam movement and declared their
own movement. When they returned from
Afghanistan the so-called Afghan alumni
were the core of this group.
Most of them did not support terrorism or,
in their terms, violent jihad in
Indonesia, they said it was not the time
or the place. But a small minority of
leaders were responsible. And even before
the Bali bombing, in hindsight it's clear
that local problems in Maluku, in Eastern
Indonesian, and in Sulawesi,
in Central Sulawesi, gave an opportunity
for local recruitment and local training.
So conflict zones were opportunity spaces.
And in the years prior to the Bali bombing
there were a series of events that, at the
time, were not well-understood.
For example, Christmas Eve 2000, a series
of coordinated bombings.
Then after the Bali bombing regular
attempts to try and recreate,
never at the same scale, those sort of
attacks. So the Marriott Hotel was
attacked in 2003, the Australian embassy
was attacked in 2004,
there was a return to Bali in 2005. In the
process of this coming out of the Bali
bombing of 2002 the Indonesian police
stood up a special unit,
a detachment, khusus, "Densus" is the
shortened contraction, Densus 88,
Detachment 88, which has become extremely
effective in counter-terror operations.
You will have noticed, perhaps, this week
in Bandung there was an attempt to set off
a bomb in a cooking pot, which was foiled,
it failed, and the would-be bomber in that
process was killed. But mostly there's
been success in taking people in alive and
prosecuting them, 1,000-plus arrests and
prosecutions. Considerable success in
tactical responses to terrorism. So this
came out of multilateral operations,
but particularly bilateral operations
between the Australian Federal Police and
Indonesian police. One of the initiatives
was the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement
Cooperation, which was very effective in
doing tradecraft capacity for Southeast
Asians, offices, and others across the
region. And so this threat has been
contained. Up until Islamic State emerged,
the threat of terrorism was not eliminated
but it was contained. There was a nasty
surprise along the way.
In July of 2009 there was a second attack
to the Marriott Hotel and that sister
hotel. And in the wake of that it was
clear that there had been some charismatic
recruiters, in this case the Malaysian
Noordin Mohammad Top had managed to
successfully time and time again recruit
young people for bombing operations.
A major training camp was established in
the northern tip of Sumatra in Aceh in
2010. But since then the problem has been
largely dealt with, it's not re-emerged
until Islamic State turned up. And now the
present Islamic State has re-energized the
threat across the region. This Islamic
State threat comes out of a group that was
called al-Qaeda in Iraq because Musab
al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian sort of street
hoodlum, a petty criminal, became a
would-be terrorist, spent time in al-Qaeda
camps, had an uneasy relationship with
Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri,
moved to Iraq in 2002 ahead of the 2003
invasion, led an insurgency which he named
al-Qaeda in Iraq and got reluctant support
from the al-Qaeda leadership.
Reluctant because he was extremely
sectarian, he played upon anti-Shia
sentiment in a country that was
predominantly Shia. The al-Qaeda
leadership felt this was unwise and not
strategic. He was killed in an air strike
in 2006 and it looked like the problem was
largely contained. Then the Sunni
Awakening successfully, in 2007/2008, saw
this insurgency and other insurgencies
largely quashed down to just a few hundred
fighters. And so they thought the threat
was dealt with, but 2011 American troops
pulled out at the same time civil war
broke out in Syria and the remnants of
this group, now led by Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, began to rebuild. We didn't
really pay a lot of attention to them
until June 2014 when they surged down the
Tigris River in the center of Iraq,
taking the second largest city, Mosul. And
of course Mosul is now the site of
contestation to try and drive them out of
Iraq. When Baghdadi declared himself a
caliph and declared a caliphate, it was
thought to be incredible and not likely to
be taken seriously. It turns out it
immediately got very serious support.
This was a very powerful brand, including
in Southeast Asia, and it evoked very
strong support. One of the things that was
associated with this brand was the idea
that people should leave their home and
migrate, they should make Hijrah to join
the utopian state. So figures from the
past, such as Abu Bakar Bashir from his
jail cell, declared on video their
allegiance to Islamic State.
In the center of the national capital
there were open demonstrations supporting
ISIS. That level of public support is
being controlled now, but it's still a
problem. Of course Islamic State,
so-called, embedded itself along the two
river valleys, the more populated areas of
these Arab zones, and embedded themselves
along those two river valleys in
Sunni-majority communities. Which were
feeling, in the case of Iraq, a lot of
injustice and oppressions from the new
Shia government of Prime Minister Maliki
and then current Prime Minister al-Abadi.
And it gave them a sense of legitimacy as
defenders of the Sunnis.
Of course they murdered the Sunnis quite
relentlessly and used tactics of
intimidation to control their territory,
but they played upon these ethnic patterns
of Sunni majorities. In the case of Iraq a
Shia-majority country,
but Sunni majorities in the west and in
the north, and in the case of Syria a
Sunni-majority in a country ruled by a
Shia minority. They played on those ethnic
tensions and exacerbated them in ways that
were very opportunistic and effective.
They effectively ran a quasi-state with 12
districts in Iraq and 12 districts in
Syria and 9 ministries. Some of them, such
as the Ministry of Media,
extremely effective. At the same time
secret documents reveal a parallel state
that was very much a police state, a state
of intimidation and fear.
Using religion as a front, but basically
using methods of PSYOPs or of intimidation
to control people. And so we see a strange
kind of hybrid. We see the arrests of
people such as the man in Young in New
South Wales, 42-year-old electrician,
one of the fanboys, one of the sort of
global network of supporters.
What we don't see is the people really
controlling them, many of whom are former
Iraqi military officers who were caught up
in the de-Baathification after the
occupation of Iraq in ways that are very
consequential. They've used very effective
messaging and media, which has grown
increasingly sophisticated in the period
since al-Qaeda. Western government and
other government media hasn't really
improved greatly, but Islamic State has
moved on dramatically from al-Qaeda before
it. Their publications have a couple of
strong themes. They stress divine
judgment, they stress a world divided into
two camps: the domain of war,
Dar al-Harb, and the domain of Islam, Dar
al-Islam. Traditional concepts,
but of course distorted and misapplied.
The upshot being they say that the streets
of Sydney or Melbourne are zones of war,
that there is an active global conflict
that justifies a military response. This
idea of taking sides is emphasized in
their speaking out against Muslims who
don't support them. They say that there is
no gray zone in the middle, "You either
support us or you don't support us." So
after the [Inaudible] attacks,
for example, they criticized imams who
said [Inaudible] and criticized
the Muslims of Paris who didn't support
them. They've attacked Shia mosques very
overtly, but most of their victims,
in fact, have been fellow Sunni Muslims.
They justify this by saying these people
are lost in ignorance and darkness and
that the only way to overcome this
ignorance is "to align yourself with us,
come and join us physically if you can."
They, at one level, are an apocalyptic
movement, that's to say they stress this
idea of linear time coming to an end, an
inflection point where human history will
be wrapped up in a great battle, the
malahim, the great battle.
Which they cite, in ways not dissimilar
from some of the Christian apocalyptic
cults, as occurring in the Middle East.
They use the name Dabiq,
a town in Northern Syria, because it's
mentioned [Inaudible] Hadith,
the prophecy. And they use this name for
their magazine, for example.
So they say, "Come and join us. We will
face many martyrs, we acknowledge that.
But God is on our side, so we will prevail
ultimately." And they use this for an
exaggerated approach to violent jihad
beyond what even al-Qaeda has carried out
in the past. They see a reversal of
history where the decline of Muslim
civilization will be reversed with the
dramatic rising up of their pure
understanding of religion. They have a
message which is attractive to young
people. Not many young people, it has to
be said, but a small minority because it
is so muscular. So when consistently
Muslim leaders say that Islam is a
religion of peace, they say in return it's
not a religion of peace,
it's a religion of the sword, it's a
religion of judgment and justice.
Which, for young people, is a very
attractive way of presenting muscular
religion. We see it across all religious
traditions to some extent with modern
fundamentalism. But they offer a message
that's very personal,
as well. They say that if you make Hijrah,
"if you migrate and come and join
us"...and even if you can't do that
physically, at least if you do it online
and in terms of your allegiance. "If you
come and join us, make Hijrah,
you'll find forgiveness, you'll find
redemption," it's a redemptive narrative.
So as al-Qaeda in the past said you can't
be a good Muslim without supporting jihad,
their formula is a little more
sophisticated. They say if you want to be
a true Muslim, there's no gray zone,
you've got to leave the land of darkness
and ignorance. Make Hijrah, migrate, get
out of home where Mom cooks for you and
does your laundry and you hang out with
your mates and waste your life.
Make Hijrah, leave that behind, join the
community, the jama'ah,
fight the taghut, the tyrants, and support
the khilafah, the utopian Islamic state,
the caliphate. And I'd say this is the
pattern with the prophets of the past.
This area in Mesopotamia occupied by
Islamic State of course is the area
through which the Hebrew Bible and the
Quran suggest the prophet Abraham moved
through on his journey to Canaan. And so
they invoke this image and say,
"You can follow in the millah of Abraham,
follow in the footsteps of the prophet
Abraham, and join us. But you don't even
need to board an aircraft,
it's very simple. So abandon the lands of
shirk, lands of superstition and
misunderstanding, come to the land of
Islam, of true religion where the black
banner of Islamic State flies." And even
if you can't do that,
people like Man Haron Monis, the Lindt
Café gunman, are held up as an example of
somebody whose life was going nowhere, who
came from a [Inaudible] Rafidi,
a Shia, Persian background, but changed
his allegiance and became a Sunni
extremist. They hold such people up as
examples of redeemed individuals who have
transformed their lives and who offer an
example of redemption.
And they use this general pattern of
fighting injustice, of carrying out divine
judgment, of offering personal redemption
to justify terrorism.
So as we have just war, justified
defensive war, when somebody...for
example, World War II or in the Axis
powers, Germany invades Poland and there's
a response. That concept of just war is
well-understood. Poorly executed in
practice, of course, but well-understood.
They extend it to this idea of terrorism
being part of a global battle, a global
insurgency. It's got shades of sort of
21st century popular culture. So this page
from Dabiq Magazine,
their e-magazine, deliberately plays on
images of a Star Wars movie poster.
They are successful in targeting youth
popular culture as well as making a claim
on older understandings of religion. Their
level of appeal to foreign fighter
recruitment is very variable. As mentioned
earlier, it's strongest in the
neighborhood of the Greater Middle East
and the Arabian Peninsula.
Also in Turkey next door, through which
many foreign fighters have come.
Areas like Libya, of course, that are
enjoying...well, not enjoying,
are suffering from chaos through political
collapse. And neighboring Tunisia,
affected by the problems of its physically
larger neighbor, Morocco,
where there's very high youth
unemployment. All of that is kind of
understandable, but France and Britain
have very high rates of recruitment.
And it's not because life in France and
Britain is miserable, it's because
recruiters find some way of getting to
young people, young men and women who
sense alienation, suffer with
unemployment, who are vulnerable to
recruitment. The remarkable thing is that
the rates of recruitment in Australia are
the same as they are in France and
Britain, suggesting that this is about the
pulling power of this message and this
movement as much as it is about push
factors at home. So they've had enormous
success in Europe, as many as 5,000,
6,000 foreign fighters have gone from
Europe to Syria/Iraq. Many have since
returned, planning a longer insurgency
back at home. We saw this pattern earlier
with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the
numbers with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan,
what became al-Qaeda out of the fight
against the Soviets and military
occupation, saw maybe just 4,000 foreign
terror fighters, another 6,000 perhaps
joining them after the conflict was over,
but not many seeing front-line service.
Bosnia/Somalia also drew in foreign
fighters, but Iraq/Syria we're looking at
between 35,000 and maybe as many as 40,000
foreign fighters from all around the
world, including probably 1,000-plus from
our region, 200-plus from Australia.
It's re-energized the old Jemaah Islamiyah
networks. It's in some cases it's not just
been Islamic State, but the al-Qaeda
affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.
But the idea of the caliphate has given
fresh energy into extremist movements.
There's some hope, of course, the defeat
of IS in West Mosul, having already been
defeated in East Mosul, the second largest
city, the biggest city that they're
holding. And then the eventual defeat in
Raqqa and Syria. We'll see the ending of
this movement, but it won't end so
quickly. And there are opportunity spaces
in Southeast Asia that they will try and
exploit through a global insurgency.
We've seen some foreshadowing of this
already. The beginning of last year,
January 14, there was an attempted attack
in Jakarta. It wasn't very effective,
the attackers were very inexperienced
largely because a more experienced team
had been arrested in December 2015. So the
B team turned up and the A team had been
neutralized. The worry of course is that
an A team may turn up again at some stage.
There were a series of events through the
course of last year,
an attempted suicide bombing of a police
academy that killed only the bomber.
More seriously an attempted attack on a
shopping mall in Surabaya,
Indonesia's second largest city, that was
stopped just because of good intelligence
in the neighboring city of Malang where
the terror leader was arrested.
And we've seen the mass organizations of
NU, Nahdlatul Ulama, and Muhammadiyah come
together to work with the community to
deal with violent extremism.
We've seen a recognition from the
government of the need to engage in
countering violent extremism approaches,
we're seeing pilot initiatives at
rehabilitation programs in prisons.
There's a general consensus we need to
really get serious about dealing with the
problem more holistically and take a
broader approach to countering violent
extremism. This broader approach has to
work at prevention as well as
rehabilitation. The same time we see
Islamic State increasingly focusing on
Southeast Asia, along with other regions.
The new magazine that came out late last
year, Rumiyah, refers to Rome,
Western civilization, the idea being that
Western civilization is ending.
Rumiyah is published in seven languages,
one of which is Malay/Indonesian.
And of course famously their English
edition, the first edition referenced an
Australian fighter, Ezzit Raad, who had
been arrested over in an earlier terror
plot a decade earlier, and his young
nephews and brother-in-law who got caught
up in the violence. But the focus on
Australia in reference to Broad Meadows
and Brunswick, to Bankstown and Bondi, to
the MCG and the SCG and the opera house,
it was a chilling call-out for people to
respond. It wasn't a sign of capacity,
but it was certainly a sign of intent. In
the Australian context we see very tightly
networked close associations, including
the man, for example, arrested in Young on
Thursday this week who, it turns out, his
uncle had been subject to arrest in 2015
for seeking to source Chinese-made
surface-to-air-missiles for Islamic State.
He fled with his family to Syria, his
nephew was under surveillance the last 18
months. That fits a familiar pattern of
strong social networks.
So those cases that we know about, we see
this pattern time and time again.
And it speaks to the need to be active in
society and working with potential points
of vulnerability trying to prevent
recruitment, trying to work
towards...particularly working with
vulnerable individuals. Hundreds of young
Australians have been stopped from
traveling over the last two years to
Iraq/Syria. And many of them are being
followed up by community groups led by
state police, but there's a lot more work
that needs to be done to be effective.
We understand some of the warning signs
now of who are being recruited.
We need to pay attention to those warning
signs and try and affect interventions
through family and friends in the first
instance, but with some expert backup,
to try and prevent recruitment ever
occurring, or at least reverse
radicalization at its earliest stages.
Most of the interventions we've done in
the CVE space so far have been primary
interventions, they've been aimed at the
general population to build social
cohesion. That's a very important,
necessary thing, but we need to do more
work in the secondary space.
For example, these young people who have
been stopped from traveling as well as
those who have been arrested and are
serving time in prison, the tertiary
interventions. An important need in
Australia, it will be more important in
the future, it's a very important need in
Indonesia, where success by Densus has led
to 1,000-plus arrests. But people are
normally in prison for a few years,
then they're out, having served their
sentence. And without rehabilitation are
likely to reoffend again. So in
conclusion, we now understand
radicalization is largely a social
process, people join a network and they
join a group before they internalize the
ideology. But ideology narratives are
important, this narrative of the caliphate
is very powerful. Even if it's physically
defeated on the ground, it will still be
very powerful. We need to work at this
problem for the long-run, we need to try
and prevent recruitment as best we can.
We'll also need to work out
rehabilitation, where that's not always
possible. And there's broad consensus of
the need to do this. Doing it particularly
in the secondary and the tertiary
intervention spaces is challenging,
but there is at least consensus across our
region, across Southeast Asia.
We need to work together on this. And if
we do it well, it can actually enrich
society and make society better. So given
that we're dealing with a minor problem
that's not an existential threat that
takes enormous resources,
it's important that we respond to this
problem in ways that actually build
society.
- Thank you so much, that was a really
insightful presentation.
Now we have time for questions, so I'll
give you a few minutes to pop in your
questions now. So just to let you know,
Professor Greg Barton has agreed to share
the presentation with anyone who may be
interested. So you can e-mail me at
deakinalumni@deakin.edu.au and I can share
a copy with you. So our first question,
"What would be the most important thing a
government could do to assist Indonesia
with this problem?"
- Well, there's no one thing that we can
do. The good news is that the response to
the Bali bombing of October 2002 resulted
in some very practical bilateral
cooperation. It helped the Indonesians set
up their Detachment 88.
It led to the establishment of the Jakarta
Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation,
which, despite the name, is actually in
Semarang in the National Police Academy.
And that's been very effective in training
not just Indonesian police,
but police from around Southeast Asia and
people from other backgrounds.
All of that has to do with sort of
tactical responses to counterterrorism.
So in the last two years there's been
recognition of the need to work more
holistically alongside that to also do the
countering violent extremism,
the CVE, piece. And there isn't a single
one thing that we can do,
but it's clear that, in terms of CVE
interventions, Indonesia needs to work
harder on tertiary interventions in the
prison space and prisoners leaving prison
and those who are detained, 1,000-plus in
terrorism charges. It also needs to work
with community groups in trying to prevent
recruitment. It needs to make some
amendments to legislation to make it
easier to prosecute. At the moment you can
leave the country, go to Syria, come back,
and it's very hard to charge people.
People have been charged, it does happen,
but the legal framework is difficult.
That's something for Indonesia to sort
out, but there could be discussions about
what works in terms of legislation, they
could be sharing experience.
And this has to happen in the spirit of
cooperation. Australia is not superior to
Indonesia in this space, but we face a
common threat. We can learn some things
together. And one of the things we can
learn together is how we do the
interventions with youth at risk,
secondary interventions, to try and
prevent or reverse recruitment, and how we
do the tertiary interventions for those
who already got caught up in trouble. For
Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia,
as hundreds of people possibly return from
the conflict zone, particularly as the
caliphate physically begins to crumble,
that's going to be a real pressing issue.
We need to basically carry on the
direction that we are carrying on,
but to accelerate this idea of secondary
and tertiary interventions.
- Thanks, Greg. What do you think is the
role of the ASEAN in fighting extremism in
SEA, Southeast Asia?
- Of the ASEAN?
- In fighting extremism in...
- Oh, ASEAN, yes. Okay, yes. ASEAN is of
course a regional forum for Southeast
Asian nations and we could have a long
discussion about how effective it's been
or not effective. It has a policy of
non-adherence and some people see that as
making it less effective than it could be.
But it has to be said ASEAN has continued
to perform better than critics would
expect. The important thing is there is a
community now that identifies through the
ASEAN framework and the JCLEC training
center at the police academy in Semarang
has proven very successful in working
across the ASEAN nations in building
capacity. That's tactical capacity to
respond to terror threats. Now we need to
try and replicate the same thing through
ASEAN mechanisms to collectively develop a
capacity to counter violent extremism,
to prevent recruitment, radicalization, to
reverse it, to affect rehabilitation.
So ASEAN by itself isn't a vehicle for
magically making problems resolve
themselves, but the fact that you have
Southeast Asian nations working in a
community now. And that perhaps owes
success not just to ASEAN,
but also to AirAsia and to cheap travel
and to people moving around the region.
But ASEAN plays a role in terms of a
collective [Inaudible].
Australia has been privileged to be
included in many of those discussions
beyond ASEAN. And I think that the more we
can do in that broad frame of cooperation
the better for everyone. Such multilateral
cooperation of course is often difficult
to make very effective, the best
cooperation tends to be bilateral.
But starting with a multilateral forum
like ASEAN is a good way of encouraging
those multilateral interventions between
Singapore and Indonesia,
between Malaysia and Singapore, Australia
and Indonesia. There's a lot of things
that we can do in terms of
building capacity, basically.
- Thanks, Greg. Our next question from
Glenn, "How much does biased reporting on
popular media, such as print and
broadcast, encourage increase in
radicalism?"
- Well, we need to be cautious of thinking
that anything about this problem is
simple. So sometimes media reporting is
simplistic, and that's a problem in
itself. But conversely we can't solve this
problem just by changing media reporting.
And media, to be fair, will always look
for stories on breaking events and report
on them, that's what media has to do.
Donald Trump can complain about the media,
but it's not going away. But what is
important is that we understand that
modern terrorism is a struggle for hearts
and minds. It's very much about emotional
persuasion as well as intellectual
persuasion. And the way we talk about each
other, the way that we portray Muslims in
particular, very much shapes how easy or
difficult it is for recruiters to come
along and say, "They don't respect you,
they hate you, they don't think you're
part of Australia," "They don't think
you're part of Indonesia," whatever it
might be. So we, I think,
most sensibly can work with media to be
more sophisticated in the way that we talk
about these things and to give credit
where credit is due. I think media
reporting in general has improved year on
year. And, for example,
when a drug-addled unstable individual, in
a murderous rage, drives his car at
pedestrians on Bourke Street in the middle
of Melbourne, some initial media reports
describe it as terrorism, but very quickly
the media said, "This is not terrorism,
it's some hateful crime of mass murder."
And it was recognized that it wasn't
terrorism. Similarly, when a French
Algeria backpacker attacked his friends in
a hostel outside Townsville, even though
he may have used the words "Allahu akbar,"
"God is great," in his murderous rage,
media very quickly recognized this was not
a terror attack, it was a deranged
individual. So, to be fair,
media has got better at this than it has
in the past. The problem perhaps at the
moment is less about media per se and more
about our political discourse.
So when we have Islamophobic groups, like
the Q Society in Melbourne,
and where the Q society and other such
groups get the support of elected
officials, such Senator Cory Bernardi or
George Christensenm that's a concern.
Because it undermines the government, it
undermines the general political response,
it lowers the tone of political discourse,
and it plays into the hands of recruiters.
It's not directly supporting terrorism,
but it makes the job of recruiters easier.
That's why, for example, ISIS greeted
Donald Trump's ban on the seven
Muslim-majority countries as being a
blessed ban, because it made their job
easier. And that's actually the bigger
challenge for us. It's easier to blame the
media, but the bigger challenge is
our national discourse in general.
- Thanks, Greg. Our next question from
Peter, "It seems much of the targeting for
recruitment is of teenage people.
I suggest that there is a level of
disenchantment by many young people with
modern society. For example,
of the current Australian political
system. Do you think there are any drivers
for disenchantment with Australian Muslim
youth compared to the general young adult
population? What can be done to connect
young Muslims with young non-Muslims to
enable them to have a dialog and share
their concerns and create shared ways
forward?"
- I think those are good questions, and so
instinct in the questions is sound,
but we need to be a little bit cautious.
On the one hand it's true that a group
like Islamic State, more than al-Qaeda,
targets teenagers, certainly
20-somethings, but also school-age
teenagers much more than al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda was very fussy about who it could
recruit, it had a very tough filtering
process. Islamic State basically will sign
anyone up and encourage a total stranger
to act in their name, and then proclaim
them to be a hero. So it's a broad funnel,
it's a very crude instrumentalist approach
to crowdsourcing and it's targeting young
people. Now the young people are easier to
target when they're feeling alienation and
they don't have strong social connection.
But if we suggest that the problem is just
driven by alienation, then it wouldn't
explain why the problems we have in
Melbourne and Sydney are equal to the
problems in Paris and Marseille when the
social problems on the ground, the push
factors, are arguably greater in the case
of France or in even many British cities.
So I think that part of the issue we're
seeing here is not just alienation, but
also very effective use of social
networks, social media, friendship, as a
mechanism for recruitment,
often online. Which doesn't rely solely on
alienation and on push factors,
but also on the pull factor of this very
powerful brand of caliphate and very
effective recruitment networks. Having
said that, I completely agree with the
sentiment that we need to work on building
social cohesion, encouraging dialog.
In general, and recent studies reported
this last week bear this out,
the more people get to know each
other at the individual level,
the more non-Muslims mix with Muslims,
vice versa, the less they will be living
in a world of imagined difference and the
less they'll succumb to prejudice and
misunderstanding, and the more that
they'll form strong social bonds that will
build capital and build social cohesion.
In the CVE context this is called a
primary intervention. But one of the
dilemmas we face is, because this is the
easiest thing to do, there's a danger it
might be the only thing we do.
And we need to do this, but at the same
time look for those individuals who are
particularly vulnerable. And that means we
need to work with community so that family
and friends can speak up and identify
individuals who are struggling and we make
targeted secondary interventions to those
individuals. The Islamic Council of
Victoria just this last month announced an
initiative for a hotline which people can
call between 6 a.m.and midnight about any
problems they have, bullying at school,
drug and alcohol problems, relationship
problems, but also recruitment,
so that there could be these targeted
secondary interventions.
So we do need to work on social cohesion
and dialog, and anything in this space
that we can do is basically worth
pursuing. We also need to look at more
targeted interventions.
- Thanks, Greg. Glenn, who previously
inquired about biased reporting in the
media, has inquired, "How do we promote
responsible journalism?"
- I think we're sort of moving in that
direction. As I say, credit where credit
is due, there's a lot of things to be
concerned about with media reporting.
But I think one of the things we need to
do is give credit when credit is due.
So when a media outlet tries to deal with
the complexities of an issue in a way that
doesn't use prejudicial language, that
doesn't generalize the problem,
that doesn't sort of blame just one
community, we need to recognize that and
acknowledge it. So the conversation that
we have as a nation around the media,
which we increasingly have in some media
programs but also in social media,
needs to identify sort of best practices,
sort of identify when somebody has done a
good job and say, "That's a good way of
handling the issue," and to politely speak
critically to when it's been done badly.
And we are seeing that beginning to happen
in the media. So, to be fair, the
instances of biased and shallow reporting
increasingly outweighed by an effort to
try and understand the issues.
One of the things that we need to do more
though is to have more,
frankly, non-Anglo faces on our television
screens and more Muslims in the
conversation when we talk about problems
affecting Muslim communities.
That will naturally correct some of the
misunderstandings that come from having
discussants who don't have person
experience.
- Thank you, Greg. Next question from
Peter, "Are there hearts and minds
programs in Australia that could be
considered in some sense targeted to
antiterrorism or anti-violent extremism?
If so, by who are they [Inaudible]?
- Well, there are many programs that seek
to build social cohesion as sort of a
general primary intervention, as well as
some programs doing secondary
interventions. I think one of the things
that we're learning about countering
violent extremism is that, as a term, like
"counterterrorism" or any other term we
can think of, automatically acquires some
baggage. And some people recoil from the
term "CVE" and "CT" and feel it to be a
tainted term. There aren't any perfect
terms, so I don't think we can solve this
just be looking for the perfect term.
But what it does mean is that when a
community is doing, or a group is doing,
good work in what we might recognize as
being countering violent extremist,
we don't have to label it as such. So a
lot of the work that's being done at the
moment, in the example I gave of the
Islamic Council of Victoria with a
national hotline, the hotline is for
people to call in, Muslim parents to speak
to other Muslim parents and Muslim young
people to speak to other Muslims about all
sorts of personal problems, which may
include concerns about recruitment and
radicalization. I think that speaks to the
way forward. We don't have to narrowly
define things in terms of CVE and we
should be cautious, particularly when
we're working on the side of government,
damaging good initiatives by putting
government branding or stepping overtly
into the space where communities are doing
good work. There's not time to articulate
all of the initiatives currently going on,
but there are many programs around
Australia that have been working quietly
and very effectively. Some of them, of
course there's always trial and error in
the space and things don't always work,
but I think we need to basically be
prepared to get behind community groups,
give them a go, let them try something.
If it works, build on it. If it doesn't
work, try something else.
- Thanks, Greg. And we're almost running
out of time, so we'll answer one more
question. What sort of education should
our schools be including in their
curriculum, assuming you believe that this
should be there?
- I think we need to approach this with
real wisdom and grace and care.
First of all, as I said at the beginning
of this discussion, terrorism is not an
existential threat. So if we frame it as
being an existential threat,
then we exaggerate the threat out of
proportion to other threats.
I do think we need to acknowledge that
domestic violence, youth suicide,
other problems involving, for example,
drug and alcohol abuse and violent assault
are bigger problems by far than terrorism.
And so we shouldn't overly fault around
terrorism, but there are some things we
can do. I think we need to look at school
curriculums when it comes to history and
discussions of international affairs,
politics, to try and present not so much a
variety of opinions,
but a diversity of perspectives. So we are
a multicultural society and we should
acknowledge that there are different ways
of thinking about history and different
ways of thinking about which things are
important. The days in which we only
focused on sort of British history or
European history and ignored Australian
history are thankfully largely passed, but
we need to, in talking about the world
today, acknowledge, for example, that the
invasion of Iraq in 2003 is widely
criticized, not everyone agrees with it.
In fact, probably the majority of security
specialists and serving military officers
agree that it was unwise and that mistakes
were made. Not intentionally, but
unintentionally. And have a conversation
about that, create safe spaces in the
classroom to discuss international
affairs. We don't have to give a
prescriptive answer, but if somebody can
ask a question and say, "Why do I see,"
for example, "drone attacks against
so-called terrorists in Pakistan that kill
so many civilians?," we need to be able to
discuss that safely in the school
environment. And there's no simple answers
there, but if we don't have that
conversation at school, then kids will
look for it online and they will find
potentially much more biased discussion
online. And the danger is they end up in a
world where they're told to trust nothing
they see at school or in the media and to
trust only what they find with their new
friends. So there's something we can do in
the education space to counter that.
Of course there's the broader discussion
about respect for diversity for
difference. We should have greater
literacy of religious identity and
religious convictions and practice, on the
diversity within communities as well as
across communities, so that Australians
understand our nation better and feel more
comfortable with difference and diversity
and feel that it's safe to have
discussions about difference and
diversity. Now we do a lot of that very
well already, but that's always an area we
can work out much better in.
Our media environment looks more diverse
than it did even a decade ago,
but we still have a long way to go. We
need to try and create opportunities for
including different voices. And if we're
talking about the Muslim world and Muslim
problems, then include Muslim voices in a
way that opens up a discussion rather than
leaves some people
feeling they're excluded.
- Thank you, Greg. That's all we have time
for today. Thank you so much for your time
today, Professor Greg Barton, and thank
you to our audience for tuning in and
participating in the discussion. Remember
you can submit feedback to
deakinalumni@deakin.edu.au, and a
recording of the presentation will be
available on our website within the next
few weeks. And Greg Barton has shared his
e-mail address displayed on the screen. So
if your question has not been answered,
feel free to get in touch with him. Thanks
again, everyone, and have a great day.
