Posted: Feb 14, 2020 4:52 am
Indonesia has sealed the fate of hundreds of its citizens and former nationals drawn to fight for the Islamic State group, in a Presidential decision blocking a return to their homeland.
Immediately after his two-day state visit to Canberra, Joko Widodo settled on a decision that had vexed his Government for months.
Most of the estimated 689 men, women and children who joined the fight for the Islamic caliphate in Syria and Iraq will be left stranded in the Middle East because of the ban.
At the end of a cabinet discussion at the Presidential Palace in Bogor, Indonesia's Coordinating Minister for Security Affairs, Mohammad Mahfud MD, said the safety of 267 million citizens had to be protected from what he called the ideological "terrorist virus" of the foreign fighters.
"The Government has no plan to return, or will never return, the foreign terrorist fighters back to Indonesia," Mr Mahfud said.
Cabinet's deliberations had been based on advice from the anti-terrorism agency BNPT and police.
This has nothing to do with Indonesia being afraid that these returned terrorists will make their way to Australia. Indonesia fears for the safety of its own citizens. It has calculated that the odds of these terrorists spreading their ideological virus to others citizens as far more likely than the country's chance of deradicalising them.
It couldn't be motivated by something more mundane like that they just don't care about them, consider them traitors who have forfeited their rights, and don't want to spend any time or money on it?
Traitors according to who? The laws are unclear on this. You are considered a traitor, if you have committed treason against the state- which they haven't, they are fighting foreigners on foreign land. Or if you have sworn allegiance to a foreign country, especially demonstrated by joining and fighting for the military of that country - which they have not done, technically speaking. International laws do not recognise ISIS as a sovereign state. If Indonesia forfeits their citizenship, claiming that these ISIS terrorists have sworn allegiance to another country and fought for the military of that country, then Indonesia will be the first country in the world to recognise ISIS as a sovereign state. The right thing to do is to bring these terrorists home and possibly persecute them for engaging in terrorism, but since these terrorist acts are committed overseas, Indonesian laws has no jurisdiction to persecute them.
Earlier on, the president has released a public statement denouncing them as "ISIS ex-citizens [of Indonesia]" as opposed to "ex-ISIS citizens". This is an illegal move, since according to the aforementioned reasons, these citizens have not sufficiently breached the laws to effectively render themselves stateless. So even more recently, Mahfud (Coordinating Minister for Security Affairs) had to correct the president's statement and publicly said that Indonesia is not taking away their citizenships.
Does this mean Indonesia will accept their return after all? If that's the case, it won't be the first time that Indonesia's finest politicians pussyfooted around terrorism issues. Back in 2019, in a shameless bid to win the re-election, the president flirted with pandering to the Muslim hardliner voters and attempted to have a terrorist mastermind released from prison. Public outrage ensued. A sophisticated Twitter bot, gathering and analysing social media posts, revealed that the chance of the president losing votes from his most ardent supporters is far more likely than him gaining the votes of Muslim hardliners. Faced with the prospect of losing the election, the president verbally moonwalked all over himself, publicly declaring that the terrorist mastermind will not be released after all.
The fate of these terrorist foreign fighters rests on public opinion, and at the present moment, the public majority are against Indonesia returning these terrorists. Even if the same public also hypocritically believes that Islam is a religion of peace and thus terrorists -in theory- could be effectively deradicalised through the proper teaching of peaceful Islam by the nation's best and brightest Islamic preachers and scholars. But, alas, like all theories related to religion, this is just another theory that will forever remain in theory sugarcandyland.