5 October 2005 | The Age Online
By Christopher Kremmer
BANNING Jemaah Islamiah would be a knee-jerk reaction that would not prevent bombings such as those in Bali and could make terrorism even harder to eliminate, a respected Indian human rights campaigner and former prisoner has warned.
Ravi Nair — who spent a year in New Delhi’s notorious Tihar jail under emergency laws in the 1970s and who now heads the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre in New Delhi — is in Sydney at the invitation of the Edmund Rice Centre, a faith-based research and advocacy group.
Responding to calls for JI to be banned after last weekend’s bombings in Bali killed 22 people, Mr Nair said the Indonesian Government should be trusted to make its own decisions, free from pressure by Western governments.
“If we pressure a strong, moderate leader like President (Susilo Bambang) Yudhoyono and force him to do our bidding, it exposes him to the charge of being our lackey. The extremists win,” he said.
A Sri Lankan expert on terrorism, Rohan Gunaratna, said this week that Australia should put pressure on Jakarta to proscribe JI and legally designate it as a terrorist organisation. Mr Nair, who for decades has observed the shifting relationship between nation-states and militant groups, said governments from Britain to India ended up talking to groups they once banned.
“If you want to destroy terrorist groups, you need to use a scalpel. What’s happening is that we’re using a hammer, and causing a lot of unnecessary collateral damage,” he said.
Federal and state leaders meeting in Canberra last week had erred by adopting a 10-year sunset clause for any new terrorism laws and a review of such laws after five years, he said.
Annual legislative review and a sunset clause of at most five years and preferably two years, with all detentions subject to periodic review, were better options, he said.