5 October 2005 | Sydney Morning Herald Online
By Christopher Kremmer
Banning Jemaah Islamiah would be a knee-jerk reaction that would not prevent bombings like those in Bali and could make terrorism even harder to eliminate, an 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 the latest bombings in Bali, which 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, Dr Rohan Gunaratna, said this week 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 told the Herald.
“I think Rohan Gunaratna needs to revisist his own country of Sri Lanka and see why the knee-jerk reaction of banning militant groups like the Tamil Tigers and JVP [Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People’s Liberation Front] has failed.
“Banning only pushes the issue underground and prevents democratic governments from draining the swamp in which these terrible organisations grow,” Mr Nair said.
While acknowledging the need for stronger laws, Mr Nair strongly opposes moves to weaken institutions like the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
Mr Nair said Australian politicians had erred by adopting a 10-year sunset clause for new anti-terrorism laws. “You don’t save democracy from terrorism by making it less democratic. Where laws infringing democratic rights have been imposed, as they have in India, they caused so much injustice that they had to be removed. I was only one of many victims of them.”