[Kabar-indonesia] WP: A New Terror Hub? [+NYT: Attack on UK 'Highly Likely; ' Naxalites]

[JoyoNews at aol.com]

3 reports: 

- WP: A New Hub for Terrorism?
  [In Bangladesh, an Islamic Movement 
  With Al-Qaeda Ties Is on the Rise]

- NYT: British Security Says Terrorist 
  Attack on Nation Is ‘Highly Likely’ 

- Guardian: Maoist guerrillas and tribal rebels 
  threaten India's industrial boom [Plans to 
  develop the mineral wealth of the country 
  could be derailed by Naxalites]

The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 2, 2006

Opinion

A New Hub for Terrorism?

In Bangladesh, an Islamic Movement 
With Al-Qaeda Ties Is on the Rise

By Selig S. Harrison

While the United States dithers, a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement 
linked to al-Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence agencies is steadily converting 
the strategically located nation of Bangladesh into a new regional hub for 
terrorist operations that reach into India and Southeast Asia.

With 147 million people, largely Muslim Bangladesh has substantial Hindu and 
Christian minorities and is nominally a secular democracy. But the ruling 
Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) struck a Faustian bargain with the 
fundamentalist party Jamaat-e-Islami five years ago in order to win power.

In return for the votes in Parliament needed to form a coalition government, 
Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has looked the other way as the Jamaat has 
systematically filled sensitive civil service, police, intelligence and military posts 
with its sympathizers, who have in turn looked the other way as 
Jamaat-sponsored guerrilla squads patterned after the Taliban have operated with increasing 
impunity in many rural and urban areas.

To the dismay of her business supporters, the prime minister gave the coveted 
post of industries minister to Matiur Rahman Nizami, a high-ranking Jamaat 
official who has helped promote the growth of a Jamaat economic empire that 
embraces banking, insurance, trucking, pharmaceutical manufacturing, department 
stores, newspapers and TV stations. A study last year by a leading Bangladeshi 
economist showed that the "fundamentalist sector of the economy" earns annual 
profits of some $1.2 billion.

Now the BNP-Jamaat alliance is rigging the next national elections, scheduled 
for January, to prevent the return of the opposition Awami League to power. 
Voter lists are being manipulated, and the supposedly neutral caretaker 
government and the commission that will run the election are being turned into 
puppets.

The BNP argues that coalition rule helps moderates in the Jamaat to combat 
Islamic extremist factions. But the reality is that Jamaat inroads in the 
government security machinery at all levels, starting with Home Secretary Muhammad 
Omar Farooq, widely regarded as close to the Jamaat, have opened the way for 
suicide bombings, political assassinations, harassment of the Hindu minority, 
and an unchecked influx of funds from Islamic charities in Saudi Arabia and the 
Persian Gulf to Jamaat-oriented madrassas (religious schools) that in some 
cases are fronts for terrorist activity.

With some 15,000 hard-core fighters operating out of 19 known base camps, 
guerrilla groups sponsored by the Jamaat and its allies were able to paralyze the 
country last Aug. 17 by staging 459 closely synchronized explosions in all 
but one of the country's administrative districts. When the key leaders of these 
groups were captured, they were kept by the police in a comfortable 
apartment, where they were free to receive visitors. A cartoon in the Daily Star of 
Dhaka on July 24 showed them lounging on a rug, conducting classes in bombmaking. 
Their fate and present place of confinement is uncertain, and all of the 
major guerrilla groups are back to business as usual.

The bitterness of Bangladeshi politics is often attributed to a personal 
vendetta between two strong women, Prime Minister Zia and the Awami League leader, 
Sheikh Hasina Wajed. But the roots of the current struggle go back to 1971, 
when Bengali East Pakistan, led by the Awami League, broke away from 
Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan to form the nation of Bangladesh. The Jamaat, which 
originated in the western wing, opposed the independence movement and fought side 
by side with Pakistani forces against both fellow Bengalis and the Indian 
troops who intervened in the decisive final phase of the conflict.

For Pakistan's intelligence agencies, especially Inter-Services Intelligence 
(ISI), the legacy of the independence war has been a built-in network of 
agents within the Jamaat and its affiliates who can be utilized to harass India 
along its 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh. In addition to supporting tribal 
separatist groups in northeast India, the ISI uses Bangladesh as a base for 
helping Islamic extremists inside India. After the July 11 train bombings in 
Bombay, a top Indian police official, K.P. Raghuvanshi, said that his key suspects 
"have connections with groups in Nepal and Bangladesh, which are directly or 
indirectly connected to Pakistan."

A State Department report cited evidence that one of the Jamaat's main 
allies, the Harakat ul-Jihad-i-Islami, also headquartered in Pakistan, "maintains 
contact with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan." Bangladesh Harakat leader Fazlul Rahman 
was one of the six signatories of Osama bin Laden's first declaration of holy 
war against the United States, on Feb. 23, 1998. Since the October 2002 Bali 
bombings led to repression of al-Qaeda, some of its Indonesian and Malaysian 
cells have shifted their operations to Bangladesh.

What makes future prospects in Bangladesh especially alarming is that the 
Jamaat and its allies appear to be penetrating the higher ranks of the armed 
forces. Among many examples, informed journalists in Dhaka attribute Jamaat 
sympathies to Maj. Gen. Mohammed Aminul Karim, recently appointed as military 
secretary to President Iajuddin Ahmed, and to Brig. Gen. A.T.M. Amin, director of 
the Armed Forces Intelligence anti-terrorism bureau.

The respected journalists in question cannot write freely about the Jamaat 
without facing death threats or assassination attempts. The U.S.-based Committee 
to Protect Journalists has published extensive dossiers documenting 68 death 
threats and dozens of bombing attacks that have injured at least eight 
journalists. "We are alarmed by the growing pattern of intimidation of journalists by 
Islamic groups in Bangladesh," the committee said recently. "As a result of 
its alliance with the Jamaat-Islamiyah, the government appears to lack the 
ability or will to protect journalists from this new and grave threat."

The Bush administration has yet to speak with comparable candor. The latest 
State Department annual report on terrorism mentioned only one of the three 
Jamaat militias as a terrorist group and avoided direct criticism of the BNP for 
its coalition with the Jamaat, referring only to the "serious political 
constraints" that explain the government's "limited success" in countering 
"escalating" terrorist violence. On July 13 the U.S. ambassador called Bangladesh "an 
exceptional moderate Muslim state."

The United States and other donors gave Bangladesh $1.4 billion in aid last 
year. There is still time for the administration to use aid leverage and trade 
concessions to promote a fair election by calling openly and forcefully for 
nonpartisan control of the Election Commission and the caretaker government. In 
addition to implicitly threatening an aid cutoff if it is rebuffed, the 
administration should offer the powerful incentive of duty-free textile imports from 
Bangladesh if Prime Minister Zia cooperates.

In Pakistan, the United States has been gingerly pushing Gen. Pervez 
Musharraf for democratic elections because it needs the limited but significant 
support he is giving against al-Qaeda and fears what might come after him. But what 
is the excuse for inaction in Bangladesh, where the incumbent government 
coddles Islamic extremists and a strong secular party is ready to govern?

The writer, a former South Asia bureau chief of The Post and the author of 
five books on South Asia, has covered Bangladesh since 1951. He is the director 
of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and a senior 
scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

----------------------------------------

The New York Times
Wednesday, August 2, 2006

British Security Says Terrorist Attack on Nation Is ‘Highly Likely’ 

By ALAN COWELL

LONDON, Aug. 1 -- The security services here made public their assessment of 
the probability of a terrorist attack for the first time on Tuesday, telling 
Britons they faced a “severe” threat, meaning that an attack was “highly 
likely.”

British authorities also suffered what they took as a significant setback in 
their counterterrorism strategy when three appeal judges upheld a previous 
ruling that 
so-called control orders -- a form of house arrest -- that were used to 
detain six 
Iraqi suspects constituted a breach of their human rights and should be ended.

John Reid, the home secretary, said the terms of the control orders would be 
eased. But, he said, he would appeal to the House of Lords to overturn the 
judges’ conclusion that the orders, confining the men indoors for 18 hours a day 
and setting other restrictions, were illegal under European laws forbidding 
indefinite detention without trial. 

The developments focused new attention on the problems British authorities 
have faced in dealing with terrorist suspects they do not wish to bring to 
court, and in enlisting public support for counterterrorism measures criticized by 
civil rights organizations. 

Under a new system introduced in an effort to make the intelligence services 
seem more open, the threat level appeared on several Web sites, including 
www.intelligence.gov.uk, which is run by the espionage and counterterrorism 
establishment, and www.mi5.gov.uk, run by the domestic security service.

The level of peril facing Britons has been contentious since last year, when 
the security services lowered the threat assessment two months before the July 
7 bombings, in which four bombers killed 52 passengers on the London 
transport system.

“Threat levels are designed to give a broad indication of the likelihood of a 
terrorist attack,” the intelligence.gov.uk site said. “They are based on the 
assessment of a range of factors, including current intelligence, recent 
events and what is known about terrorist intentions and capabilities. 

“This information may well be incomplete, and decisions about the appropriate 
security response are made with this in mind.”

Unlike the previous secret grading system, which offered seven levels of 
threat, the new system has been simplified to five, from “low” to “critical,” 
meaning an attack is expected imminently. 

“Severe” is the second-highest level, but the Web site did not say what kind 
of attack was thought likely. The assessment is roughly the same as it has 
been for a year.

Britain’s apparent vulnerability relates to assumptions among intelligence 
experts that its military presence in Iraq as America’s most resolute ally has 
helped make it a target. 

Assessing the threat from Al Qaeda, the Web site said, “British and foreign 
nationals linked to or sympathetic with Al Qaeda are known to be present within 
the U.K.”

The relative openness follows other measures by the intelligence elite to 
swap its traditional cloak-and-dagger for a Web-and-wired modernity. Last October 
MI6, the secret intelligence service, which once denied its own existence, 
opened a Web site to advertise for recruits.

But that has not satisfied legislators, at least those preoccupied with human 
rights. A cross-party parliamentary panel known as the Joint Committee on 
Human Rights took umbrage when Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director general 
of MI5, refused to be questioned about recent antiterror legislation.

Her reticence seemed to revive legislators’ concerns about the quality of 
British espionage after intelligence reports used to justify the invasion of Iraq 
in 2003 
proved wrong. 

---------------------------------------

The Guardian (UK) 
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
 
Maoist guerrillas and tribal rebels threaten India's industrial boom 

Plans to develop the mineral wealth of the 
country could be derailed by Naxalites 

by Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi

When Tata Steel began building the country's third-biggest steel mill in a 
plot of the 5,000-hectare (13,000 acre) Kalinganagar industrial area in the dust 
bowl of eastern India this year, executives thought they would be welcomed.

After all, they reasoned, the company, with revenues of more than £3bn, was 
bringing development and jobs to one of India's poorest places. However, by the 
end of the day, the bulldozers had not moved an inch and 12 people lay dead 
after what appeared to be a pitched battle between locals, armed with axes and 
spades, and police who carried guns and tear gas.

Tata Steel, part of a leading Indian industrial conglomerate with a history 
of social projects, faced a troubling territorial issue: how to build a factory 
on land that its inhabitants, indigenous people, had refused to leave?

The new plant would produce 6m tonnes of steel a year - an industrial surge 
that would create much-needed jobs in Orissa, which declares more than half its 
population as living in poverty.

B Muthuraman, managing director of Tata Steel, said: "We are working with the 
local people. They do want schools, the water, [and] the development that the 
plant will bring. It is some other elements who caused the problems. The 
action has delayed [the plant at Kalinganagar] by months."

These "other elements" are now at the centre of a corporate debate over how 
to exploit resources in the mineral-rich but poverty-stricken tribal belt in 
India. Tata Steel would not say who the instigators in Kalinganagar were, only 
that they were "extremists".

What happened in Orissa, say many experts, could easily be replicated across 
India, where the same mix of tribal disaffection could bubble up into a series 
of peasant uprisings. A bigger danger is that holding sway over a vast area 
of India is an armed group of left-wing guerrillas, referred to as Naxalites, 
who see industrialisation as an unwanted intrusion and threaten a violent 
contest over rural lands.

Rebels

When the Guardian visited Naxalite guerrillas deep in the forests of central 
India earlier this year, Gopanna Markam, a company commander of the People's 
Liberation Guerrilla Army, stressed that the "exploitation" needed to be 
stopped. "The government is bent upon taking out all the resources from this area 
and leaving the people nothing."

This is not a threat to take lightly. Naxalite bandhs or shutdowns in 
Jharkhand state, with rich deposits of iron ore and dolomite, have cost local 
steelmakers 60 days of lost work a year. Armed rebels have carried out several 
attacks in southern Chhattisgarh on the state-owned National Mineral Development 
Corporation iron-ore mine.

Coincidentally, it is post-Maoist China's surging economy that is driving 
global demand for raw materials and in India it is Maoist-inspired 
revolutionaries who seek to dent their supply.

The Naxalites, who follow a radical Maoist ideology, have waged a 
low-intensity guerrilla war against India for decades. They control 92,000 square 
kilometres (36,000 square miles) of the country, from Nepal to the southern state of 
Andhra Pradesh. This "red corridor" runs along some of India's poorest parts 
and through areas inhabited mainly by tribal peoples. In many places Naxalites 
have in effect become the state - running schools, digging wells and 
administering justice through "people's courts".

Although the movement has splintered many times in the 40 years since it 
began, a unified leadership emerged last year under the Communist Party of India 
(Maoist). The new party, with a 10,000-strong armed wing, was promptly banned. 
By April India's prime minister was calling the Naxalites the "single biggest 
internal security challenge ever faced by our country".

With $85bn (£46bn) of investment slated for mineral-rich India - including 
proposals from South Korea's Posco; the FTSE 100 mining firm Vedanta, which 
holds its annual meeting in London today, and the world's biggest steel company, 
Mittal Steel - financial analysts have begun to fret over the implications of 
trying to build an industry in the absence of the state.

The brokers CLSA said in a note last month: "Lack of policy initiatives and 
the inability to win over the tribals, the largest stakeholder in the 
hinterlands where the Maoists hold sway, means the Naxalite movement is becoming 
stronger." The report pointed out that Maoist violence in India had already claimed 
374 lives in 500-odd attacks in the first six months of this year.

Anirudha Dutta, a senior investment analyst with CLSA, said the problem was 
trying to square industrial growth with decades of government indifference. 
"Kalinganagar was a manifestation of the same problem. Tribal people do not have 
the education to get jobs at these plants. They sell their land at 
government-determined prices and then end up working as contract labourers.

Discontent 

"This economic insecurity is a serious source of discontent and is being 
exploited by the Naxalites. Government has to take steps to solve this because 
industry cannot. You are talking of about $30bn of foreign investment here - it 
is a lot of money," said Mr Dutta.

However, some in industry are undeterred by gloomy predictions. JSW Steel, 
the flagship steel and power company of the OP Jindal group, is pressing ahead 
with plans for a 3,500 hectare plant in Jharkhand producing 10m tonnes of 
steel, despite threats to some potential investors from Maoists.

"The problems are not particular to India or mining," says Ravi Kastia, group 
executive president of Aditya Birla and chairman of the Confederation of 
Indian Industries' mining group. "In difficult geographies around the world we see 
the same problem. We have seen copper mines close in Indonesia and Chile 
because of similar issues. But the demand is still there and so will the 
investment."

Activist's challenge

Bratindi Jena, an Orissa activist, has travelled to Britain to challenge the 
head of Vedanta Resources at today's annual meeting. Vedanta is developing an 
$800m aluminium refinery in Orissa's Lanjigarh area under an agreement with 
the local government two years ago. It has been disrupted by clashes with local 
tribes, some of whom have been displaced. Vedanta says it has offered them 
accommodation, schooling and jobs. Ms Jena says: "There are a number of serious 
environmental and human rights concerns with this project that the company has 
so far failed to address."

sidebar: Planned plants

Projects planned in tribal belt states with active Maoist presence

Investment ($m)

Chhattisgarh

Texas Powergen, US (power plant, sponge iron) 1,207

Vedanta (aluminium smelter) 550

Jharkhand

Tata Steel (steel plant) 10,109

Mittal Steel (steel plant) 8,696

Orissa

Tata Steel (steel plant) 3,261

Posco (steel plant) 10,870

Vedanta (alumina refinery expansion) 800

Vedanta (aluminium smelter) 2,100

Mittal Steel (steel plant) 9,000

Source: CLSA

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