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IN THE NEWS 2005 Banning JI fruitless exercise, says expert 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." |
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