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IN THE NEWS 2005 Banning
JI not the answer: rights advocate 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. |
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