The recent conviction of three Islamist terrorists in a Cambodian courtroom illustrates once again the extent of the jihadist threat facing the free world and the efforts radical Islam is making to destroy it.
Last December 29, a Cambodian judge handed the three Islamists life sentences in prison for their part in a plot to blow up the American and British embassies in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, in 2002. Two of the convicted are Thai Muslims, while the third belongs to Cambodia’s indigenous Muslim community. All are believed to be involved with Jemaah Islamiyah, an al Qaeda-linked terrorist network in Southeast Asia, which wants to establish an Islamist super state in the area. A fourth defendant, an Egyptian, was acquitted.
The Cambodian prosecutor in the case said the three planned the terrorist attack with Hambali, the mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombing in Indonesia, which killed 202 people, many of them foreign tourists. The three Islamists were accused of using a Saudi Arabian-funded Islamic school, where they were employed as teachers, as a cover to carry out the embassy bombings. Cambodian authorities subsequently closed down the Phnom Penh-area school and expelled from the country 28 foreign Muslims and their families, who originated from as far away as Nigeria.
Hambali, who has been in American custody since his arrest in Thailand in 2003, is known to have spent time in Cambodia the previous year. It is believed the Indonesian terrorist intended to use the country as a base to launch terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia. The three terrorist-teachers were also accused of having hidden him during his sojourn in Cambodia, during which time he taught them to use explosives. Hambali and two others involved in the plot were convicted in absentia during the same trial and also were given life sentences.
America’s embassy in Phnom Penh welcomed the Cambodian court’s conviction of the three Islamists. The terrorists’ arrests occurred in May, 2003, shortly before former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s visit to Cambodia for a regional security conference and after American intelligence had reportedly tipped off Cambodian security authorities. The Phnom Penh Post newspaper also reported that agents from the Central Intelligence Agency interrogated the suspects after they were taken into custody.
The trial’s outcome reinforces the findings of a United Nations Security Council committee last October that Cambodia and other countries in the region could become a “breeding ground” for terrorists if they do not receive international assistance. The chairman of the committee, Hector Munoz, Chile’s U.N. ambassador, said after a visit to Cambodia that the country “causes concern,” since it lags far behind in its capabilities to fight terrorism.
The fact that Hambali was in the country, Munoz said, should serve as a warning, since “he was not vacationing there, clearly.”
To add to the worry, it is suspected that Islamists are trying to radicalize Cambodia’s indigenous Muslim population, which numbers about 500,000 in a nation of 12 million, 90 per cent of which is Buddhist. Most Cambodian Muslims belong to the ethnic Cham minority, while the rest are Malays. And like in other parts of Southeast Asia, Cambodia’s Muslims practice a form of Islam that contains Hindu and Buddhist influences.
However, Islamic fundamentalists, many from the Arab world, have come into the region to “purify” the Islam practiced there with either a strict Wahhabi version or by a form of Islamic orthodoxy called Tablighi Jama’at. Originally an India-based organization founded during British rule to teach the Koran, Tablighi Jama’at is now suspected of sending teachers to other countries to get local Muslims involved in the jihad against Israel and the United States. Because of their radicalism, some states, including Russia and China, have now stopped issuing visas to TJ teachers.
Bjorn Blengsi, a Norwegian anthropologist who has studied Cambodia’s Muslims, has noted that more and more of their number are joining these radical movements, which are creating tensions in their community. Arab charities are also active in setting up puritanical schools and mosques around the country. Moreover, about 80 Wahabbi students leave Cambodia every year for religious studies in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, while additional Cambodian Muslim students are contacted in Malaysia, their traditional destination for Islamic education, and are persuaded to move to madrassas in Pakistan. Upon their return, Blengsi notes, they take a hard line towards to the traditional practice of Islam in Cambodia.
The Norwegian also remarks that the case of the three teachers “highlights the potential terrorist threat” and that foreign instructors may also now be teaching Islamist doctrine in Cambodia. But Cambodian Muslim children, he notes, will continue to attend the radical schools because they fulfill the desire for education that their impoverished country is unable to meet.
Ahmad Yahya, a leading Cambodian Muslim and a member of his country’s legislative assembly, told the New York Times in 2003 that he could guarantee his people, but not the Bangladeshis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Saudis and other Muslim foreigners living in his country. But if radical Islamist activities are left unchecked in Cambodia for a generation, it is doubtful whether Yahya’s successors will be able to do the same.