COMMENT Boy, how peaceful it is Singapore must be feeling these days. For more than two years, the nation teetered on what must have been a dreadful reckoning with an escaped terrorist who, though not quite of the Osama Bin Laden kind of pedigree, knew just what to do if and when he commandeers a hijacked plane.
Mas Selamat Kastari was no ordinary individual. The Indonesian-born who had spent most of his formative years in Singapore is the leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah, known otherwise by its acronym of JI. The JI is the Southeast Asian “branch office” of terror kingpin Osama's al-Qaeda network.
But what he did on Feb 28, 2008, was something that will go down in the annals of Singapore’s history as one of the city-state’s greatest ever escapes, or more dubiously the nation’s greatest blunder. Not only was Kastari able to outfox his very watchful guards at the super fortified maximum security prison in Whitley Road. He was also able to do so all by himself with no assistance whatsoever from fellow inmates. The escape had turned him into an instant cause célèbre.
But make no mistake. Kastari is no folk hero. He was a dissolute terrorist who made no secret of his sharp and running dislike for Singapore which had tracked and jailed his fellow collaborators soon after the Sept 11 attacks in the United States.
He was bent on wreaking revenge with his intention to crash an aeroplane into Singapore’s fabled Changi Airport and re-enact the Sept 11 horror. This bloodcurdling vow and his subsequent escape sparked a massive manhunt matched only in scope, intensity and character by the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s.
The plot to set the airport ablaze, if it had materialised, would have driven a gaping hole into Singapore’s vaunted security apparatus. And along with it, Singapore would be kicked down a few notches in its global security perception index – just the very kind of fear the republic had so desperately tried to avoid in all of its history and at all costs.
Yet what had happened and what possibly could have happened, underscores just the very kind of lessons that are now confronting countries from the United States to Germany, which, as everybody now knows, recently had its own Parliament, the Reichstag, in the cross-hairs of Osama's al-Qaeda group.
Special legal instrument
From what history records and what evidence suggests, terrorists are a special breed. They never give up as they are fanatics. And fanatics, as war-time British prime minister Winston Churchill rightly pointed out, never change their minds and also their subjects.
It was perhaps with that in mind that Singapore has had special legal instruments in place to deal with terrorists to fill in for what Churchill obviously missed out mentioning, that is, terrorists don’t squeal and don’t turn in their “brethren” unlike the thugs who are sometimes wont to do.
So to make terrorists do what they have been indoctrinated not to do, Singapore employs what is known in humans rights circles as “extra-judicial measures”, something that is not too dissimilar from the US version of the Patriot Act.
For all of its born days, right from the time of its violent inception to its present-day modernity, Singapore has known just too well what it would need to do with terrorists of the Kastari ilk.
Its detention without trial laws, enshrined in the Internal Security Act provisions of 1955 which it has maintained for more than five decades, did not come about in a vacuum. British colonial masters had artfully crafted them.
And when it was time for the British to leave Singapore to Singaporeans, the colonial masters made sure the locals knew how to combat the brigands of communist terrorists who in the troubled times of the 1950s and 1960s were just as menacing, fanatical and ideologically-driven as the Kastaris of today. There, however, was one notable exception.
Resembling in doctrine to America’s Patriot Act, the Internal Security Act is essentially a carrot-and-stick approach to treating detainees through the double whammy of incarceration and the careful weaning of their wayward ways by pastoral care.
The “encounter” with Kastari may not be Singapore’s last ever skirmish with terrorism.
So long as it lives in the shadows of its giant Islamic neighbour south of the border, it will have to deal with an assortment of genies that refused to be corked in. Indonesia is huge. Like the old Soviet Union, it is a state with provinces pulling in every direction.
That in turn makes it just ripe for a terrorist and his network to move around and drive a wedge between feuding parties and thereafter turn every adversity into an “opportunity”.
Transformed person?
What is more, with more than 17,000 islands spread over three time zones – the largest archipelago it must seem anywhere in the world – Indonesia remains a plausible cause to attract the likes of Osama and Kastari.
Making the state just as ungovernable is the lack of adequate and incorruptible enforcement agencies.
Few in Singapore remember the 1960s when Indonesia attacked Singapore through its policy of confrontation that, by today’s verdict, can be judged as being purely moved by some old-fashioned, misplaced and certainly misguided irredentism.
Singapore need no longer worry about a new charismatic Sukarno emerging from the background to try a repeat of his 1960s antics.
Deep-seated apprehensions, nonetheless, have remained as can be seen in the numerous times articles on the threat of regional terrorism are deliberated in the country’s Straits Times broadsheet – the city-state’s widely distributed newspaper. For instance, there are still concerns as to why Jakarta took an exceptionally long time to nail down the Marriott Hotel bombings mastermind, Nordin Top.
Top, it is believed, was killed unarmed in a hail of gunfire after he had reportedly contacted Kastari who, upon fleeing Singapore, took refuge in Johor.
Yet for Singapore it must seem that the scourge of terrorism must have come one full circle. Kastari may be behind bars all over again, but the larger question is how “transformed” he will be when he leaves prison which, depending on the security threat one poses, can take years.
Until that question is comfortably settled, the so-called peace dividend Singapore may be enjoying may only be transient.
Maxwell Coopers is a freelance writer based in Singapore.
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