Indonesia needs more women in counterterrorism, like Malaysia's Normah Ishak
After a recently married couple - the woman being four months pregnant - unleashed a pressure-cooker bomb at a cathedral in Makassar on Palm Sunday, killing themselves and injuring at least 20 others, three women were among those arrested for possible links to the perpetrators. On Thursday, a 25-year-old female university dropout went to the national police headquarters in Jakarta and fired at officers. She was shot dead.
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What changed? Experts who have studied Indonesian terrorist networks say women have always been crucial to their resilience. Among other things, they raised funds to conduct attacks, evaded surveillance to pass messages, and were part of marriages that solidified ties between groups with jihadist leanings.
Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the al-Qaeda network's Southeast Asian offshoot - which carried out some of Indonesia's deadliest attacks, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people - did not use women as combatants. But as more women radicalised by Isis ideology to seek martyrdom began carrying out attacks, and the phenomenon was amplified on social media, gender norms were overturned.
As researcher Lydia Khalil put it in a June 2019 analysis for the Lowy Institute, Isis had expanded the potential and scope of female involvement and the fall of the Isis caliphate had not dampened the appeal of jihad. "As Isis shifts from governance project to global terrorist movement, women will continue to play an important part of that transformation," she said.
The Indonesian government clearly recognises this problem. It has devoted resources to increasing surveillance of known networks - well aware that in spite of waning support for Isis, the threat that highly mobile extremists will "regroup, recruit and regenerate with the aim of conducting jihad", to quote IPAC, is real.
Jakarta is also conducting ongoing research into understanding the factors causing extremism and recidivism. Yet some of its assumptions come across as outdated.
In February, the national agency for combating terrorism, known as BNPT, released research done over a decade that showed women were marginally more likely than men to be radicalised, with them getting such content on the internet. In a webinar last June, a BNPT official said women were used by terrorist networks because they were "loyal and obedient" and given their lower literacy levels, were more easily influenced by their surroundings.
These views, carried by online media sites, do little to further the public's and policymakers' understanding of the changing role that women are playing in extremist networks.
Experts have proposed different measures, for example IPAC's suggestion to allow female prison officers to shape and spearhead rehabilitation programmes for female inmates, and increase their salaries if they succeed.
Beyond recruiting more women into Indonesia's defence and security services and profiling their contributions to upholding its values of unity in diversity, Indonesia will also need to get women to front the discussion about the dangers of radicalisation. Why not organise an international conference led by female experts on this topic?
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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