Raids by Australian safety forces (ASIO) and armed police on Indonesian migrant households in October 2002 had been actually surprising for members of this neighborhood. Australia has a small however rising Muslim diaspora (augmented as a religion group by a rising variety of Australian–born converts), totalling about 340,000 on the time of the 2006 Australian census, and about one quarter of the 50,000+ Indonesian-born residents recorded within the 2006 census are recorded as of Muslim religion.
Muslim migration solely grew after a shift away from migration coverage that the restricted non-white immigration (The White Australia coverage) within the Nineteen Seventies and an embrace of multiculturalism quite than assimilation as coverage. This transformation appeared to herald tolerance of cultural and non secular variety, and was skilled by many immigrant Australians on this method.
However the international conflict on terror that led to ethical panic, positioning Muslims because the enemy of western civilisation, particularly following the destruction of the Twin Towers, examined this. The bounds of tolerance of for Australian Muslims was revealed throughout the first Gulf conflict, when probably the most generally reported act of violence towards Muslims was tearing off girls’s head scarves—an act anthropologist Ghassan Hage has termed the “governmental hand”.
The picture of a civilisation beneath assault had particular resonance for Australians when on 12 October 2002, members of the Indonesian Islamic organisation Jemaah Islamiyah bombed two well-liked vacationer venues in Bali, regarded by many Australians as their very own yard playground. Australian casualties had been the best amongst overseas vacationers, about equal to Indonesian numbers, and the occasion was formally declared Australia’s worst peacetime catastrophe. This environment and emotions of “a civilisation beneath assault” offered the context for the October 2002 raids.
The Australian media reported that the raids had been carried out due to an ostensible hostile act towards the Australian nation: the individuals focused had attended a lecture by Abu Bakar Bashir (jailed for his function within the bombings and launched in 2006) considered the religious head of JI, when he had visited Australia beneath an alias within the Nineties. The raids adopted rapidly on the Federal Authorities’s proscription of JI as an unlawful organisation in Australia on 27 October 2002, the very day the governor common signed it into legislation.
The speedy timing of raids had been a surprising revelation that Indonesian Muslims in Australia (residents and everlasting residents) had already been beneath surveillance previous to the Bali bombing. Islamic faith and Indonesian cultural citizenship made them “not fairly” Australian, sorely testing the picture of Australian tolerance and dedication to multiculturalism.
Response to the raids in Australia—Muslims because the enemy inside
The media accounts of the October 2002 raids introduced a spectre hardly ever seen in Australia: “Armed ASIO brokers and Federal Police fan out throughout Australia seeking hyperlinks to Islamic extremism”; “Officers sporting balaclava and bullet proof vests” holding sub-machine weapons (Australian Broadcasting Company “ASIO raid in Perth”, PM, 30 October 2002.)
They reported police utilizing sledgehammers to interrupt down doorways and home windows and “smash…their method into homes” at daybreak. Within the case of the Suparta household in Perth, closely armed officers broke into their residence in Thornlie (a suburb well-liked with Perth’s Asian migrant populations) and the dad and mom and 4 kids (aged 17, 10, 6 and 4) had been ordered to the ground and saved there for half an hour. The oldest youngster, a 17-year-old lady, mentioned officers pointed weapons at them, and one officer put his foot on her father’s head and instructed him to not transfer.
After a seven-hour search, officers took away passports, books (together with spiritual books), materials downloaded from the web, computer systems, and movies. Such actions had been repeated in about 12 extra properties of Indonesian Australians in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. In accordance with a Muslim chief (Yasser Solimi, president of Islamic council of Victoria) the ASIO and police raids had left individuals “confused, scared and surprised” (cited in The Age, 3November, 2002.)
Neighbours interviewed by the press expressed shock. In Perth, neighbour Helena Joyce instructed ABC radio (Australian Broadcasting Company ‘ASIO raid in Perth’, PM, 30 October): “..And I noticed a number of males in, I assume fight or regardless of the SWAT individuals put on, you recognize, the black helmets, the black balaclava, the ski glasses, the black clothes, some machine weapons. So I used to be terrified.”
The reporter David Weber requested: “Have you learnt the household effectively?” and expressing a view apparently at odds with the official “othering”, the neighbour replied: “Sure I do, Yep, we’ve lived right here for nearly three years they usually’ve been right here since earlier than we got here right here. Um, they’re Australian residents like everybody else, I assume they usually’re a really good household. All I may consider is that they’ve received the satellite tv for pc dish and they’re initially from Indonesia?”
One other neighbour commented: “They do their yard. I at all times stroll by to go to the Thornleigh buying centre and their look to me is a really quiet, good household, and that’s all I do know…” When the reporter asks if he “can be stunned when you knew that…” the person cuts him off, replying: “Very stunned. Very, very stunned. Very quiet, good man out within the entrance doing the yard. He says hi there. They’re ethnic individuals however they’re beautiful, very good individuals.”.
The neighbours’ feedback, that the Suparta household are a “good household, who do their yard and say hi there” signifies a “grass roots” vernacular multiculturalism in that they’re judged by their efficiency of the quotidian attributes of Australian belonging.
The Director Normal of ASIO (Australian Safety and Intelligence Organisation) denied the report that the individuals raided had been suspect as a result of they’d attended lectures by the JI religious chief within the Nineties; however one of many males raided, Jaya Fadli Basil mentioned to the media that the paperwork he had been proven indicated that they had been investigating anybody with JI hyperlinks. He mentioned that he had at all times carried out the fitting factor, had no terrorist hyperlinks and the one cause he was raided is that he had been within the spiritual lectures of Abu Bakar Bashir within the Nineties. Jaya Fadli Basil mentioned he now felt he was not welcome in Australia “because the Bali bombing, lots of our neighborhood received abuse”.
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In accordance with one newspaper, all the dozen individuals aided had some hyperlink to the JI chief throughout his Australian go to: one had pushed him round, one other had invited him to lunch after a lecture on the Dee Why Mosque. One of many males raided mentioned he had been interviewed by ASIO beforehand as he knew Mamdouh Habib, at the moment detained in Guantanamo Bay. Habib was, he mentioned, as the daddy of one among his son’s faculty buddies. He had additionally attended the Abu Bakar Bashir lectures “I solely went to listen to him converse. That’s all I did. I’ve by no means heard of Jemaah Islamiah” (reported in Solar Herald, 3 November).
For Australians involved with civil rights the raids—and the laws that enabled them—signalled a diminution of civil rights. The president of the NSW Council on Civil Liberties was quoted: “If these individuals are speculated to be terrorists they need to be charged and introduced earlier than a court docket of legislation. The truth that there have been so many raids and that none have been charged means that there isn’t any proof. It means that this can be a fishing train or a publicity stunt.” (reported in The Age, November 1, 2002).
The Chairman of the Islamic Council of NSW made an identical remark and linked the raids to the circumstances within the undemocratic regimes that migrant refugees had fled: “We aren’t against any Australian resident being required to help ASIO or different authorities businesses in defending Australia at any time. However this should be achieved inside the rule of legislation and utilizing no extra pressure than essential to safe the required consequence. I imagine the raids haven’t been applicable or affordable responses to any threats acknowledged to this point. Younger households have been overwhelmed by the pressure and violence of the raids. Many Muslims fled conflict, bloodshed and violence to construct a safe life right here. To cease that chaos erupting on our shores should be the precedence and we’ll work with whoever asks us to maintain Australia secure. Nevertheless, for the authorities to storm into our properties and lives on this vogue brings these traumas and fears into our residing rooms.”
It was reported in 2003 that nobody was ever charged as a consequence of the raids
The Indonesian ambassador on the time, Imron Cotan, leapt to the defence of the households who had been raided despite the fact that a lot of them had been now not Indonesian residents. In an alternate with the host of a TV present affairs programme he mentioned: “We’re deeply involved about the way in which the ASIO in addition to Federal Police, carried out the operations as a result of that involved Indonesian residents…We’re right here to guard our residents.”
In response the host, Tony Jones, identified that each Indonesian and Australian residents had been targetted within the raids, and handled in the identical method; Ambassador Cotan pressured once more that his function was to behave in response to his mission to guard Indonesian residents.
Ambassador Cotan’s response was not completely at odds with the affective response of many Indonesians resident in Australia who noticed themselves as beneath assault for his or her Indonesian Muslim identification. This invoked a discourse of suspicion of their proper to belong in an Australian nation that was closing off the embrace of cultural and non secular variety, which Islam had then solely just lately, and cautiously, been allowed into.
In contrast to many different Muslim teams in Australia Indonesian migrants are usually not refugees: they’ve entered Australia as expert or enterprise migrants, and on household visas, for instance once they marry Australians. A lot of them had been caught unawares by the quickly altering politico-religious panorama in Indonesia following the autumn of the Suharto regime in 1998, which noticed the fast progress of Islamist actions, many at odds with customary types of tolerant and liberal Islam, some espousing violence in pursuit of their ideological goals. One lady, who had married and moved to Australia many years earlier than, expressed the dilemma to me, saying the fast adjustments left Indonesian Muslims in Australia weak. She mentioned, “We have now to observe our backsides,” which means that Australian Indonesian Muslims had been prone to changing into unwittingly embroiled with excessive spiritual actions by means of harmless acts of attending lectures by visiting clerics. Her resolution was to start an organisation that might facilitate individuals like herself acquiring up-to-date recommendation from individuals extra educated in regards to the up to date spiritual panorama in Indonesia, comparable to college students with spiritual schooling background, or Indonesian diplomats.
The raids threw obvious certainties onto query, indicating that Indonesian Muslims had been beneath surveillance, and their loyalty to the Australian nation beneath query for a while. Citizenship doesn’t mechanically confer certainty of belonging to the nation. Indonesian cultural citizenship has been embraced as a solution to acquire information to guard themselves from future dangers within the politico-religious panorama.
