Senior Cleric in Indonesia Is Charged With

Terrorism
One of Indonesia’s most senior radical Muslim clerics could
face the death penalty after prosecutors formally lodged
terrorism charges against him on Wednesday.
Abu Bakar Bashir during an interview in 2008. He is a founder
of Jemaah Islamiyah.
Abu Bakar Bashir, an elderly cleric long accused of being a
main terrorist ideologue, was charged with coordinating and
financing a militant group that was violently suppressed by the
police last year after it set up an armed training camp in the
northern Sumatran province of Aceh.
Prosecutors lodged the case file with the charges, which contain
a maximum sentence of death, on the same day that defense
lawyers mounted a constitutional challenge to Mr. Bashir’s long
detention since his arrest in August last year
A lawyer for Mr. Bashir, Mahendradatta, said the case against
Mr. Bashir was based on flimsy evidence and accused the
authorities of deliberately delaying the cleric’s trial in order to
keep him detained.
“He’s already getting old, why do they have to detain him? This
is proof that their true purpose is to keep Ustad silent,” Mr.
Mahendradatta said, using an honorific term for some Muslim
men.
Mr. Bashir, who leads an above-ground Islamic organization
called Jamaah Ansharut Tauhid, was being persecuted to please
the United States, Mr. Mahendradatta said.
“Now, everybody knows that Ustad is just a kitty, not a tiger,”
the lawyer said. “A kitty, just some ordinary guy who speaks
anti-America, anti-something, like that, but doesn’t have any
power to execute his speech.”
The authorities, however, said Mr. Bashir played a central role
in the operation of a short-lived coalition of militants, calling
itself Al Qaeda of the Veranda of Mecca, which stockpiled
weapons and carried out training in Aceh’s jungle-covered
mountains.
The police violently wiped out the group’s Aceh training camp
last year.
In subsequent crackdowns, scores of terrorism suspects were
arrested or killed, including Dulmatin, one of Southeast Asia’s
most wanted terrorism suspects.
Islamist militants have been accused during the past year of a
number of attacks on the police as well as armed robberies. The
police have also alleged nascent plots to attack foreign interests
and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The case is the third
legal attempt in less than a decade by the Indonesian authorities
against Mr. Bashir, a founder of the radical Jemaah Islamiyah
movement. The group has been blamed for a series of attacks,
including the 2002 bombing of nightclubs on Bali that killed 202
people, mostly foreigners.
Mr. Bashir was acquitted in 2003 of earlier charges related to the
Bali attack but was convicted on a passport violation. He was
convicted of conspiracy in a second case and was released in
2005 after more than two years in prison.
Sidney Jones, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, said
that, unlike in earlier cases, the Indonesian authorities appeared
to have a strong enough case to guarantee a heavy sentence
against Mr. Bashir.
“I think they do have a strong case, and I don’t think this is an
unusual time period,” Ms. Jones said. “Because in the Aceh
cases, some of those guys were arrested in February and their
trials didn’t start for another six months.”

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Hundreds of Islamic hard-liners stormed a courthouse and set two
churches on fire in central Java on Tuesday to protest what they considered a lenient sentence for
a Christian convicted of blaspheming Islam.

The Christian, Antonius Richmond Bawengan, was found guilty of distributing books and
leaflets that “spread hatred about Islam” and was sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum
term.
The violence came two days after Muslim villagers carrying machetes and sticks attacked
members of Ahmadiyya, a minority Muslim sect, in Banten Province. Several people were killed
as outnumbered police officers failed to stop the brutality.

Tuesday’s events began in front of the district court in Temanggung, where the trial was held,
and spread to surrounding neighborhoods, said a police spokesman, Col. Djahartono, who like
many Indonesians uses only one name. Members of the crowd, who apparently wanted Mr.
Bawengan to receive the death penalty, also threw rocks at a school and set a police truck and
several cars and motorcycles on fire. Riot police officers fired into the air to disperse the crowd.

Witnesses said that at least nine people were hospitalized and that the police led some protesters
away for questioning.

Indonesia’s Constitutional Court upheld the blasphemy law last year, saying that it did not limit
religious freedom and that it was vital to religious harmony in a secular nation.

Human rights advocates say the law discriminates against believers who are outside the
mainstream of six officially recognized faiths (Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism,
Hinduism and Confucianism). They also say the law is largely used to defend Islam, the
dominant religion of Indonesia’s 240 million people.

SIBANG KAJA, BALI — Half a world away from Cancún, Mexico, and the international
climate change talks that took place there last month, a school here in Indonesia is staging its
own attempt to save the planet.

It is small-scale and literally grassroots — and possibly in some respects more effective than the
tortuous efforts of politicians to agree on how to stop global warming.
In the midst of the lush, steaming jungle of Bali, along a pitted road, past scattered chickens and
singing cicadas, Green School has two dozen buildings made of giant bamboo poles. There are
no walls, and there is no air-conditioning. Just gracefully arched roofs, concrete floors and
bamboo furniture. There is a big, grassy playground, complete with goalposts made — yes — of
bamboo; a bamboo bridge across a rock-strewn river; vegetable patches; and a mud-wrestling pit.

But there is also a computer lab, a well-stocked library and an array of courses drawn from an
internationally recognized curriculum and taught in English.

More than 200 children from 40 countries, including Indonesia, are learning math here, as well
as grammar, science, business studies, drama and Bahasa Indonesia, the official language spoken
in this country of 240 million.

The students, whose levels range from kindergarten to 10th grade and who represent 40
nationalities, are also learning to grow and thresh rice and how to make ceramics and paper from
materials found on the school site.

They get dirt under their fingernails and mud between their toes. Visitors are advised to wear
comfortable shoes. High heels are not recommended.

If all this sounds a little bit hippie and idealistic, that is because it is. A little.

But then, Green School, the brainchild of John Hardy and his wife, Cynthia, is also realistic and
practical, designed to give children not just a sense of how to live sustainably, but also to leave
them ultimately with the skills to enter academic institutions anywhere in the world.

“We want to create future green leaders — we need green leaders,” said a sarong-clad Mr.
Hardy, picking his way along a dirt path last month. “We want to teach kids that the world is not
indestructible.”

Mr. Hardy himself — sarong notwithstanding — is no mere dropout, tree-hugging beach bum.

True, he says, he “ran away” from his home in Canada in 1975, to go to Bali. But he is also an
entrepreneur, and the upmarket jewelry business he and his wife built over the years was worth
enough, by the time they sold it in 2007, to allow the Hardys to set up the Green School.

The original idea had been to retire quietly. But then Mr. Hardy saw “An Inconvenient Truth,”
the 2006 documentary about the campaign by Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, to educate
people about climate change.

“Al Gore ruined my life,” Mr. Hardy, who is now 61, likes to say.

The movie prompted him to scrap plans for a quiet life and to try to do his part to change the way
young people — and ultimately society as a whole — behave toward their environment.
Environment-studies courses and nature excursions have, of course, long been popular in U.S.
and European schools. But Green School, Mr. Hardy and its teachers believe, is unique in that it
completely immerses children in a world of sustainable practices throughout the school day —
with the nonflush compost toilets, the (easily bearable) lack of air-conditioning and the fact that
virtually everything in the school is created from bamboo, rather than steel, glass and concrete.

“There are lots of schools that have elements of ‘green’ teaching, but I don’t think that anyone
has been ambitious or foolhardy enough to try anything on this scale before,” said Ben Macrory,
a New Yorker who moved to Bali in 2008 to take on the job of Green School’s head of
admissions and whose 4-year-old daughter, Maggie, attends the school. “Every experience the
children have here is about how to live with only a minimal impact on the environment.”

Yes, there are trade-offs. Schooling is only available from nursery school through 10th grade,
with plans to extend teaching for the remaining two years by 2012. Also, students have a more
limited choice of languages or other standard courses than might be available at Western schools
or other international schools on the island of Bali.

But that has not prevented the appeal of Green School, which is in its third year, from growing.

Many of the students have come from other schools in Bali, and an increasing number come
from families who have moved to Bali recently — often in large part because they want to send
their children here.

“The atmosphere is magical,” said Barbara Friedrichsen-Mehta, who visited the school with her
husband, Rajesh, and their daughters Lena and Vinya last month. The family is considering
moving to Bali, once their institute for innovative music has been established in Singapore.

“We’ve always missed the educational vision in most of the international schools in the many
places we’ve lived, and done a lot of home schooling for that reason,” Ms. Friedrichsen-Mehta
said. “But this place is creative, innovative and multicultural. And the girls really, really liked it.”

The mystique of Bali — its arts, ubiquitous temples and gentle climate — helps to draw families
to this place. And the slightly offbeat profile of expatriates on the island means parents are open
to novel concepts like a school without walls that grows its own vegetables.

“No boring people move to Bali,” Mr. Macrory said. The island attracts entrepreneurs, artists,
healers and some staff members from nongovernmental organizations, rather than the financial
and corporate communities that have grown in Hong Kong and Singapore, Frankfurt and New
York.

Still, Mr. Hardy says he is convinced that the Green School concept can work elsewhere, too,
and he hopes the school will be the blueprint — or “greenprint” — for more. “Not just one,” he
said — “50!”

Will Green School be a game-changer in the global fight to combat climate change? Who
knows?
But for now, 200 children are visibly enjoying the school. And perhaps the school and its future
spinoffs will someday yield another Al Gore to shake up someone’s retirement plans.