"[I]t was under the Soeharto government at this time that three factors came together in a way that ultimately produced the Bali bombers.
"One issue was the decision by the Indonesian intelligence agency BAKIN to help resuscitate Darul Islam (DI) at a critical juncture in the early New Order. The original DI had largely collapsed after the arrest and execution of its leader, S.M. Kartosoewirjo, in 1962. Surviving leaders of the movement had come together on their own, but BAKIN provided critical funding, in the hope that the DI network would become a Golkar asset. That was not New Order repression; it was New Order hubris that it could control and co-opt an organisation that had fought the Indonesian state for more than a decade in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was a revived DI that was later to give JI [Jemaah Islamiyah] much of its organisational base inside Indonesia.
"But the second factor was the suppression of Muslim political parties in a way that not only denied Indonesian Islamists any role in the government but made them the target of active repression, particularly in the lead up to the 1971 elections. It is questionable whether a man like Abdullah Sungkar, JI’s founder, would have made common cause with DI if the New Order government had allowed a party like Masyumi, the largest Muslim party before its banning by Sukarno in 1960, or any party headed by Mohammad Natsir, to function freely.
"The third was the direct result of the first two: the grafting on to a revived insurgency of that disenfranchised Islamist elite’s attributes, including an internationalist outlook, access to funds and contacts, salafist inclinations, and intellectual power. The Indonesian Islamic Propagation Council (Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia, DDII), founded by Natsir in 1967, had all those characteristics, and the fusion of DI and DDII proved potent. Banning independent Muslim parties also meant the removal of any meaningful political role for the youth organisations that shared their goals[...]—hence the attraction of a militant, clandestine movement that the fused DI-Sungkar alliance became.
[...]
"[Ali] Moertopo and others, including Col. Pitut Suharto, thought they could use DI as a tool for bringing in the Golkar vote and promoting an anti-Communist stance at the same time. After all, here was an organisation that BAKIN thought it controlled and that had a clear constituency in Java, which was the real target of BAKIN’s efforts to create the Golkar machine.
"[...]as late as 1976, with the 1977 elections on the horizon, Moertopo reportedly believed he could still use former DI members as a machine to turn out Golkar votes, and was unperturbed by the fact that DI had used the political space available to form a military organisation that engaged in a series of attacks on civilian targets[...] All of BAKIN’s contacts were with the generation of men who surrendered after 1962; it appeared to be oblivious to the fact that these men had taken advantage of widespread unhappiness in Muslim ranks to recruit a new generation; that the DI message had already spread beyond its original base; and that the old and new members were anything but supportive of the New Order.
[...]
"It was Abdullah Sungkar who embodied the DI-DDII connection as much as anyone else. [His] relationship with DDII Solo almost certainly preceded his involvement with DI. As a student, he had been a member of GPI, one of the more radical student organisations; he would have been directly affected by the banning of Masyumi in 1960, when he was 23. [...] In March 1977, he was arrested without warrant or charge and detained in Semarang for 48 days for urging his followers not to vote in that year’s elections—among other things because the Soeharto government did not allow two candidates who should have been running, in his view, Mohammed Natsir and Mohammed Roem, on the ballot. Both men had been prominent Masyumi leaders and were the natural choices to head a new party, the Partai Muslimin Indonesia (Parmusi), that Soeharto reluctantly allowed to emerge in 1968. But because Natsir and a few other Masyumi notables—not Roem—had supported a regional rebellion in West Sumatra in 1958 [PRRI], Soeharto refused to countenance any political revival of Masyumi as an institution or its former leaders as individuals.
[...]
"In Malaysia, the DI-DDII-ex-Masyumi alliance comes full circle. One of Sungkar and [Abu Bakar] Ba’asyir’s first visitors was Abdul Wahid Kadungga, a DDII activist, personal secretary to Natsir and, for good measure, the son-in-law of the leader of the DI rebellion in South Sulawesi, Kahar Muzakkar (Conboy 2006:42–43; ICG 2003). Kadungga had just come from meeting with Abdullah Azzam in Pakistan at a time when Saudi money was beginning to become available in large quantities to send foreign fighters to Afghanistan. The money was channelled through the Rabitat al-Alam al-Islami, the World Muslim League, and its vice-president was Natsir, Kadungga’s boss.
"Thus began Sungkar’s program of sending Indonesians for training to Afghanistan, financed by the Rabitat, with the aim of building up the capacity of Indonesian Muslims to take on the Soeharto government militarily. The first batch of recruits, including Zulkarnaen, the man who became head of Jemaah Islamiyah’s military operations, were not DI members. They were GPI [Gerakan Pemuda Islam] members who only later joined DI.
"If it had been only ex-fighters of the DI rebellion in West Java, Aceh, or South Sulawesi who had gone to Malaysia in 1985 (and there were some), would they have been able to build the base among Malaysians and Singaporeans that Sungkar and his followers succeeded in doing? Probably not—there were few in DI ranks, at least of that generation, that had the religious knowledge or political savvy of Sungkar. The men he brought with him to Malaysia [...] were well-versed in the writings of al-Banna and al-Maududi. That internationalist outlook almost certainly ended up being a factor in the ability to recruit non-Indonesians—a factor that was to have major implications for the growth of JI."
