If militant Indonesian Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir was worried about spending more time behind bars, he did not show it on Thursday.
As a judge read out the closely watched verdict in his terrorism trial, sentencing him to two and a half years in jail over the 2002 Bali bomb attacks, Bashir was expressionless.
In a statement read to the court, he attacked the verdict as “tyranny,” but then smiled broadly when police rushed him out as his supporters shouted in anger at the court decision.
Slightly stooped, the reed-thin 66-year-old Bashir looked every inch the avuncular Muslim preacher he claims to be.
That is the image — of an old preacher persecuted by his own government and the West — that Bashir has cultivated since being accused more than three years ago of leading Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian militant network seen as an arm of al-Qaida.
His conviction, although less than the eight years sought by prosecutors, enraged his small militant support base and will anger Muslim leaders and nationalist politicians who accuse authorities of bowing to U.S. pressure over Bashir’s case.
Indeed, before the session began on Thursday, a relaxed looking Bashir spoke to reporters, making clear who he thought was behind his second trial over violence in the past few years.
“It’s clear the role of America is very, very strong here. People who do not see the role of America, their hearts are dead,” said Bashir, wearing his trademark white Muslim cap, a white shawl wrapped around his shoulders and wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose.
Ever since he was arrested just before the Bali bombings in 2002, Bashir has mixed defiance with the appearance of taking the threat of prison time as of little consequence.
On Thursday, he swayed slowly from side to side in a swivel chair placed in front of the five judges, looking disinterested in the proceedings. Whenever scores of his supporters inside shouted “God is Great,” he would raise his hand to silence them, not even bothering to turn around.
'Symbolic figure'
Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based expert on al-Qaida, said Bashir would be a strong influence on Islamic militants in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, even from jail.
“He is a very symbolic figure. If one asks a student of the Pondok Al-Mukmin ... the Bashir school, about Bashir, they will say ’oh we have lost our father’,” Gunaratna said.
Bashir co-founded an austere Islamic boarding school called al-Mukmin in the Central Java city of Solo in the early 1970s, which the International Crisis Group think tank has put at the top of Jemaah Islamiyah's “Ivy League” of schools where members send their children.
To the United States and other foreign governments, Bashir is thought to be deeply involved in the planning and execution of acts of terror in Indonesia.
Bashir has repeatedly denied any links to terrorism, although he has admitted being an admirer of Osama bin Laden and has called the Bali bombers misguided but praiseworthy fighters.
Despite growing public revulsion in Indonesia at bombings blamed on Jemaah Islamiyah, he remains a difficult customer for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono because of a popular view that U.S. pressure forced his latest trial.
That was reinforced when a former interpreter for President Bush testified during the trial that Washington had pressed Indonesia to hand Bashir over shortly before the Bali bombings.
Bashir was originally arrested shortly after those attacks, but a court ruled charges over his leadership of Jemaah Islamiyah and links to earlier violence were unproven.
He instead served 18 months for immigration violations.
Bashir was first jailed in 1979 under former autocrat Suharto for agitating to set up an Islamic state.
In 1985 he escaped that jail term and fled to Malaysia, where for 14 years he spread his influence among Muslim militants from Southeast Asia while selling honey on the side to make ends meet.
Bashir returned to Indonesia in 1999. Like most of Indonesia’s most radical Muslim clerics, Bashir is of Yemeni descent. He is married and has three children.
