An Indonesian Extremist Trades Rifle For Spatula
Tucked away in a back street of Semarang, a city in Indonesia's Central Java province, is a tiny, four-table restaurant. In the cramped kitchen, Mahmudi Haryono whips up a plate of ribs — lunch for two customers.
He brings it out and serves it to two Indonesian soldiers in olive drab uniforms.
Haryono is smiling and cool as a cucumber. But he acknowledges that after getting out of jail a few years ago, serving men in uniform set butterflies aflutter in his stomach.
"Sometimes, I felt insecure," he says, sitting down at a table to talk as the soldiers eat. "I thought that perhaps somebody wanted me to be rearrested. Or maybe somebody was setting me up."
Haryono, a former terrorist, has traded his rifle for a chef's spatula. His broken dreams of global jihad help to explain a little bit why Indonesia — home to the world's largest Muslim population — has not become the hotbed of terrorism that many have feared.
After all, between 2002 and 2009, homegrown Indonesian terrorist groups staged deadly attacks almost every year, making them some of al-Qaida's most effective affiliates. The most prominent of these is the militant group Jemaah Islamiyah.
The Birth Of A Jihadist
After graduating from high school in 1995, Haryono visited an Islamic boarding school founded by Jemaah Islamiyah's spiritual mentor, Abu Bakar Bashir, and run by younger radicals. The turbaned men there were among the very few Indonesians with personal ties to Osama bin Laden. Some of them would go on to stage the notorious Bali bombing in 2002, which killed 202 people, including seven Americans. He also read the work of famous Islamists, such as Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and '60s.
They inspired him to wage jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan. But Haryono had no money, and no way to get there.
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