Indonesia clerics to fight militants in "war of ideas"

JAKARTA, Monday (Reuters) A move by Indonesia's mainstream Muslim groups to form a special team to fight militant ideas and work with police marks an important step but must involve more than just rhetoric, a leading terrorism expert said on Monday.

The team was set up late last week after the discovery of videos showing three suicide bombers using Islam to justify attacks on restaurants in Bali on Oct. 1 that killed 20 people.

It is the first time moderate groups have agreed to play a decisive role in tackling terrorism. In the past, they have been reluctant to criticise militants or have said fighting terrorism was the responsibility of the government and the police.

Sidney Jones, director of the International Crisis Group in Indonesia and an expert on the country's radical fringe, praised Vice President Jusuf Kalla for summoning mainstream clerics to view the videos of the young suicide bombers last week. "That's a real new step and we haven't had this level of government involvement before in any of the cases that have come up from Bali onwards," Jones said, referring to the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people.

"It's taken this long for some of the (Muslim) organisations to realise the extent of the problem in Indonesia and to realise it's got a kind of staying power."

All major bomb attacks in Indonesia in recent years have been blamed on Jemaah Islamiah, a shadowy network seen as the regional arm of al Qaeda. It usually recruits young, poor Muslims from teeming Java island as its foot-soldiers.