Photo: Jihad book collection in Jakarta Sept.21, 2009. REUTERS/Supr

A half-century ago, Washington worried about Southeast Asian nations falling like dominoes to an international communist movement backed by Maoist China, and became bogged down in the Vietnam War.

Noordin Top, believed to be the mastermind behind most of the suicide bombings in Indonesia -- including the July 17 attacks on two luxury Jakarta hotels -- pronounced himself to be al Qaeda's franchise in Southeast Asia.

Top and his allies in Jemaah Islamiah (JI) aimed to create an Islamic caliphate across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand and Southern Philippines. Even before the 9/11 suicide airliner attacks, they were trying to spark an Islamic revolution with ambitious plots and attacks.

Their young foot soldiers dreamed these pro-Western nations (which had banded together to form ASEAN under the U.S. military umbrella at the height of the Vietnam War in 1967) might fall like dominoes to the righteousness of an Islamic jihad. Their martyrdom to the cause would given them a blissful reward in Heaven.

But just as Communism was not the monolith it was feared to be in the 1960s -- China and the Soviet Union had split for one thing -- so too has the Southeast Asian jihadist movement failed to cohere into a singular movement.

Vietnam, it turned out, was fighting what it believed to be a war of national liberation, and was (still is) historically suspicious of China. Al Qaeda's jihad in Southeast Asia has stumbled over similar misconceptions.

JI's former military commander, Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin or "Hambali", tried to pull together various insurgencies in the region under an al Qaeda umbrella before he was captured in Thailand in 2003. He even helped sponsor an "al Qaeda summit" with bin Laden's lieutenants in Kuala Lumpur in 2000.

He failed mostly because the groups had different agendas and a fragmented leadership. The ideology that animates the movements -- Islam -- also prevents it from incorporating as well. The religion does not have hierarchies. People can have different views. The jihadist groups don't do politburos.

Reuters has taken a look at these issues -- including for investors in the region -- in a package of stories. Click on the headlines below to read more about Southeast Asia Islamic insurgencies.

Is economic terrorism a threat to SE Asia?

On June 8, gunmen burst into a mosque and killed 10 people as they prayed. Thailand blamed separatist insurgents for the bloodiest attack this year in the mainly Muslim region bordering Malaysia where nearly 3,500 people have died in violence since 2004. But the head of the world's biggest Islamic body urged Thailand to protest its Muslim minority after local residents put the blame on military-backed elements.

(Photo: Thai Muslims pray at a funeral after the mosque attack, 9 June 9 2009/Surapan Boonthanom)

Reuters correspondent Martin Petty toured the area last week in the wake of the attacks. He talked to a woman who narrowly escaped an assassin's bullet in Yala.  She said she doesn't know who wanted her dead or why. Former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra blamed mafia-style smuggling gangs for the violence, but security analysts believe homegrown separatist groups -- with little or no ties to al Qaeda or other regional militant networks -- are behind the violence.

The Thai government hopes to stem the violence by pouring $1.58 billion in development funds into the region. But many residents told Petty it won't make a difference, because the people are stuggling to keep their Malay-Muslim identity -- not to boost local fisheries, rubber and palm oil industries.

A better idea would be to withdraw the 30,000 soldiers deployed in ther region and scrap an emergency decreee that grants the military broad powers of arrest with immunity from prosecution, they say.

(Photo: Soldiers guard a village after a police raid on a suspected militant hideout on June 18, 2009. REUTERS/Surapan Boothan)

The three provinces were part of an independent Malay Muslim sultante annexed by Buddhist Thailand a century ago and its people have long resisted Bangkok's attempts to assimilate them.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) has just issued a report on the insurgency and says in its summary:  "This struggle, nominally between a Thai Buddhist state and a Malay Muslim insurgency, targets civilians of all religions. More than 3,400 people have been killed since the violence surged in 2004. There are more dead Muslim victims than Buddhists, and many of the slain Muslims were marked as 'traitors' to Islam."

Can the Thai government win hearts and minds with its planned development initiative? Or will a region that is battling to keep its ethno-religious identity and way of life in a borderless world continue to see  violent paroxysms such as this month's mosque attacks, until the governmetn comes up with a broader plan that addresses deep-seated grievances?

Here are links to Petty's latest stories about the south:

Cloud of suspicion hangs over Thai south schools -- June 22

Thai insurgents recruit from Islamic schools -- June 22

Thailand's Muslim south gripped by fear -- June 19

Money won't stop south Thai violence, Muslims say -- June 18

  “43 percent nasty” read posters dotting the press wing of Australia’s parliament this week under a photo of a beaming Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, pointing readers to a more benign 5 percent-strength beer on sale at a nearby news studio.
    The quip drew on a poll finding near one-in-two voters believe the boyish-looking Rudd has a nasty side, echoing other recent surveys showing the centre-left leader’s meteoric popularity is sliding back from a year of levels “with the gods” .
    The beer plug perhaps helps explain a bizarre and sudden switch in Rudd’s technocratic speaking style to a bush slang which has left even Australians bewildered as, with his usual obsessiveness, Rudd works hard to reconnect.

Photo: Rudd at the Asia Security Conference in Singapore, May 29, 2009/Reuters 

 "Fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate . . . It's chalk and cheese . . . Fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate . . . Well, again, fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate," the Mandarin-speaking former diplomat said with “ticking clock” monotony in a television interview this week which raised eyebrows nationally.
    Compare that to equally incomprehensible, but slang-free, comments by Rudd in Britain last year while meeting foreign leaders over climate change.
    "The parallel ideological synergies, vis-a-vis the development opportunity momentum in our own constituencies … that's where the low-hanging fruit lies," he said as attending journalists shook their heads.
    In the United States, Rudd spoke at the prestigious Brookings Institution of “a complimentarity that could be developed further in the direction of some short of conceptual synthesis”.
    Australians can be forgiven for wondering who their prime minister really is, with the question having added resonance amid a swirl of talk that Rudd could call early elections to overcome an upper house Senate currently giving Labor nightmares.
    “Will the real Kevin Rudd please stand up,” former conservative opposition leader John Hewson demanded on national television on Friday.
    Rudd was a virtual unknown outside the corridors of parliament when he led his Labor Party out of near 12 years in opposition and chronic leadership instability to a sweeping election triumph in November 2007.
    Rudd came to lead then-opposition Labor in late 2006 as almost last leadership man standing and since election his popularity has been at record highs. His standing belies the “Dr Death” nickname Rudd earned while cutting a swathe through staff numbers as a top bureaucrat in Queensland state in the early 1990s.
    But that began to downshift in April when stories emerged of Rudd’s temper and control obsession -- which political insiders have known of for years – boiling over at a air force stewardess he reduced to tears over food choice while on a VIP flight.
    Since then Rudd’s popularity, while still strong, has fallen from high 70s to around 58 percent in the closely-watched Newspoll series.
    “Rudd's whole life is an artifice. With his blond hair, round face, round glasses
and wholesome values, he would have us believe he's the Milky Bar Kid,” senior writer Ross Fitzgerald wrote in the Australian newspaper this month, comparing Labor’s star to a popular children’s chocolate bar character.
    “As the public is starting to realise, the real Rudd has more in common with Dr
Death than the carefully-crafted public persona of the Milky Bar Kid,” Fitzgerald said.
    “Strewth! There is now a Kevin Rudd for every occasion, and the only version of the Prime Minister that's missing is one that's real,” wrote conservative Herald Sun newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt after Rudd’s stream of sauce bottle slang.
    Speech experts have blamed Rudd's chameleon switch on his advisors trying to better reach ordinary voters, particularly swing-vote workers in crucial regional seats and suburban fringes, often ill at ease with Rudd’s natural intellectualism.
    But commentators, and the public, see the transition as far from smooth, raising questions on if it could actually harm Rudd in future opinion polling, and ultimately an election.
    Others say its shows a country and its leader unsure of their identity, torn between sophisticated city dwellers and a more insular retreat to nationalist symbols and protectionism among voters in regional areas.
    “While some of us have drifted off to lattes, designer wear and a taste for cosmopolitan things, others have retreated to the comfort of flags on our utes (SUVs) and Southern Cross tattoos,” the Courier Mail newspaper said.
    “In all fairness, it must be hard for any moderately intelligent Australian political leader to hit exactly the right note with his or her public persona in this shifting landscape that is our national character,” the paper said.
    So far Rudd is not retreating from the barrage of criticism and has even poked fun at himself and protagonists at a business power lunch in Sydney on Thursday, drawing laughter from those assembled.
    Channeling his inner aussie once more, Rudd called on media commentators to give him a "fair crack of the whip" and not "come the raw prawn".
     Does that leave you confused? Then spare a thought for wondering Australians as they await opinion testing of Rudd new style during a bruising parliamentary session over the next fortnight that could yet lead to surprise early elections!

Meditation centres have also seen an upswing in attendance and people seek peace and calm amid the economic downturn.

(Photo: Hindus pray in a Singapore temple, 24 May 2009/Vivek Prakash)

Reuters correspondent Nopporn Wong-Anan has a feature here looking at how people seek spiritual solace at a time of material loss in Asia, home to all the major religions and any number of minor ones.

The impulse to return to religion in a crisis may be universal -- we've looked at various aspects of this on FaithWorld in recent months -- but there are some interesting local twists.

In Hong Kong, for example, business has slowed for feng shui masters, or geomancers, because the property sector is suffering a severe contraction. Feng shui masters say they use the laws of heaven and earth to give advice on how to design buildings to bring wealth and luck. They advise architects on how to place doors, windows and even furniture to avoid the bad spirits they say could otherwise infiltrate a building.

"From 1991 until about 1998, when the last big economic crisis happened, a lot of people went to geomancers to get help. But the economy never got better and people didn't think feng shui helped them," said Edwin Ma, a feng shui consultant to top property firms. "So a lot of people got disappointed and they would now rather keep their money in their own pockets."

(Photo: Singapore dollars, 6 Feb 2008/Tim Chong)

In the latest case, a Malaysian court granted permission to a Christian to challenge the authorities for seizing religious materials that used the word "Allah". The government has banned the use of the Arabic word to describe God by all except for Muslims, saying it might confuse Muslims or offend their sensisibilities.

(Photo: A Hindu pilgrim outside Kuala Lumpur, 8 Feb 2009/Zainal Abd Halim)

The Catholic Herald, Malaysia's main Catholic newspaper, has been fighting the government for months over the right to use the word "Allah". Herald Editor Rev. Lawrence Andrew argues that Malaysian Christians have used "Allah" as their term for God for centuries. In a recent edition, the Herald slammed a new locally produced Bible, which further muddied these troubled waters by using the Hebrew word "Elohim" instead of "Allah" (or God for that matter) for the Almighty.

The new government of Prime Minister Najib Razak, which took over last month, is trying to portray itself as reformist. It has begun dismantling, albeit in an incremental way, some of the economic and educational privileges guaranteed Malay Muslims under Malaysia's ethnically based political system. Najib's government has undertaken a review of a draconian internal security law that allows indefinite detention without trial and which has been used liberally against Indian and Chinese opposition figures.

In another apparent concession to religious pressure, Legal Affairs Minister Nazri Aziz last month banned the conversion of children to Islam without the consent of both parents. The decision concerned the highly publicised case of a 34-year-old Hindu woman, Indira Gandhi (no relation to the late Indian leader), whose estranged husband converted to Islam and then did the same with their children. Nazri said minors were to be bound by the common religion of their parents at the time of marriage, even if one parent were later to become a Muslim. A number of Muslim organisations were opposed to the move, saying it was unfair to the Muslim parent, and the case has wound up in the courts.

(Photo: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, 10 April 2009/Udo Weitz)

Najib's reform platform may make some Malay Muslims uneasy. But the coalition government led by the Malay nationalist UMNO party is responding to the debacle it suffered in the last general election, when minorities, and even many Malays, deserted a coalition that has ruled Malaysia uninterrupted since 1957, and made a huge swing to the fractious opposition alliance.

So the government will likely continue its balancing act, offsetting concessions to Hindu and Christians here with a sop to Muslims there. The Ahmadiyyas, a moderate but controversial Muslim sect, may have lost out in these equations. An Islamic council issued a fatwa against the sect last month that bans it from conducting prayers in its mosque. The Ahmadis are considered heretical by some Muslims because they refuse to accept the Prophet Mohammad was Islam's final prophet, and say that the founder of the sect, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, is a prophet and messiah.

All of this is taking place as Muslims have taken a more activist approach to the changing religious climate in Malaysia. A coalition of 50 Malaysian Muslim non-governmental organsiations known as Pembela that came together in 2006 has been spearheading the fight against apostasy, particularly the series of conversion cases (including Indira Gandhi's) that have come before the courts the last few years.

Mahatma Gandhi once said: “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.” Or politics in Malaysia for that matter.

(Photo: A Malaysian Muslim at prayer, January 2009/Zainal Abd Halim)

Environmental activists dressed in orangutan suits at the ASEAN summit in Hua Hin, Thailand, Feb. 28, 2009. REUTERS PHOTO/Adrees Latif

This is the storyline from a new comic book and animated cartoon for schoolchildren that the ASEAN Secretariat has commissioned to propagate the idea of an ASEAN Community, one not so unlike the European Community, which the leaders of today are hoping to bequeath the children of tomorrow. And as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations gets set to host its annual pow-wow with other Asia-Pacific powers this weekend in Thailand, the story of a stranger in a strange land seems apt.

At the risk of being snide, observers can sometimes feel like they've dropped out of the sky and landed in a puzzling world where people speak in a profusion of arcane acronyms at ASEAN's confabulations. (North Korea barked at ARF. AWGEE issued an impressive enviornmental paper. BIMP-EAGA went to CARD, connected the DOTS, and an agreement was nearly in their GRSP before they had to go back to the KRIBB for a ZOPFAN)

What is this ASEAN village anyway? The devil is truly in the details here. ASEAN is aiming to become an integrated political/security, economic and cultural community by 2015. But what does an integrated political community mean exactly in a grouping that includes Myanmar's truculent junta, not to mention the communist states, kingdoms and boisterous democracies that comprise the rest of the ASEAN village?
If all that isn't confusing enough, ASEAN is also intent on creating some sort of East Asian community with its dialogue partners in the "East Asia Summit" -- Japan, China, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India -- though it seems even more vague and ambivalent about that.

The idea had its genesis in the early 1990s, when Malaysia's outspoken premier Mahathir Mohamad campaigned for a conclave of Asian tiger economies which he dubbed the East Asia Economic Caucus -- pointedly exlcuding non-Asians from the clique. (Some wags called it the "caucus without the Caucasians".) The United States, loathe to see China gain ascendancy in the region, pushed strenuously (working through Japan) to include its allies "Down Under" in the group.

A demonstrator walks past a picture depicting ousted Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra as a superhero during an anti-government protest outside Government House in Bangkok April 7, 2009. Supporters of Thaksin are holding big demonstrations to try to embarrass it an the annual East Asia summit this weekend that Thailand is hosting. REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom

I remember covering an ASEAN meeting in Brunei in 1995 when Australia's then foreign minister Gareth Evans unrolled a huge map of East Asia which absurdly showed Siberia at the top, Antarctica at the bottom and the Australian continent smack dab in the middle. Malaysia's foreign minister (and future prime minister) Abdullah Badawi was beside himself. He stormed up to the podium, pointed with a shaking finger at the map and declared: "Australia is not there, it's down there," gesturing vehemently at the floor.

So ASEAN wound up caucusing with the Caucasians in the end, launching this annual East Asia Summit four years ago, as an encore act to its annual meetings. And as in a Bertold Brecht play, they have been 16 leaders in search of an existential purpose ever since.

The first summit in Kuala Lumpur was almost an umitigated disaster. China and South Korea were barely on speaking terms with Japan because of its prime minister's visit to the controversial Yakusuni war shine. At the second summit in Cebu Philippines, the voluble host, Philippine President Gloria Arroyo took a stab at defining the East Asia community, describing it as "many concentric cirlces" converging on areas of common ground such as trade. You could almost see the bubbles floating around.

This weekend's meeting in Pattaya, Thailand will try to find common ground in dealing with the financial crisis, which has begun to pinch Asia's largely export-dependent economies. The leaders will sign agreements on energy, climate change, food security. They will be filled with important sounding acronyms and they will be legally pretty much worthless.
If the leaders ever begin to talk seriously, say about a single currency or monetary union as Europe did a quarter-century or so ago, then they can truly start being a community. Or a village if they prefer. Until that happens, Dr. Mahathir had it right. This is a caucus without much focus.

A farmer pushes a bicycle as he walks along a paddy field in Ngai Cau village, 20 km (12.5 miles) outside Hanoi, April 4, 2008. The East Asia summit this weekend in Pattay, Thailland is expected to talk about a food security agreement. REUTERS/Kham