Creating an inclusive society is a critical element in combating religious extremism that breeds acts of terrorism in many countries, including in the UK and Indonesia, a visiting British foreign office minister said Friday.
Jeremy Browne, the UK Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, said countering terrorism required more than just enforcing the law.
“We are aware that [arresting terrorists] is about treating the problem in the end,” he told a seminar organized by the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture (CSRC) at Jakarta’s State Islamic University.
“That is like treating the illness once the person is already ill.”
He added that the root cause of why certain people disengage from mainstream ideas to immerse themselves in “extreme, radicalized Islam” as well as deep-seated hatred that “manifests itself in the form of violence against innocent people” should be addressed.
Like Indonesia, the UK has come under terrorist attack in recent years. In 2005, four Muslim men of Pakistani and Jamaican descent rigged three bombs on London’s underground trains and one on a double-decker bus.
The explosions killed 52 people and injured 700 others.
An effective way to counter extremism as the root of terrorist attacks is the government’s openness to its own citizens as well as foreign governments and their citizens, he said.
He stated that, unlike certain neighboring European countries, the UK government allowed the freedom of religious expression in its multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.
“There are 1200 mosques in the UK so nearly every community in Britain would have a mosque and people of the Muslim faith worship in those mosques,” he said, adding that there were roughly two million Muslims living in the UK.
“There are some who present a radical, violent threat to innocent people but they are numerically very small to the vast majority of Muslims living in Britain who have normal lives,” he added.
Furthermore, he added, no segregation or distinction between citizens of various religions existed in the UK, unlike what might be commonly perceived by Indonesians about the UK.
For example, he said, Muslims take on a variety of professions from public transportation drivers to senior positions in the civil service.
“There are Muslim as well as Christian staff, and others of different race and background,” he said.
His visit to the country — part of his tour to Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines and Thailand — was an effort to represent his government’s embrace of the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, he added. “Ours is a message about cooperation and the excitement about the potential that the future holds as the result of more people working more closely with each other,” he said.
The minister said ordinary citizens as well played a role in counterterrorism through how they spoke with each other and the conversations they had.
“I would not feel this was a task that should be left just to politicians and the government,” Browne added. (gzl)
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