"What for, the minister could not have found anything there," NII Crisis Center founder Ken Setiawan said during a seminar on the prevention of NII ideology from influencing students, here on Saturday.
He said that Al-Zaytun had been conditioned in such a way to cover up its relations with NII because the NII teachings were not taught in the boarding school while its students were not members of the NII movement.
Setiawan said that Al-Zaytun was designed as an educational institution so that it was able to fool the public as if it were an education center while actually it was a center of the NII movement.
"The minister in his visit will at the most only find buildings, constructions and students. He would not find any NII activities there because the movement of NII is underground in nature, so that to reveal it, an intelligence technique is needed," he said.
He said that it could therefore be understood if the religious affairs minister concluded in his brief visit that Al-Zaytun had no relations with NII. The minister`s conclusion was different from the results of a religious affairs ministry`s research in 2002.
The religious affairs ministry and the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) carried out research on the matter in 2002 and concluded that Al-Zaytun and NII had links but the results of their research were not made public.
"If one is willing to find the relations between Al-Zaytun and NII, he or she should trace information from former victims of NII, people in its surroundings and parents whose children have become victims," Setiawan said.
He said that the visit of the minister to the boarding school was comparable to a question raised to a thief, asking whether or not he or she was a thief. "It is impossible for a thief to admit he is a thief," he added.
He said that the religious affairs minister`s statement which said there was no link between Al-Zaytun and NII constituted a heavy blow to victims who had testified to the contrary.
It had created the impression that the victims had only tried to make Al-Zaytun leaders a scapegoat.(*)
Editor: Aditia Maruli Radja
Copyright © ANTARA 2011
