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The hard-line Indonesian Mujahideen Council has sent an open letter to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in protest of his recent warning that terrorists were seeking to turn the country into an Islamic caliphate.

“His statement linking an Islamic state to terrorist ideology is completely wrong,” said Muhammad Thalib, who heads the group, which is known as the MMI. “The former does not threaten the nation, but the latter does.”

Thalib, speaking on Tuesday after presenting the letter to the National Police, pointed out that under the country’s flourishing democracy, the government should respect peaceful calls for the formation of an Islamic state.

“We will keep pushing for this through the wider implementation of Shariah law,” he said.

In a speech at Halim Perdanakusuma Air Force Base in East Jakarta last month, Yudhoyono said that despite not being an Islamic state, Indonesia respected Islam and had adopted its values — and sometimes even its laws — as part of its social fabric.

However, he suggested that the 2003 Law on Terrorism be amended to allow the prosecution of clerics who criticized the government in their sermons or advocated for the implementation of Shariah law.

Irfan S Awwas, a senior member of the MMI, said the president’s remarks were uncalled for.

“It will only create problems. Such amendments to the law are meant to be open to discussion and debate,” he said.

According to Irfan, democracy was a fluid concept and not set in stone. “Recall that former President Sukarno devised a ‘guided democracy’ for Indonesia, which was later pushed aside for ‘Pancasila democracy,’ ” he said. “Things always change.”

Al Chaidar, a terrorism expert at Malikul Saleh University in Aceh, however, said that the goal of an Islamic state went hand in hand with current terrorist activities in the country.

“The whole point of terrorism in Indonesia is to push for an Islamic state. The ideology feeds the violence that paves the way toward this end,” he said.

“These terrorists are so focused on their single-minded objective of creating a caliphate that they ignore their own families, even their own mortal souls. No terrorist in Indonesia believes in anything else.”

Al Chaidar said their conviction made the battle against terrorism almost impossible to win.

“They fight their war in two ways. One is the soft approach, through ideals. The other is through violence, what they call jihad,” he said. “What we’re seeing now is a marked shift from the first approach to the second one.”