KAMUNTING, Malaysia, 6 July 2003 — The view of verdant mountains across a river valley and an adjoining golf course suggest the setting for a country club.
The high walls and barbed wire tell a different story.
Kamunting detention camp is where Malaysia puts suspected members of Jemaah Islamiah, the Southeast Asian militant group whose top operatives are allegedly linked to Osama Bin Laden.
Located 280 km from Kuala Lumpur in northern Perak state, Kamunting is the usual destination for those detained under Malaysia’s controversial Internal Security Act (ISA).
The ISA allows detention without trial and is a throwback to British colonial rule, when the enemy across Southeast Asia was communism.
The new enemy is Muslim militancy.
Almost 90 militants have been arrested in the last two years, most of them after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington by Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.
Some of the detainees had links with men on trial in Indonesia for the Bali bombings, which killed 202, mostly Western tourists, in October last year.
Aside from Jemaah Islamiah suspects, members of the main opposition force Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS), including a son of its leader, are on the camp’s roll call.
The post-Sept. 11 environment has muted criticism of the ISA, which successive governments, long before Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s, have used to silence opposition figures.
In June, six supporters of Anwar Ibrahim — the finance minister sacked and jailed for corruption and sodomy after challenging Mahathir in 1998 — were finally released after two years of detention under the ISA.
They were accused of planning street demonstrations and seeking to overthrow the government through violent means. But their Keadilan party, led by Anwar’s wife, fights for reform and justice through the ballot box.
The detainees denied everything, but all efforts to challenge their incarceration through the courts came to nothing, though four of their cohorts were released.
Rights organization Amnesty International called them prisoners of conscience, while the United States cited their case as an example of how the government uses the ISA “to intimidate and restrict political dissent”.
Accounts of life inside Kamunting suggest concessions to prisoners were followed by angry repression.
“I was punched, kicked, handcuffed and photographed naked one day simply because I was holding a laptop computer the guards wanted,” said Keadilan vice president Chua Tian Chang, who was released in June. Kamunting officials did not comment.
Tian Chua, as Chua is better known, says lawyers for the Keadilan six are planning to bring a civil suit against the police on grounds of defamation over the unproven accusations that they were planning armed opposition.
He said they will also challenge the government’s decision to ignore a ruling by the country’s highest court, the Federal Court, late last year which said their detention was unlawful.
Covering about 80 hectares, Kamunting has military-style barracks, barbed wire and towering walls for detainees on one side, and quarters for almost 300 officers, staff and their families, on the other.
Security sources say there are around 100 inmates, held on charges ranging from printing fake passports to providing lodging to Al-Qaeda operatives involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Those held under the ISA are kept in secret locations for 60 days and transferred thereafter to Kamunting. Habeas corpus applications to bring them before a court, the only legal means of challenging their detention, rarely succeed.
Once at the camp, prisoners’ two-year terms can be extended indefinitely by the home minister, meaning life inside can be agonizingly slow.
“The thing that hits you after some time is ‘My God, this could be 20 years, not two years’,” said Karpal Singh.
The criminal lawyer and former opposition Democratic Action Party lawmaker served 15 months in Kamunting during a late 1980s crackdown on political dissidents.
Singh said after his arrival he met two communists, there for 14 years. “That sort of thing can make you go mad quietly.”
Inmates usually spend their days reading censored materials, chatting with cellmates and receiving weekly visits from family members and lawyers. Often it is so quiet, they could sleep.
Human rights groups raised a howl after Mahathir suggested last year that the ISA be made even harder to challenge after a couple of detainees were freed by courts.
“It’s a grossly unjust piece of antiquated legislation that should have gone out of the window decades ago,” said Cynthia Gabriel of the Voice of the Malaysian People.
But not all condemn the ISA.
“It’s a necessary evil,” said Abdullah Ahmad, group editor at the New Straits Times newspaper, who spent five years in Kamunting in the 1970s after being accused of being a communist.
“I will support the ISA so long as it’s used against those really out to destroy racial and religious harmony or sabotage the economy,” said Abdullah, who got his freedom when his friend, Mahathir, became prime minister in 1981.
But he has few fond memories of his years in Kamunting, the first two spent in solitary confinement. “The food I had, I wouldn’t even give to my cats,” he said.
The food hasn’t improved much. But now there’s a nine-hole golf course, set against the picturesque backdrop of Peninsular Malaysia’s central mountain range.
“We thought it was a nice way to pass time,” a camp officer told Reuters. He meant for the warders, not prisoners.