SINGAPORE, 4 September 2003 — Would 15 years in jail for a charismatic Indonesian cleric make much difference to militants in their prosecution of violence?

Recent history would suggest it is the incarceration of operations chiefs rather than spiritual leaders such as Abu Bakar Bashir that can really make a difference in curbing attacks.

On Tuesday, an Indonesian court jailed Muslim cleric Bashir for four years on treason charges, but said the prosecution had failed to prove he led the Jemaah Islamiah network blamed for bombings across Southeast Asia.

“Most Muslim extremist groups have a spiritual leader...but generally speaking they are not engaged in the operational side of things so it is difficult to tie those back to the spiritual leader,” said Clive Williams, terrorism expert at the Australian National University in Canberra.

That made Bashir’s trial almost a lose-lose situation for those battling terror.

“His conviction is just fine for Jemaah Islamiah. He is a much more powerful figure to the organization as a martyr,” said Zachary Abuza, expert in Southeast Asia security at Simmons College in Boston.

Bashir has always maintained that Jemaah Islamiah (JI) does not exist.

“This is ideal for them,” said Abuza, referring to the group. “If he’s not the head of JI, then they still seem to benefit from it anyway because he shares their world view.”

But it is extremely difficult to jail a religious firebrand because of his world view — as Indonesian prosecutors found this week — and then there is no guarantee that his disappearance from the scene would halt violence.

In 1995, Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman was found guilty and jailed for life by a US court for plotting to blow up the World Trade Center. The “blind sheikh” remains in jail.

The World Trade Center was destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, in suicide airliner attacks by members of the Afghanistan-based Al-Qaeda network. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, is its spiritual figurehead and not the brains behind actual operations. He remains at large as does his right-hand man — the Egyptian Ayman Al-Zawahri — a disciple of the “blind sheikh”.

Bashir, not proved to be leader of Jemaah Islamiah, will serve about three years in jail after nearly one year already in custody. The prosecution had demanded a 15-sentence.

Whatever the length of his sentence, the jailing of the frail 65-year-old still makes him a hero among his many thousand followers in the world’s most populous Muslim country.

“This won’t make a difference to Jemaah Islamiah,” said Williams of ANU. “There are tapes of his preaching and the fact that he is not giving these speeches personally will not make a great deal of difference.”

Bashir’s influence, rather than any role in day-to-day operations, was his strength, analysts agree.

“I think he is the emir of JI,” said Abuza. “But he has never had that much day-to-day control. He has been in jail for the better part of the last year and the organization has done just fine without him.”

While Bashir’s relatively brief sentence may appear to be a setback in the US-declared war on terror, more pertinent was the capture of JI’s operations chief Hambali. The Indonesian cleric, born Riduan Isamuddin, was caught by Thai police and the CIA in a one-room apartment in central Thailand last month.

“JI is still in business as long as it is able to train operatives faster than they are being arrested,” Abuza said. “These people don’t just retire.”

Since Hambali’s arrest, JI activists will have resorted to personal couriers to communicate until they can set up new e-mail accounts of which Hambali is unaware and which he cannot reveal to interrogators.

Such practical details are not the realm of preachers like Bashir. His power derives from words not action.

Jemaah Islamiah faithful may be distressed by the sentencing of Bashir, but will it be enough to turn them to violence?

“More people are sympathetic to what he was saying than sympathetic to what Hambali was doing,” said Williams, referring to divisions in Jemaah Islamiah since the Bali bombings last October that killed 202.

Hambali and such radicals number in the hundreds, while followers of Bashir’s goal of an Islamic state in Southeast Asia run into possibly tens of thousands, especially among Asia’s many poor and dispossessed.