GOVT'S DERADICALIZATION PROGRAM YET TO YIELD OPTIMUM RESULTS : OFFICIAL

Jakarta, Sept. 18 (ANTARA) - The government's deradicalization program to fight terrorism is not easy to implement and has so far not yielded optimum results, a top security official said.

"It concerns one's ideology which is not so easy to change. So, this program has so far not yielded optimum results," Ansyaad Mbai, head of the political, legal and security coordinating ministry's anti-terror desk, said here on Friday.

The Indonesian government had long been implementing a de-radicalization program in the wake of the series of terrorist bombings since 2002, he said.

The program involved prominent religious figures, Islamic scholars (ulema), and Islamic boarding school ('pesantren') teachers and was designed to rectify the misconceived or distorted Islamic teachings adhered to by terrorists, according to Mbai.

The government was also cooperating with several other countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan in implementing the program, among other things by inviting their ulemas to Indonesia and distributing books on Islam to correct the radicals' misunderstandings about Islamic teachings.

But changing one's ideology proved to take a very long time and to be not easy, he said.

The government, however, would not give up and deal with the root of the terrorism , namely radicalism, he said.

"We should not be too overjoyed about the death of Noordin M top and his associates, because the threat of terrorism still exists in Indonesia. What we should do is to continue addressing the root of the problem," Ansyaad Mbai said.

He had earlier said Noordin's peers such as Dul Matin, Umar Patek and Upik Lawanga were still at large.

The fight against terrorism was not finished with the death of Southeast Asian terrorist leader Noordin M Top and his three associates, Mbai said.

The security agencies still did not know much about the network Noordin had built up but it had to be assumed he had recruited followers, trained them in bomb-making, and they were still around, he said.