"…it is not fair if all boarding schools are viewed as one because NU's schools are against terrorism," Ali said.

CAIRO, December 6, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Nadhlatul Ulama, a major Indonesian Muslim organization, has criticized a national police plan to fingerprint all students and alumni of the Islamic boarding schools across the country, news reports said on Tuesday, December 6.

"To tell you the truth, I feel very insulted since all NU members fully support the country's sovereignty," Ali Maschan Moesa, NU's East Java chapter head, told the Jakarta Post.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla has approved a plan to collect fingerprints from Islamic students, saying that the police would merely be collecting data for future use.

The NU leader said this puts the students of Islamic boarding schools, or pesantren, under suspicion and presumes they posed a danger to state security.

Some reports have suggested that Indonesia's most wanted man, Noordin M. Top, might be hiding in one of the boarding schools.

Noordin and his Malaysian compatriot Azahari bin Husin have been accused of masterminding several bomb attacks across the country.

Azahari was killed during a November 9 police raid, while Noordin managed to escape.

Stigmatizing

Many have criticized the fingerprinting plan, saying it is tantamount to stigmatizing Islamic boarding schools as a source of terrorism in the country, the Post said.

"Some boarding schools, which have NU ideology and use the organization's yellow book, are against terrorism," Ali said.

"Therefore, it is not fair if all boarding schools are viewed as one because NU's schools are against terrorism."

Ali said that police must explain where they would be carrying out their plans and what their motives would be in taking fingerprints.

He stressed that police should scrutinize each boarding school's ideology to find out whether they were hard-liners or not.

"The police should only watch over those (schools) who teach violence to their students."

Pre-emptive

National Police chief Gen. Sutanto said the fingerprint collections were only one part of police efforts to "pre-empt people who try to influence students with terrorist ideology".

He said the plan had been misinterpreted as a form of police suspicion of Islamic boarding schools.

"That's not true," Sutanto said on the sidelines of the Indonesian Navy anniversary ceremony in Surabaya, East Java.

He urged the community, including Muslim students as well as other groups, to work together with the police in pre-empting the spread of militant ideas.

Indonesia has seen a series of deadly bomb attacks over the past several years committed by militants, some of whom reportedly studied in Islamic boarding schools.