KAMUNTING: 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 kms from Kuala Lumpur in northern Perak state, Kamunting is the usual destination for those detained under Malaysia’s controversial Internal Security Act (ISA).

A person may be detained without trial under ISA laws and is a throwback to British colonial rule, when the enemy across Southeast Asia was communism.

The new enemy is Muslim militancy.

Almost 90 Muslim militants have been arrested in the last two years, most of them after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks in USA.

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 spiritual leader, are on the camp’s roll call too.

The post-September 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.

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.

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.—Reuters