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COMMENTARY
Supporting Indonesia's military bad idea - again
By Conn Hallinan
(Republished from Foreign Policy In
Focus)
As part of the war on terrorism, US Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld recently called for rebuilding military relations with
the Indonesian army. In a joint May 13 press conference with his
Indonesian counterpart, Matori Abdul Djalil, Rumsfeld said the
George W Bush administration intended to work with Congress
"to re-establish the kind of military-to-military relations
which we believe are appropriate".
This is hardly a new development. Shortly after September 11, the
White House, led by Deputy Secretary of State and former
ambassador to Indonesia Paul Wolfowitz, began maneuvering to
loosen restrictions on military aid to Jakarta. The latter had
been cut off by the Bill Clinton administration during the
Indonesian army's 1999 rampage in East Timor, which killed
thousands of civilians and destroyed 70 percent of the tiny
country's infrastructure.
But now Bush administration officials argue that the Indonesian
army has reformed since the bad old days of two years ago and
needs US help in its struggle against terrorism. US intelligence
says Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are active with extremist groups
in Java. But if it isn't careful, the US is likely to find itself
in the middle of several very nasty civil wars that have little to
do with jihad but quite a lot to do with very worldly things like
gold, copper, and oil.
There is a good reason why the Clinton administration imposed a
ban on military aid to Jakarta. The US has supplied Indonesia with
more than 90 percent of its military hardware over the past 30
years. Indonesia has repeatedly put those weapons to deadly use.
In 1975 it invaded tiny East Timor, a former Portuguese colony on
Indonesia's eastern edge, now independent. That invasion,
according to declassified documents published by the National
Security Archives of George Washington University, had the full
blessing of then president Gerald Ford and secretary of state
Henry Kissinger.
According to the United Nations, Indonesia's 24 years of
occupation resulted in the deaths of more than 200,000 Timorese,
or one-third of the pre-invasion inhabitants. In terms of
percentage of the population, not even Cambodia's Pol Pot managed
that kill ratio. When East Timor voted for independence in a 1999
UN-sponsored referendum, the Indonesian army and its militia
allies systematically destroyed the country, killing at least
2,000 people and forcing 250,000 more into concentration camps in
West Timor.
The Indonesian army is currently engaged in suppressing two other
independence movements, one in Sumatra's Aceh province and the
other in West Papua (formerly known as Irian Jaya) on the
country's eastern edge. The campaign in Aceh has killed more than
6,000 people, 1,500 in the past year alone. In West Papua, which
makes up the western side of the island of New Guinea, the army
has been jailing pro-independence supporters and firing on
demonstrators. In November, Kopassus, an Indonesian army unit
accused of widespread human-rights violations, invited one of West
Papua's independence leaders to a dinner. He ended up strangled to
death on the side of the road.
From all indications, such violence is likely to escalate. In a
December 29 speech to military cadets, Indonesian President
Magawati Sukanoputri told them: "You can do your duty without
being worried about human rights," a green light to unleash
the full fury of the army's repressive machinery.
While Jakarta says its civil wars are about terrorism, what's
really at stake are billions of dollars in raw materials. The
seizure of East Timor allowed Indonesia to claim part of the Timor
Gap, a channel between Timor and Australia, estimated to contain
anywhere from 1 billion to 6 billion barrels of oil. While the
Indonesians have finally left East Timor, they are hanging on to a
section of the Gap. In West Papua, the army is deeply involved in
the logging industry, as well as protecting the investments of the
US-operated Freeport-McMoran gold and copper mine and the Atlantic
Richfield oil company.
Both Aceh's and West Papua's independence movements were peaceful
until army repression sparked a violent response. As Sidney Jones,
the Asia director of Human Rights Watch, put it, "the
brutality of the army created the mass base for separatist
movements". In the name of fighting terrorism, the Bush
administration is about to re-establish ties with a particularly
brutal bunch of military thugs. Bad idea the first time around,
bad idea the second, and will only inflame rather than douse the
separatist fires raging in Indonesia.
Conn Hallinan
is the provost at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a
political analyst for Foreign Policy
In Focus.
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