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Indonesia's generals go
to war on a shoestring
By Bill Guerin
JAKARTA - The Indonesian army is once again at the forefront. Last
week saw the rise of an army general to head the military, which
has been under a navy officer for three years, a clear
illustration of President Megawati Sukarnoputri's increasingly
close links to the generals.
The army by far outnumbers the other services and now regains the
key role it had during the rule of former dictator Suharto.
General Endriartono Sutarto, finally installed last week as the
new military commander-in-chief (Panglima TNI), will command
337,485 troops, including 52,118 sailors and 24,194 airmen, as
well as the soldiers from his own force. The new C-in-C will have
an annual budget of just over US$1 billion, less than a quarter of
that of tiny neighbor Singapore. Singapore has a total of 60,500
military personnel and an annual defense budget of $4.4 billion.
The government upped the defense budget by 18 percent for 2002 to
Rp9.4 trillion from Rp7.4 trillion ($822million) last year. Even
Thailand's total of 301,000 military personnel received about $2
billion a year for their needs.
By comparison, Indonesia's internal-security budget, including
police, in 2002 is only Rp5 trillion. The defense sector receives
the most money after social welfare, and some legislators have
complained that Indonesia does not need a powerful military
because there is sustained peace in Southeast Asia. They also
wanted to double the budget for internal security to encourage
total reform in the police organization in the hope of making them
more professional.
Professionalism of the military was a non-issue during most of
Suharto's reign as the assumption was that, as Indonesia would
never go into combat against an external threat, why spend money
on making the military professional? The legendary General L B
Moerdani, then C-in-C, set the strategy in stating in 1980 that
there would be no war within the next 100 years. However, two
decades later, the new realities after September 11 demand a
rethink of this tried and tested paradigm.
Sutarto, when being questioned by a parliamentary commission
during a "fit and proper test" for the man who would be
military supremo, said that the TNI's power was waning because of
its limited budget.
"It cannot be denied that TNI's professionalism is related to
its budget and the welfare of its members," he told the
legislators, adding that his views on soldiers' low morale and the
TNI's limited budget were not meant to justify poor
professionalism of the military, rather that the military's
limited and outdated weapons had affected its professionalism.
Sutarto said the TNI's commitment to encouraging democracy was not
necessarily by encouraging civilian forces to empower themselves,
but rather by creating conditions that would enable the military
to maximize its professionalism and discipline.
This is a point made by Juwono Sudarsono, the country's first-ever
civilian minister of defense, who, though agreeing that there was
a "grudging recognition" now that civilian politicians
had "blown it" over the past four years, believes that
the main issue is something entirely different.
Juwono, speaking at a recent seminar, said the issue was not the
formalities of civilian supremacy, the budget transparency of the
military, or the need to open up the businesses, the foundations
and the cooperatives run by individual officers in its service and
the police force. He said the real issue was creating a new
generation of soldiers and police who would be up to their duties
provided that they were given adequate training and preparation.
Recently, retired army deputy chief of staff Lieutenant General
Kiki Syahnakri commented in the same vein when saying that the
military was very aware that in the past they had been involved
too deeply in politics and as a result "politics penetrated
the army, making it a multicolored institution, just like a
rainbow". Eventually, he said, "politics gnawed at our
military skills, causing them to deteriorate from bad to
worse."
Kiki remembered the good old days when "not only were we the
best in Southeast Asia, we also commanded the respect of such
armies as the British Gurkhas during the confrontation with
Malaysia [where Indonesian troops fought the Gurkhas in the
jungles of Borneo] and the Dutch in Irian Jaya".
One reason the US is upping its efforts to re-engage with the
Indonesian military (despite the prohibitions in place with the
Leahy amendment), Kiki says, is that they know that Indonesia's
past three presidents relied on the role of the military,
especially the army, to take charge of the micro-management of the
country and the bureaucracy, as well as the police and defense
forces.
In a move said to be part of efforts to "rejuvenate" the
Indonesian military, former Strategic Reserve (Kostrad) commander
Ryamizad Ryacudu, the son-in-law of former vice president and
Suharto's adjutant, Try Sutrisno, was promoted to army chief of
staff only a few days before Sutarto took command.
This is the second top command post in the military and Ryacudu
pledged to pay attention to soldiers' welfare and said it was the
government that was responsible for paying fair wages to soldiers
through allocating a sufficient budget to the TNI.
"Professionalism in the military can be built if the
soldiers' welfare is improved," he said. "Of course, the
army has several foundations which earn profits for us. We must
channel these to the soldiers," Ryacudu said. The best
estimates are that the military obtains only a third of its actual
budget from the state, and has to finance the rest independently.
The military has for years been starved of funds for operations,
new weaponry, and money for paying wages and salaries. During the
Suharto era, the state met more of the needs of the military, in
line with the strong grip Suharto had on an armed force that he
had steadily deprived of its power. Suharto allowed the military
to enrich itself provided it did not question his authority.
Officially, the military's business empires were meant to raise
funds for the welfare of the soldiers, whose incomes were, and
still are, pitifully low. The reality was much different, with the
benefits going largely to high-ranking officers.
Suharto maintained the so-named "Unitary state of
Indonesia" with a relentless and brutal military approach.
The hour of maximum danger may have passed for the worst
separatism fighting after Suharto's downfall, but Megawati is
solidly behind a renewed military approach and has, in fact, given
the green light for additional military commands (Kodam).
The new TNI chief is a hardliner on Aceh, pushing for the
establishment of a new Kodam for Aceh against the wishes of the
Acehnese community, and also on Maluku, arguing that the solution
is to declare martial law.
During the Suharto era the army's "territorial system"
of military posts in towns and villages acted as an instrument of
political control and a source of widespread business and criminal
activity. Last year's regional-autonomy implementation and more
decentralization threaten to affect this military business empire
drastically. Short of any serious move by the government to fund
the military properly, the generals will resist any such change to
the utmost.
A case in point is the planned BP operation in Tangguh, in Bintuni
Bay in the "bird's head" region of Papua. This is a
megaproject that may involve almost 23 trillion cubic feet of
natural-gas reserves. BP is investing $2 billion to construct a
liquefied-natural-gas (LNG) plant and wants to do without a large
military presence on site, but a protest at the site this year,
ostensibly over land rights, was thought to have been set up by
state security forces to justify a heavy military presence. The
military has, in fact, told BP officials that troops are required
by the Indonesian constitution to protect all national assets,
including the Tangguh (Invincible) project.
The world's largest gold mine, operated by Freeport in Papua, and
ExxonMobil, which produces LNG in Aceh, have for long experienced
image problems because of brutality by the Indonesian troops they
had hired to protect their operations.
Indonesia, more than at any time in its post-independence history,
perhaps, needs a professional, well-trained and equipped, properly
paid security force that can be sent to an area very quickly when
there is a danger of ethnic conflict.
In Central Kalimantan during Abdurrahman Wahid's presidency,
security forces could not prevent a serious massacre of migrant
Madurese at the hands of the local Dayak population. Soldiers and
police even started shooting at each other. A military source
commented that the killings arose from an extremely primitive
understanding of regional autonomy, but it was also said that they
reflected a rise in sentiment for an independent state of Borneo.
A professional peacekeeping force could also have done much to
quell the opposing Muslim and Christian fighters who set off the
Ambon wars in January 1999.
A truly professional Indonesian military and police force is out
of reach as long as the commanders have to spend three-quarters of
their efforts on running businesses to generate funds to plug the
enormous budget gap and to improve conditions for the troops under
them.
Sudarsono argues that given the failure of civilian leadership at
all levels of government, and the new priorities for the armed
forces, it may take as long as 10-15 years before the role of the
military, both symbolically as well as effectively, is reduced.
The military may also have a much wider political backing for its
mission to protect the nation by whatever means it deems
necessary. People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) Speaker Amien Rais
said last week that in overcoming clashes between conflicting
groups, security authorities had to choose between two
alternatives: adopting a democratic approach or a militaristic
one. The democratic option has led to bomb explosions, whereas the
militaristic approach will stop the bloodshed, he said.
"So I would choose the second alternative, even if it
somewhat tarnishes the image of democracy."
The urgency of the task at hand for Indonesia's two top generals
and the new military regime was underscored by last weekend's bomb
explosions in a nightclub and a hotel in Jakarta.
(©2002 Asia Times Online
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