Rob Stokes – "Made in Britain - used in faraway places to kill dissidents". The government is being challenged to ban UK arms and related sales to Indonesia after the programme World in Action uncovered evidence that BAe, Rover and others are supplying the dictatorship there. While the exports are not illegal, Labour's response will be watched keenly by UK business because it will be the first significant test of Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's promise to introduce an "ethical dimension" to policy.
The UK exported 900m worth of goods to Indonesia last year, nearly 50% higher than in 1995, so it is a large and fast-growing export market which British exporters will not want to see jeopardised by a diplomatic row. Cook side-stepped the issue of arms to Indonesia when he unveiled his 'mission statement' last month. However, the television evidence places him on the spot. Moral pressure for a moratorium on arms sales to the Suharto regime, which was re-elected last week, has been increased by support from Nobel Peace Prizewinner Jose Ramos-Horta from East Timor, which is under brutal occupation by Indonesia. "The UK has become the single most important arms supplier to the regime," Ramos-Horta tells Making a Killing, the programme to be screened tomorrow night.
The World in Action documentary reveals that BAe's Heckler & Koch subsidiary in Nottingham has sold MP5 machine-guns, which fire 800 bullets a minute, to the regime. The guns are filmed being used by Kopassus, Indonesia's elite stormtroopers who are occupying East Timor, and who stand accused of leading the worst slaughter relative to population size since the Nazi extermination of Jews. Rover Group sells its Defender Land Rover direct to Kopassus, which favours the vehicle because it drives well in the rugged countryside of East Timor.
The Indonesians have armed their Defenders with heavy machine-guns and grenade launchers. More than 2,000 vehicles made by Rover Group at Solihull in the Midlands, have been sold to Indonesia with the UK government's approval.
The TV researchers also discovered that Nitor Group, a Surrey-based business headed by a former senior Royal Marine, has supplied Indonesia with computer simulation systems, called Ultima, to train snipers. The company gave reporters posing as businessmen a publicity video for Ultima which has been developed by Surrey police to help policemen shoot terrorists accurately. It can be used for more sinister purposes – to train marksmen to shoot unarmed demonstrators. Ramos-Horta is in no doubt how Ultima might be used in Indonesia: "This kind of training is designed to assassinate opponents of the regime when internal dissension becomes more serious."
Nitor group also confirms in the programme that it is negotiating with Indonesia to sell Close Quarter Battle Houses (CQBs). Known by some in the trade as 'killing houses', they are constructed to train special forces to storm buildings and kill opponents inside. The company has built them for the British Army and claims that in the Far East there is a big demand for CQBs based on shopping malls, discos, mock brothels and even places of worship. Indonesia is not mentioned in any of Nitor's promotional material.
"We are mindful, of course, of their human rights problem, and the work that we have done in the past has been through a third party so that our name doesn't necessarily become connected with Indonesia as such," Hitchcock, a former Royal Marine, told the undercover TV team. Said Ramos-Horta: "It is an outrage that they (Nitor) should provide this kind of infrastructure a that is going to be used to improve the killing capacity of the regime, not for external defence of the country, but against internal dissension."
He urged the UK government to freeze arms deliveries to Indonesia for the next five years "until the regime changes, until there is freedom in Indonesia, until East Timor can exercise its right to self-determination".
Indonesia goes to the polls every five years but Suharto's party, Golkar, has won six elections in a row since he came to power, and democracy activists claim that restrictions on opposition parties prevent a fair vote.
Six members of an independence group in East Timor were arrested last week.