Steven Gutkin, Jakarta – The United States remains ready to normalise relations with the Indonesian army, but obstacles including suspicions that soldiers were involved in the murder of two Americans are preventing full restoration of ties, the US ambassador said yesterday.
Ralph Boyce said other obstacles included the slow pace of military reform and resistance to holding officers accountable for human rights abuses, especially in the former Indonesian territory of East Timor.
"There are very troubling questions about who was responsible" for the killing last August of two American teachers and their Indonesian colleague in the eastern province of Papua, Mr Boyce said.
Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation as well as being a key US ally in the war on terror and one of the few democracies in the Islamic world. Its military has a long history of human rights violations.
The Clinton administration cut all sales of military equipment to Indonesia after the 1999 independence referendum in East Timor, during which hundreds of people were murdered at the hands of the Indonesian military and its proxies.
Although Washington in January reinstated a program to train Indonesian officers in the US, there were no immediate plans to restore full military ties or sell arms to Indonesia, Mr Boyce said.
The ambassador said recent trials designed to bring the perpetrators of the East Timor violence to court were "very disappointing".
But he praised Indonesia's efforts to root out Islamic terrorists and said the country had made impressive strides toward democracy in the five years since the fall of the dictator Soeharto. But arrests and other blows against suspected Islamic extremists had not ended the threat of terrorism here.
"It would be folly to assume they are eliminated," Mr Boyce said of Jemaah Islamiah, the suspected al-Qaeda linked terror group believed responsible for the October 12 Bali blasts that killed 202 people.
Mr Boyce said Indonesia had moved beyond breaking up the Bali plot, developing a "pro-active plan of rooting out this organisation".
A series of raids this month uncovered a cache of bomb-making materials and resulted in the arrests of 18 suspected Jemaah Islamiah members with suspected links to the Bali blasts.
Mr Boyce said he believed Muslim extremists had become more vocal since the fall of President Soeharto – because of newfound freedom of expression – but not necessarily larger in number. "To me, Indonesia remains a moderate, open, tolerant multicultural society," he said.