Conn Hallinan – Behind a recent, highly controversial indictment by the US Department of Justice, the administration of President George W Bush is maneuvering to revive military ties with the Indonesian armed forces (TNI, for Tentara Nasional Indonesia), one of the world's most oppressive institutions.

In late June, US Attorney General John Ashcroft persuaded a federal grand jury to indict Anthonuis Wamang for a 2002 ambush in West Papua that killed two Americans and an Indonesian and wounded 12 others. The indictment identifies Wamang as a commander in the Free Papua Movement (OPM, for Organisesi Papua Merdeka) and, despite strong evidence to the contrary, clears the Indonesian military of charges that it engineered the incident.

Human-rights groups, longtime observers of Indonesia, and even the Indonesian police say the indictment ignores evidence tying the ambush to the most notorious unit of the TNI, Kopassus. Indeed, rights groups charge that Wamang works for Kopassus, not the OPM.

The OPM has been fighting a low-key rebellion since Indonesia – with US support – short-circuited a United Nations-sponsored election and engineered the seizure of West Papua in 1969. West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea and Indonesia's easternmost province.

The United States has a long relationship with the TNI, dating back to the 1965 coup that overthrew then-president Sukarno and led to the murder of more than 500,000 communists and leftists. According to declassified US documents, US intelligence helped finger some of the coup's victims. The United States also supported Indonesia's violent takeover of East Timor in 1975.

The Bush administration is currently pushing Congress to fund an International Military Education and Training (IMET) program for Indonesia, but Congress is holding up the monies because of Indonesia's resistance to investigating the 2002 ambush seriously.

The United States first restricted Indonesia's IMET funds after the 1991 massacre of 270 civilians in Santa Cruz, East Timor. All military ties were suspended in 1999, when TNI-organized civilian death squads ravaged East Timor after that country's independence vote. And IMET funds were suspended after the 2002 West Papua ambush. While the TNI blamed the OPM for the attack, not even the local police agreed.

Two months after the August 31, 2002, ambush, a police report found that the OPM was an unlikely suspect because the group "never attacks white people". It concluded that TNI involvement "was a strong possibility". At the time, US officials concurred with the charge of TNI involvement. A "senior [Bush] administration official" told Raymond Bonner of the New York Times, "there is no question there was military involvement. There is no question it [the ambush] was premeditated."

According to the Australian newspaper The Age, "The initial police report on the attack concluded: 'There is a strong possibility' that the attack was 'perpetrated by members of the Indonesian National Force Army; however, it still needs to be investigated further'." But further investigation may be problematic. According to The Age, "Indonesian police investigators were threatened, evidence appeared to be planted, and the crime scene appeared to be interfered with."

On the day of the attack, two vans were ambushed leaving Freeport McMoRan's Grasberg mine, the largest gold and copper mine in the world. The attacker, or attackers, used M-16s, a weapon that has never been associated with the OPM, many of whose members use bows and arrows. OPM spokesperson John Ondowame denied any involvement in the attack. "I can say with assurance that the incident did not involve the Free Papua Movement," he told the press in Melbourne.

It would hardly be surprising that the TNI, in particular Kopassus, would engineer such an incident. In 2001 seven low-level members of the unit were jailed for murdering Papuan independence leader Theys Eluay. The seven are appealing their two-to-three-year sentences, which, given the track record of such appeals for war crimes committed in East Timor, are likely to be overturned. Out of 18 Indonesians charged with war crimes for their behavior in East Timor, Indonesian courts acquitted 12 and convicted six. Of the six, four had their sentences overturned, and one had his sentence halved. The one civilian charged, the former governor of East Timor, was sentenced to three and a half years. The minimum jail time for such crimes is 10 years.

In the meantime, Jakarta has ignored the UN-sponsored court in East Timor, which has charged almost 400 people with war crimes, including former Indonesian presidential candidate General Wiranto. Indonesia has refused to hand over any of the defendants. Besides discrediting the OPM, the military had a financial stake in the ambush. Freeport McMoRan paid the TNI US$10.7 million in protection money from 2000 to 2002, and provided military officers with free airline tickets. The company stopped the payments shortly before the ambush because a new US corporate-responsibility law required disclosure of such payments. One intelligence analyst told Bonner it was "extortion, pure and simple".

But the stakes are much bigger than bribes and free airline tickets. Restarting the lucrative Indonesia-US arms pipeline and roping in a potential ally against what some in the Bush administration see as their future competitor – China – overshadow greasing the palms of local Indonesian military commanders. Indonesia could be an important link in the chain of bases and allies the United States is forging in Asia. Australia, the Philippines, Japan and India already have signed up for the US anti-missile system. The Bush administration says it is directed at North Korea, but the Chinese are convinced it targets their small missile fleet.

The US Department of Defense (DOD) has lobbied to end the ban on arms sales and cooperation with the Indonesian military, in spite of the latter's horrendous human-rights record in the rebellious provinces of Aceh, Maluku, East Timor and Papua. "I think it is unfortunate that the US today does not have military-to-military relationships with Indonesia," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld's right-hand man, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, argued, "More contact with the West and the United States and moving them in a positive direction is important both to support democracy and support the fight against terrorism." Wolfowitz served as US ambassador to Indonesia during the Ronald Reagan administration (1981-89).

But others argue the opposite. Karen Orenstein, Washington coordinator for the East Timor Action Network (ETAN), said, "History demonstrates that providing training and other assistance only emboldens the Indonesian military to violate human rights and block accountability for past injustices."

The Indonesian military's "worst abuses", said Ed McWilliams, former State Department political counselor for the US Embassy in Jakarta from 1996-99, "took place when we [the US] were most engaged".

"Abuses" is a mild term for what the TNI has inflicted on such places as East Timor and Aceh. According to the United Nations, Indonesia's 24-year occupation of East Timor resulted in 200,000 deaths, a higher kill ratio than Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot managed in Cambodia. After the vote for independence in May 2002, TNI-sponsored militias went on a rampage, killing up to 1,500 people, forcing another 250,000 into concentration camps in West Timor, and destroying 70% of East Timor 's infrastructure.

In May 2003, Indonesia broke a ceasefire with the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakin Aceh Merdeka, or GAM), sent in 40,000 troops and 10,000 police, and sealed off the oil-rich province in Sumatra from journalists, human-rights groups and even international aid organizations such as the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Red Cross and the World Health Organization. Much of Aceh's civilian population has since been moved into strategic hamlets and, according to Amnesty International, there is "widespread ... torture of detainees in both military and police custody".

As in East Timor, the military, with the blessing of Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, has organized "civilian defense groups that are little more than death squads". According to the government-run National Commission on Human Rights, the military has been recruiting, training and arming such groups, which are then unleashed on the population.

The TNI has also been accused of aiding the right-wing Muslim organization Laskar Jihad, which is associated with widespread violence in Maluku and is increasingly active in West Papua.

Ashcroft's indictment has stirred outrage among human-rights groups, both in West Papua and the United States. An August 4 joint press statement from three Papuan rights groups, ELSHAM (the Institute for Human Rights Studies and Advocacy), LEMASA (the Amungme Tribal Institute) and YAHAMAK (the Women and Children Human Rights Foundation), expressed "grave concern over the actions of US Attorney General John Ashcroft" and accused him of "suppressing evidence" that the groups had supplied Federal Bureau of Investigation agents probing the ambush.

The groups say that Wamang, the target of the indictment, was "a business partner of Kopassus". The groups also charge that the Indonesian military "routinely uses civilians to stage attacks", and that the former police chief of West Papua, General Made Pastika, concluded that the TNI was behind the attack. According to the three groups, none of this evidence was presented to the grand jury.

In his statement announcing the indictment, Ashcroft said, "The US government is committed to tracking down and prosecuting terrorists who prey on innocent Americans in Indonesia and around the world. Terrorists will find they cannot hide from US justice."

But according to a 2002 study by the US Naval Postgraduate School, the TNI's links to groups such as Laskar Jihad has made it "a major facilitator of terrorism". As John Miller of ETAN pointed out, the Indonesian military carries out and sponsors terrorism throughout the huge archipelago. "Who," he asked, "are the terrorists here?"

[Conn Hallinan is a lecturer in journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a foreign-policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted with permission from Foreign Policy In Focus.]