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Long tradition of using gangsters

Source
South China Morning Post - September 4, 1999

Vaudine England, Jakarta – Indonesia's armed forces have long used street gangs and self-styled militia to do their dirty work, with East Timor simply providing a contemporary example of a pattern which goes back to at least the 1940s.

Many of the army's earliest leaders themselves came from the local militia set up by the Japanese occupying forces during World War II.

Of relevance to the militias now active in East Timor is the state's attitude to such gangs once the dirty work is done.

In the early 1980s, gangsters were recruited to participate in campaigning for the 1982 elections, acting as bully boys and provocateurs to make sure of then president Suharto's continued dominance. Once they were no longer needed, thousands of them were exterminated – murdered in "mystery killings" that lasted until 1984.

Much of the violence that has broken out across Indonesia since Mr Suharto's fall in May last year has been blamed on "provocateurs" or "a third force". So it is in East Timor.

Information Minister Yunus Yosfiah argues that militias only sprouted suddenly in East Timor this year because the many native East Timorese, who genuinely support continued integration with Indonesia, felt a real need for protection in the wake of President Bacharuddin Habibie's offer of independence to the territory.

There is no doubt an element of truth in this, but the mushrooming of up to a dozen different groups of men with guns, matching T-shirts, berets, government-issue M-16 rifles and plans of campaign suggests more organisation is involved than merely a spontaneous growth of neighbourhood protection units would provide.

Moreover, some of the militias now active in East Timor have existed since Indonesia's 1975 invasion. Their job, then and now, has been to support the military's hypothesis that the problem in East Timor is a long-running civil war, not Indonesia's occupation.

This is why the pro-independence movement has decided to turn the other cheek as much as possible in recent weeks, hoping not to be drawn into any fighting which would prove the military correct.

Complicating the matter further is the fact that it is not "the military" as such which is directly sponsoring the militias, but certain hardline elements within it who trace their allegiance not to armed forces chief General Wiranto but to disgraced former special forces chief (and Suharto son-in-law) Prabowo Subianto.

For as long as the militias help make the Timorese civil war myth into reality, they will remain part of the anti-independence arsenal.

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