Jakarta – The Indonesian government on Thursday asked parliament to approve a 10.5 percent rise in overall defence and security expenditure, but a 71.9 percent cut in development spending for the armed forces.

The armed forces sub-sector will see its development budget drop from 1.5 trillion rupiah in the current budget to a mere 415.4 billion rupiah, documents on the new draft budget showed.

The new budget covers the nine-month "transitional" fiscal year from April through December 31, 2000. The armed forces payroll does not fall under the the development budget.

The armed forces is one of four subsectors of the defence and security budget, which as a whole would see defence and security spending rise 10.5 percent during the nine month period, the documents showed.

The rise – in the "support sub-sector" which had its development budget raised by almost 500 percent to 1.3 trillion rupiah – will bring spending in the whole defence and security sector between April 1 and December 31 to 1.9 trillion rupiah.

There was no accompanying description of what the support sector covered, though it was believed to cover logistics and training.

The police, which received no development budget in the current fiscal year which ends March 31, was given 127 billion rupiah in the 2000 budget year.

The sector covering civilian militias and civil protection saw its development budget this year cut by 24 percent to six billion rupiah.

The government of President Abdurrahman Wahid had been striving to return the military to the defence sector and gradually wean them from their influential non-defence role in the country's politics.

The defence and security sector was one of the three sectors which saw a raise in the new budget.

The tourism, post and telecommunication sector had its budget allocation raised by 4.5 percent to 719.8 billion rupiah, while the sector of regional development and transmigration saw its budget go up by 52.3 percent to 16.6 trillion rupiah.