Pip Hinman – With Megawati Sukarnoputri freshly installed as president, and the country's armed forces, the TNI, in the ascendancy, the US government is moving swiftly to strengthen military ties with Indonesia.

US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in Australia to promote closer US-Australian defence ties and "regional security", said on July 29 that he was keen to re-establish US training of Indonesian military officers as well as the sale of weapons and equipment to the TNI.

Australia's foreign minister, Alexander Downer, went on record the next day heartily endorsing the US plan. The move comes as US officials scurry to withdraw from circulation an embarrassing archival report which documents US involvement in installing the military regime of Suharto in 1965-66.

The report shows that the US supplied the military with lists of thousands of members of the Indonesian Communist Party, who were then tracked down and killed. Possibly a million Indonesians were murdered during Suharto's first two years in power, setting the pattern for Suharto's 32-year reign.

The administration of George W. Bush is keen to rebuild close ties with Jakarta. The previous Clinton administration was forced to suspend training, equipment and weapons supplies to Indonesia following worldwide protest at the TNI's post-ballot rampage in East Timor in 1999.

A 1998 defence bill included the Leahy provision which barred the Pentagon from training foreign troops who have a history of human rights atrocities. This provision, which attaches conditions to the re-establishment of full military ties, was renewed on July 22 as part of Congress' 2002 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act.

The 1998 Leahy provision came in after the Pentagon was discovered training Indonesian officers despite a congressional ban on joint training with foreign troops with a record of human rights violations. However, it did not ban the sale of weapons, only "restricting" their use in occupied East Timor and limiting military training to "non-tactical matters".

It was only in September 1999 when the futility of such conditions on the TNI became so obvious that US Congress, along with the European Union and other countries, was forced to suspend equipment sales and training altogether.

Since then, Indonesia has campaigned to get this ban overturned, with some success. The European Union lifted its ban on arms sales in January 2000, with France leading the arms sales push, closely followed by Britain.

Australia, meanwhile, never stopped its training programs, only suspending those with the elite Kopassus troops. The Australian government allocated some $4 million last financial year to Indonesian officer training.

Bush is on record praising Indonesia for its "commitment to the rule of law and democracy", despite the lack of any action being taken against any high-level TNI officer being charged with murders in East Timor, Aceh or West Papua.

Since Sukarnoputri's instalment, the police, TNI and their right-wing militia accomplices have launched a renewed crack-down on Indonesian democracy activists resulting in the arbitrary arrest of some 37 people in the last month.

A new report, "The United States and Southeast Asia: A Policy Agenda for the New Administration", drafted by Dov Zakheim, a Reagan-era Pentagon official who is now one of Bush's under-secretaries of defence, identifies Indonesia as "the region's most important state".

Its two recommendations are to strengthen the US military presence in Southeast Asia and to promote, through multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, "market-oriented economic reform, technology-driven development and measures for poverty alleviation".

Released in June, the Council on Foreign Relations report describes the region as "a troubling landscape of political turbulence and economic fragility" and, with China in its sights, recommits the US to a 1948 pledge to keep the region "free of any hegemonic power".

According to Gerry van Klinken, editor of the magazine Inside Indonesia, the CFR report urges the US to re-engage Indonesia's army and states that Indonesia's "basic cohesion and territorial integrity" be preserved at all costs.

For the moment, the US State Department seems to favour retaining some conditions on the restoration of full US military ties. But for how long? Deputy assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs Ralph Boyce, who is slated to be Washington's next ambassador to Jakarta, believes that the US government should renew its training and equipping of Indonesian police which, he says, acts as a counterweight to the TNI.

Human rights activists disagree. John Miller, director of the US-based East Timor Action Network, said that renewing military ties with Indonesia "would send the worst possible signal" to the new regime.

Not only did Sukarnoputri openly oppose the 1999 referendum in East Timor, he said, but Eurico Guterres, leader of the most notorious militia group, Aitarak, has been praised by her as a national hero and made a leader of her party's youth wing.

Some right-wing commentators are worried about the consequences of the US pursuing military ties with such unseemly haste.

Gareth Evans, a former Labor Party foreign minister who, together with former PM Paul Keating, cultivated the "special relationship" policy with Suharto, says that while he does not oppose such a move, the timing is all important.

In a comment piece in the July 24 International Herald Tribune, Evans, who now heads the International Crisis Group, a right-wing think tank, sounded a warning about the backlash such a move could provoke: "I am one of those who has to acknowledge, as Australia's foreign minister at the time, that many of our earlier training efforts helped only to produce more professional human rights abusers".

According to Jon Lamb from Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor, "Indonesia's scorched earth policy in East Timor hasn't been forgotten – not by Australians, not by the world. Western governments deciding to reward those criminals responsible for the carnage there, and in Aceh and West Papua, will face concerted public opposition".

"The old discredited policy won't wash any more. If government was in step with public opinion here it would end all military ties with Indonesia."