Jesse J. Holland, Washington – Congress is moving toward sending money to Indonesia to help train its police but has yet to warm up to the White House's call for increased relations with the country's military forces.
The House on Friday agreed to provide $8 million to help train Indonesia's police forces in anti-terrorism as part of the $29 billion anti-terrorism bill.
The Senate Appropriations Committee earlier had agreed to send money to Indonesia's police, saying the United States "recognizes that Indonesia is a potential terrorist haven."
The Senate earmarked $4 million for general law enforcement training and $12 million "to train and equip an Indonesia police unit to prevent or respond to international terrorism."
The Senate money does come with strings attached. Assistance is prohibited to mobile brigade units, which the report accompanying the bill says "have a long history of human rights abuses."
The House and the Senate committee also specifically refused to provide any money that would have gone to the country's military forces.
The State Department had asked for $8 million to train and equip a military force to control problems within Indonesia that police are unable to control.
But the Indonesian military has been accused of corruption and human rights abuses, especially for its role in trying to suppress the independence drive in East Timor in 1999.
The United States cut ties with the Indonesian military following the East Timor violence and has said that reforms – including accounting for the violence – are necessary to resume normal relations.
However, the Bush administration – spearheaded by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a former ambassador to Jakarta – has been pushing to re-establish relations with the Indonesian military to fight terrorism.
The administration has been "interested in finding ways to work with the Congress to re-establish the kind of military-to-military relations which we believe are appropriate," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said May 14.
He did not elaborate on what those might be. "We are of the view that it's time for them to be adjusted substantially," he said.
The law halting aid – called the Leahy Amendment for Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who sponsored it – requires that Indonesia cooperate with investigations and prosecutions of members of the armed forces responsible for human rights abuses.
"If we provide this aid it should be narrowly focused and closely monitored, and it should reinforce our other foreign policy goals, including respect for human rights," said Leahy, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee's foreign operations subcommittee. Human rights groups say the conditions have not been met.