Raymond Bonner, Jakarta – The Bush administration's effort to re-establish military ties with Indonesia, which has been curtailed for nearly a decade because of its army's widespread human rights violations, has some unexpected support among Indonesians.
Many who suffered under the military in the past, and who are still critical of the army for its continuing rights abuses, say that the best hope for eventually developing an army whose conduct is appropriate for a democracy is to send officers to schools in the United States.
They add, however, that restoring aid would require a delicate balancing act. Somehow, the United States would have to make clear that it was not condoning past abuses and must keep up pressure on the Indonesian military for fundamental reforms. This would require tight conditions on the aid, they say.
American officials say they are aware that a resumption of aid would be cited as approval by the Indonesian military. But they say that, on balance, the benefits to the United States and to Indonesia of restoring the military relationship, and of working to create an army with high professional standards, outweigh the disadvantages.
The Bush administration wants to finance a new Indonesian military unit to deal with civil conflict, and to lift the ban on Indonesian soldiers attending American military schools as part of the International Military Education and Training program.
"If 10,000 soldiers were on IMET training every year, we would have a much better democracy," said Bambang Harymurti, editor of the weekly newsmagazine Tempo, which was shut down by the dictator Suharto in 1994 and did not reappear until after he was ousted in 1998.
The United States and Indonesia are not talking of anywhere near that number, but Mr. Harymurti expands on his point by saying that officers' wives and children should go to the United States too to be exposed to how an army functions under civilian control. Mr. Harymurti said that during the Suharto era, military officers who had received training in the United States were the ones who advocated reform and ending the military presence in politics. "We always had clandestine help from them," Mr. Harymurti said.
In Washington, the Heritage Foundation, the conservative research organization, is a strong opponent of resuming military aid to Indonesia, joining Sen. Patrick Leahy, the liberal Democrat from Vermont.
The United States gave military aid to Indonesia for more than 20 years "and it didn't work," said Dana R. Dillon, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Indonesia's military remains corrupt and a persistent violator of human rights, he said. "When they come here, they learn everything," Mr. Dillon said of foreign soldiers who train in the United States. "When they go home they have to operate in the same corrupt system."
The debate over military aid to Indonesia has distinct echoes from the cold war, when thousands of Latin American military officers were trained at the School of the Americas, then went home to support dictatorial generals. One of the most heated debates in that era was over El Salvador in the early 1980's.
The Reagan administration fought with Congress about military assistance to a government whose security forces and death squads were torturing and killing peasants and students suspected of being sympathetic to the Marxist-led rebellion. Training under American tutelage would make the Salvadoran soldiers more respectful of human rights, the administration argued.
Opponents countered that many of the commanders and soldiers in these units had already been trained in the United States.
Many here are acutely aware of that period and that training. "We don't want a School of the Americas," said Mr. Harymurti, the editor of Tempo.
Mr. Harymurti is opposed to short-term programs in which a soldier goes to a United States military camp and learns, as he put it, "how to shoot straight, how to place explosives." But that is precisely the type of training most Indonesian military officers want. "The highest priority is to support the effort to maintain our operational readiness," said Lt. Gen. Agus Widjojo, the most senior officer in the Indonesian Parliament.
On the other hand, he said, Indonesian officers do not want to go to the United States for courses in human rights and the rules of war. "Ask any Indonesian officer, 'Do you need that kind of training?' and he will say no," General Widjojo said. As a lieutenant, he attended a basic infantry course at Fort Benning, in 1972, and then in 1979, as a captain, he attended an advanced course. Later he went to the National War College, and got a master's degree in public administration from George Washington University.
But General Widjojo, who is considered a reformer and who was one of the generals who argued in 1998 that the military should get out of politics, went on, "Those who see the need to make the military part of a more democratic system, are those who have been exposed to the democratic system."
The debate is captured by one of Indonesia's most respected intellectuals, Goenawan Mohamad, a founder of Tempo and a persistent critic of the Indonesian military. The argument against aid, he said, is that it will be perceived by many Indonesians "as an American ploy to get the military to take part in America's war on terrorism." The American campaign is widely seen by Indonesians as a war against Islam.
He added that a resumption of aid will also be seen by Indonesians as effectively condoning past human rights abuses.
Still, and to the surprise of many who have known him, Mr. Goenawan said that he was not opposed to resuming aid. It is needed, he said, if the military is to become more professional and attuned to democracy. "I am only opposed to the timing," he said. "Now is not the moment."