[Indonesia's special forces have tarnished that country's human-rights record. Yet, they weren't always maligned, writes John McBeth KOPASSUS: Inside Indonesia's Special Forces, by Ken Conboy. Equinox Publishing. $14.99]
Prolific Jakarta-based author Ken Conboy probably wouldn't have had anyone to talk to in Indonesia if he had not elected to restrict his history of the Indonesian special forces to the period before 1988.
By ignoring the political manipulation, breakdown in discipline and outright criminality that has tarnished the secretive unit's reputation over the past decade, Conboy has ended up telling only half of the story.
Kopassus, the acronym by which Indonesia's special forces are known, has done considerable damage to Indonesia's human-rights image abroad. Yet, in earlier years Kopassus served as the wellspring for most of the military's top brass and was regarded by United States special forces instructors as arguably the best special operations unit in Asia.
Nevertheless, the seeds of its destruction were always inherent within Kopassus. Highly trained special forces soldiers have long been used by their superiors to protect gambling houses, brothels and other criminal enterprises – the result of a budget shortfall that has forced the military to scrounge for spoils.
With funding drying up in the late 1990s, money-making began to take precedence over Kopassus' primary mission, with soldiers in the field becoming little more than hired guns in the pay of the powerful.
Being for years at the centre of political intrigue also had a corrupting influence. In the mid-1990s, when President Suharto was nearing the end of three decades in power and his then son-in-law, Maj.-Gen. Prabowo Subianto, was in charge of Kopassus, it became clear the special forces were used against Suharto's political foes to a degree that far outweighed the importance of those activists as a threat to the regime. The enigmatic Prabowo probably deserves a book of his own.
At the outset of his book, Conboy acknowledges the shortcoming of not going further into the present, pointing out that an objective assessment of Kopassus' performance through the 1990s would be "all but impossible given the existing vested interests and the lack of historical perspective." From 1997 onwards, he notes, "it often became impossible to say what was a bone fide operation sanctioned by the army chain of command, and which were missions with Kopassus personnel moonlighting on behalf of political interests."
As it is, Conboy takes a conventional approach favoured by military historians, tracing the life of Kopassus from its birth in 1952. He documents its role in putting down the Permesta rebellions in Sumatra and Sulawesi in 1958-61, its ill-fated attempts to infiltrate Dutch-held West Irian before the United Nations eventually transferred the territory to Indonesian rule, and its involvement in the orgy of bloodletting that occurred in the uprooting of the Indonesian Communist Party in the mid-1960s.
Other chapters review the role of special forces operations against British and Commonwealth troops in Borneo during the "Confrontation," the term coined by Indonesia's Foreign Minister Subandrio in January 1963, referring to Indonesia's efforts at that time to destabilize the new Federation of Malaysia.
Also, Conboy looks in detail at the part played by Kopassus in the invasion of East Timor and its subsequent efforts to track down pro-independence Fretlin leaders.
One little-known factoid the author reserves for the last few pages: the appearance in the late 1980s of "Arizona" – the code name given to a rotund adviser from Israeli's Mossad intelligence service who instructed the special forces in the theory of intelligence-gathering.
On a positive note, Conboy sheds new light on Operation Woyla, in which Indonesian commandos stormed a hijacked Garuda DC-9 at Bangkok's Don Muang airport on March 31, 1981, freeing all 50 passengers. Led by Lt.-Col. Sintong Panjaitan – whose career subsequently came to an end when he was held responsible for the 1991 Dili, East Timor, churchyard massacre – the operation was accomplished with just three days of training.
Former defence chief Benny Murdani says that three of the terrorists were killed and the two others died later of their wounds. Conboy notes that when the aircraft carrying the troops left Bangkok on its flight home, only three of the five caskets aboard were filled. "Mysteriously," he says, "the remaining pair of hijackers – who were very much alive when they departed Bangkok – filled the remaining two boxes when they landed in Jakarta." Operation Woyla was successful, though Kopassus got little credit.
[John McBeth writes for the Review from Jakarta.]