Jim Lobe, Washington – Reports that the Bush administration will release funds train Indonesian military officers – despite a recent vote by a key Senate committee that calls for training to be suspended until the army's responsibility for the killing of two US teachers is clarified – have drawn strong expressions of concern by human rights groups here.
A Pentagon spokesman said Monday he could not confirm that a decision has in fact been made, but non-government organizations (NGOs) that monitor Indonesia said they understand that senior Defense officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a former US ambassador to Indonesia, have decided to go ahead.
Wolfowitz has long argued that US military re-engagement with the Indonesian military (TNI) should be an urgent priority in the US-led war on terrorism, and that it can help improve the armed forces' human rights performance, a contention with which human rights groups and many Indonesia analysts strongly disagree.
"For over three decades, the US and Indonesian militaries were extremely close and we saw no move to reform," said Ed McWilliams, a former State Department officer who served as political counselor in the US Embassy in Jakarta from 1996 to 1999. That year military relations were suspended after TNI-organized militias went on a rampage in East Timor.
The violence, in which more than 1,000 Timorese were killed and tens of thousands more displaced, prompted the intervention of an Australian-led multinational force and led eventually to East Timor's independence from Indonesia. "The TNI's worst abuses took place when we were most engaged," McWilliams pointed out.
While the amount of funds for Indonesia's participation in the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program comes to a mere $400,000, activists argue that resuming training now would be seen in Indonesia as a strong endorsement of the TNI at a critical moment.
Indonesia's armed forces are currently engaged in the largest counter-insurgency operation against secessionist rebels in Aceh since the invasion of East Timor in 1975. Reports out of the gas-rich province of northern Sumatra since the operation's launch in mid-May have spurred growing concerns about serious abuses against the civilian population.
On Monday the World Organization Against Torture, based in Geneva, became the latest international human rights group to voice "deep concern" about the situation there, particularly in light of the failure of the global media to follow developments in Aceh. It said that as many as 1,000 civilians have been killed and 40,000 more forced to flee their homes. "The latest reports indicate that human rights defenders are being subjected to harassment, arrest, torture and execution for pursuing their activities," it said. Foreign journalists and humanitarian organizations have been prevented from entering the province.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also voiced strong concerns about the counter-insurgency campaign and its impact on civilians in recent weeks. Even Wolfowitz complained on a recent trip to Jakarta that no military solution in Aceh was possible and said the government should return to the negotiating table to seek a political settlement.
The TNI has been criticized for similar abuses in West Papua, where two US teachers and one Indonesian were killed and another eight US and three Indonesian citizens wounded in an ambush near the mining operations of Louisiana-based Freeport-McMoRan Cooper and Gold, Inc. last August 31 under circumstances that, according to both Indonesian police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), implicated the TNI. After two planned FBI trips were blocked by the TNI, Jakarta recently allowed the FBI to return and continue its own investigation.
After a major Pentagon lobbying effort to persuade Congress to renew IMET training for Indonesia following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress finally authorized $400,000 for IMET training for Indonesia for fiscal year 2003, and it is that money which is now at stake.
In light of the McMoRan ambush, however, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted in May to condition all IMET aid for Indonesia in fiscal year 2004 (which begins October 1) on Jakarta's "taking effective measures" to fully investigate and criminally prosecute those response for the killings.
"The release of the IMET funds now would only cause people to question America's commitment to its own citizens' safety," Patricia Lynn Spier, who was seriously wounded and whose husband was killed in the ambush, said on Monday. "The FBI must be allowed to complete its investigation of the attack on me and others at the Freeport mine. No military assistance should be provided unless the Indonesian military is deemed innocent."
The Pentagon, however, is particularly eager to renew ties with Indonesian military officers as part of the war on terrorism in which Washington hopes the TNI will play a key role. Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, and last year's bombing of a nightclub in Bali apparently persuaded both President Megawati Sukarnoputra and other senior government officials that radical Islamists represented a serious threat to the country.
On Monday, a bomb was exploded at Indonesia's parliament in what the police called a "terror" attack in which the explosives used were similar to those found in the possession of alleged Islamist militants arrested in Jakarta last week.
The Pentagon persuaded Congress to permit it to provide the TNI with some $4 million in counter-terrorism training and non-lethal equipment last year, but has made no secret of its desire to provide more assistance to the Indonesian military, particularly its officer corps.
"I believe exposure of Indonesia officers to US [military personnel] has been a way to promote reform efforts in the military, not to set them back," Wolfowitz said earlier this year.
But other analysts strongly disagree, noting not only the brutal record of the TNI when it was most closely engaged with the US during the 30-some years of former dictator Suharto rule, but also the concern that the military will use renewed IMET funding to trumpet its return to international respectability when, in fact, it has done nothing to deserve it.
"Rather than teach democratic values, the Indonesian military will see IMET as a US endorsement of business as usual," said Kurt Biddle, coordinator of the Indonesia Human Rights Network (IHRN). "Since the administration has actively sought to restore military assistance, the Indonesian military has sabotaged international efforts to attain justice for crimes against humanity committed in East Timor, exonerated itself of last year's murder of two US teachers, and undermined a US-backed ceasefire in Aceh."
Rights groups are particularly outraged at the treatment accorded Major. Gen. Adam Damiri, who is leading the counter-insurgency campaign in Aceh. Damiri has been charged with crimes against humanity in connection with the havoc in East Timor in 1999, but missed several days of his trial in May in order to help prepare the TNI for its assault on Aceh. "There has been no meaningful progress towards reform of the military or the ending of impunity [since the East Timor violence]," according to a statement signed last month by some 90 human rights, peace, and church groups around the world who called for an international military embargo against Jakarta.
After the mayhem in East Timor, the US Congress conditioned the resumption of military-to-military relations with the TNI by insisting that Indonesia punish the military officers responsible and take other steps to secure civilian control over the military and end its impunity. But Congress relaxed those conditions as a result of Pentagon pressure after the September 11 attacks.