The upper and lower houses of the United States Congress clearly differ over whether to restore training for Indonesian military officers.

At a June 26 hearing before the Asia subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, congressmen twice asked senior Pentagon officials whether they thought Washington's suspension of military training hurt US interests in Indonesia.

Adm. Thomas Fargo, chief of the US Pacific Command, argued that military training was the best way to provide the Indonesian military with a "model for reform." Doug Bereuter, a senior Republican congressman from Nebraska, urged the Bush administration to "consult more broadly on a programme that should be in our national interest.

These sentiments differ sharply with those of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which voted in late May to withhold $400,000 approved last year for training officers in the US until Jakarta helps complete the investigation into the killing last August of two American teachers during an ambush in Indonesia's remote Papua province. Washington suspended aid to the Indonesian military in the early 1990s because of human-rights violations by its men in East Timor, which was then controlled by Jakarta.