[The following is a statement issued by Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific on August 6.]
Following a July 31 meeting in Jakarta between security and defence chiefs on both sides, the Australian government reiterated its support for closer military ties with the Indonesian armed forces (TNI), including the discredited Kopassus special forces.
Under the guise of "fighting terrorism", the Australian government is using the Bali bombing in October 2002 and the August 5 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in central Jakarta to develop closer ties with the TNI. Joint military exercises with the Indonesians, which also involved US forces, have taken place over the last few years, and the defence minister Senator Robert Hill is keen to arrange more.
Military ties were scaled back following the post-ballot carnage of TNI and its militia proxies in East Timor in 1999. US military ties were cut back, and restrictions placed on the sale of military hardware to Indonesia by the US, Britain and some European countries.
In Australia, low-level Indonesian officer training continued. The Bali bombing provided the pretext for Canberra to renew its push for greater military and police ties.
Senator Hill is on record promoting Australian military ties with Kopassus – the special forces army unit responsible for atrocities throughout Indonesia, West Papua and Aceh. Hill tries to justify cosying up to Indonesia's state-sponsored killers by arguing that if Australia is to improve Indonesia's expertise in "fighting terrorism" it has to work with Kopassus, the unit responsible for "counter-terrorism".
The same line is being echoed in the US by the defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. There, the Bush administration recently overruled Congress to release US$400,000 to the TNI held up after a preliminary US investigation pointed to Indonesian soldiers as the likely perpetrators of an ambush in Timika in West Papua last July 31 near the Louisiana-headquartered Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold mine. Indonesian police and NGO investigations have also implicated the TNI in the attack in which two Americans and one Indonesian were killed, and 11 were injured including a six-year old child.
Only one senior military figure – Major-General Adam Damiri – has been convicted for crimes against humanity in East Timor, following the ballot in 1999, and he is appealing his three-year jail term. (Of 18 senior Indonesian military and police officers brought to trial in the ad hoc Human Rights Court, 12 were acquitted. The six found guilty were given light sentences.)
The Indonesian military is using US- and UK-supplied weapons – Bronco "counter-insurgency" aircraft, Hercules transport planes, Hawke jet fighters and Scorpion tanks – in its attack on the peoples of Aceh and West Papua, despite agreements not to use them in internal matters.
Given this and the fact that an Indonesian Defence White Paper, published this year, argues that Indonesia faces no external threat, it can be fairly assumed that any military assistance from the West will ultimately be used against Indonesians themselves.
The TNI is trying to regain its position in politics following the post-Suharto reformasi period. Establishing closer military ties with the TNI means giving political support to its oppressive practices.
Gareth Evans, a former Labor Party foreign minister, and now president of the conservative think-tank, the International Crisis Group, went on record last year saying: "I am one of those who has to acknowledge, as Australia's foreign minister at the time, that many of our earlier training efforts helped only to produce more professional human rights abusers".
This is still the case, as the bloody war on the Acehnese and the West Papuans reveal. Canberra must end its "special relationship" with the Indonesian elite. Ending all military ties would send a clear message that Australia does not support this militaristic policy which is unlikely to solve the complex range of issues currently facing the peoples of Indonesia.