Jane Perlez, Jakarta – After a 13-year break, the Bush administration is acting to mend relations with the Indonesian military, the largest in Southeast Asia and a potentially crucial player in its campaign against terrorism.

Washington is seizing on an opportunity that came with the tsunami, when Indonesia accepted the help of the United States military in distributing aid and had daily contacts with the Americans. Congress, concerned about Indonesia's human rights record, curbed military ties in 1992 and cut them back further five years ago after the army was involved in the killings of hundreds of civilians in East Timor, a province that has since gained independence.

Now, administration officials said, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has moved to strengthen American training of Indonesian officers considerably.

Such training allows up-and-coming officers to learn modern warfare methods, the American system of civilian control over the military, accountability and rights issues. Armies in Asia that receive the training, known as the International Military Education and Training Program, include Thailand, Malaysia, India and Pakistan.

In late January, Washington dispatched $1 million worth of spare parts for Indonesia's aging fleet of military transport planes. For the moment, the administration was not planning to push for the removal of the ban on the sale of weapons to Indonesia, although that could come later, a Pentagon official said.

The Bush administration tried once before to draw closer to Indonesia's military, but the effort failed in 2002 when two American schoolteachers were killed in Papua Province, and, American officials say, the Indonesian Army blocked American investigators.

Ms. Rice now plans to certify to Congress that Indonesia is cooperating sufficiently in investigating the Americans' deaths, a step that would remove a major stumbling block to ties, according to an aide to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. The aide, Tim Rieser, said Ms. Rice told the senator of her decision in a telephone conversation this week. Mr. Leahy is the Congressional architect of the break in relations dating to 1992.

Mr. Leahy and others in Congress assert that the Indonesians first need to "fully cooperate" with an FBI investigation into the American deaths, and in other cases of rights abuse, before full training of Indonesian soldiers in the United States can resume. Congressional approval is necessary for a resumption of the military training.

American military officials who have been hankering since the September 11, 2001, attacks to gain access to the army, a dominant though still largely unreformed force, and the tsunami has presented the opportunity. The Bush administration views Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation, as a moderate and increasingly democratic Muslim state.

At the height of the cold war, when Indonesia was under the authoritarian rule of General Suharto, it was viewed by American administrations as a bulwark against Communism in Asia. Over nearly three decades, American training and equipment poured into Indonesia, though its military became increasingly abusive and corrupt.

The Indonesian Army itself, where some factions are viewed by American officials to be sympathetic to Indonesia's Islamic extremist groups, has kept a determined distance from America. But in an interview, the civilian minister of defense, Juwono Sudarsono, who is close to the recently elected president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, said he planned to go to Washington in March to make the case for what he called "re-engagement."

President Yudhoyono, a former general and one of the last Indonesian officers to receive training at a United States staff college, is seen as the first Indonesian leader with a military background to be sympathetic to reform of the military, a proud and profoundly nationalist institution that is itself skittish about restoring ties.

Mr. Juwono, who must take that attitude into account, said he intended to make a "calibrated" case to Washington that would emphasize the need for a stable Indonesia having a military with "accountability and legitimacy."

He said Indonesia would not beg on its knees. Indeed, he said, the Chinese had invited Indonesia for strategic talks last November in Beijing, the first gesture of its kind between the nations. The Chinese, he said, offered to sell Indonesia fighter jets at concessionary rates. "They emphasized there would be no conditionality," Mr. Juwono said.

Asked what Indonesia's response was, he said: "We said it depends on the strategic partnership. If it's junior partnership for Indonesia, no way."

Mr. Juwono, who was educated at the London School of Economics, said that even after the widely heralded democratic presidential election here last year, the military "retains the real levers of power." "From the political point of view, the military remains the fulcrum of Indonesia," he said.

To upgrade the military, Mr. Juwono said officers needed more training in management, budget and human rights issues at American military staff colleges. American officials also argue that training in the United States can create a more professional and disciplined force.

But Mr. Leahy said in a speech this week on the floor of the Senate that the United States needed to keep its leverage on the Indonesian military until it accounted for past actions. "Although senior Indonesian military officers have repeatedly vowed to support reform, they have done next to nothing to hold their members accountable for these heinous crimes," he said. "Instead, the Indonesian military has consistently obstructed justice."

After the two teachers' deaths in 2002, American officials said, the army blocked an FBI investigation for 18 months. The Indonesian police concluded in a report soon after the killings that elements in the Indonesian military were responsible for the deaths.

A suspect, Antonius Wamang, who is suspected of having ties to the Indonesian Army, was finally indicted by the United States last June. He remains at large, although Mr. Juwono said he believed that the Indonesian military police knew his whereabouts.

In Aceh, the Indonesian Army, which has been fighting a separatist rebellion for 30 years, has been on full display since the tsunami. Now it is common to see soldiers standing by, fully armed, as strong men among the refugees fight over boxes of food.

Soldiers at the military hangar at the Banda Aceh airport, where large quantities of aid are temporarily stored, severely beat an anticorruption activist, leaving his face swollen, and an eye badly bruised. The military said afterward that the activist, Farid Faqih, whose beaten visage was all over television and the newspapers, had taken aid belonging to the wife of the top military commander, Gen. Sutarto Endriartono. An army captain was arrested in the case after President Yudhoyono said the violence was unacceptable.

Of the incident, Mr. Juwono, the defense minister, said: "It leaves me defending the indefensible. My argument is that as long as you have an undertrained, underfed military you will get these cases."

The army's uppermost concern appears to be to keep a stranglehold on the armed fighters of the Free Aceh Movement, most of whom have been pushed in the past two years out of the urban areas of Aceh and into the more remote hills. But the army is also running refugee camps.

At Seunoddon, about 150 miles east of Banda Aceh, soldiers run three camps with varying degrees of intimidation.

At one of the camps, a village leader, Hassan Sulaiman, showed a letter he had written to the local authorities saying the villagers did not want to be moved to barracks, where many are fearful that they will be controlled by the army, but rather wanted help in rebuilding their homes. The day after he made the letter public, Mr. Hassan said the camp's leader, Cpl. Zulikifri, kicked him in the groin. The confrontation came during the distribution of household goods donated by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mr. Hassan said. "The pain of the kicking was nothing compared to the pain to my dignity," he said later.

To help ensure that the rebels do not gain ground on the decimated west coast of the province, the army chief, Gen. Ryamizard Ryacudu, who rarely speaks with foreign journalists, said in an interview that he planned to rebuild the 200-mile coastal road from Banda Aceh to Meulaboh that was swept away by the tsunami.

The project, which Western engineers estimated could take two years, would be completed in two months with 5,000 soldiers working "night and day," the general said. In addition to reaching out to the people devastated by the tsunami, the army is trying to keep the guerrillas from setting up a stronghold if the area remained cut off.

General Ryamizard, who has strong nationalist beliefs, has boasted of rising to the top of the military without training overseas, and is among those in whom American officials say they have sensed hostility to American overtures. Asked about restoring ties, he said: "America is the one that cut relations. Why are we blamed?"

That impulse in the army to steer clear of the United States has mounted in the past decade, in part out of a sense of resentment that Washington took away what it gave during much of the cold war. For the past four years, for example, the Indonesian Air Force failed to take advantage of a slight easing on the weapons ban, said Robert Gelbhard, a former American ambassador to Indonesia.

But two shipments of American parts are now being fitted onto C-130 planes that the Indonesians bought from the United States more than 20 years ago. Another American contribution to tsunami recovery arrived this week off the coast of Aceh – the Mercy, a 1,000-bed United States Navy hospital ship.

American officials said they were thinking of sending teams of the Navy's public health doctors and nurses into villages on Aceh's west coast, provided that the Indonesian military agrees.