The United States, eager to build up its alliances in Southeast Asia, has decided to resume training members of the Indonesian armed forces suspended since 1992, officials announced.

"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has determined that Indonesia has satisfied legislative conditions for restarting its full International Military Education and Training program," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in a statement.

Indonesia's participation in the program has been essentially on hold since 1992, when the Indonesian military launched a bloody crackdown against pro-independence protesters in East Timor.

The sanctions were further tightened in 1999, after the Indonesian army was accused of killing about 1,500 people in East Timor in an unsuccessful bid to prevent the territory from gaining independence.

The ban was effectively written into law by the US Congress in 2002, when US lawmakers insisted that generals in Jakarta were blocking an investigation into the killing of two US school teachers in Indonesia's Papua province.

But Indonesian authorities have since taken steps to improve cooperation with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and brought murder and illegal firearms charges against Indonesian citizen Anthonius Wamang, a member of a Papuan separatist group.

Moreover, the administration of President George W. Bush has repeatedly stressed the importance of broadening post-September 11 counterterrorism cooperation with Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation.

Boucher said Rice had concluded the Indonesians were determined to continue its cooperation with the FBI in the case of the murdered Americans "and thus have fulfilled the requirements articulated in the legislation to allow for resumption" of the training program.

"The department expects that Indonesias resumption of full international military education and training will strengthen its ongoing democratic progress and advance cooperation in other areas of mutual concern," the spokesman said.

There was no immediate word on where Indonesian military personnel will be trained and what kind of courses will be offered to them.

But the decision caps a quiet lobbying campaign by top Pentagon officials led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who has openly advocated the view that congressional restrictions on military-to-military contacts with countries like Indonesia and Pakistan were hurting US interests more than helping them.

Following his tour of tsunami-hit countries in January, Wolfowitz came out strongly in favor of opening the doors of US military academies to Indonesian officers.

He cited the case of newly elected Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whom he described as "a democratic reformer" and one of the last military officers trained in the United States. "I think we can have a more positive influence that way," the deputy defense secretary pointed out.

Wolfowitz also called for finding ways to resume US military cooperation with Indonesia, because he said the country was "moving in an impressive way" toward democracy. But he cautioned against opening the floodgates of military assistance, pointing to "the need to calibrate these things carefully."

Rice hinted that a decision on Indonesian military training was imminent more than a week ago when she told a Senate panel she was in the "final stages" of consultations with Congress on the subject Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa said a resumption of the training program would serve as a "correction for an anomaly."