| |
US paves way for new Indonesia military
ties
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
The administration of US President George W Bush has
moved a major step closer to normalizing military ties
with the Indonesian military (TNI), which it hopes will
be a key ally in its war against terrorism in Southeast
Asia.
The Senate voted 61-36 on Thursday to
defeat an amendment that would have barred funding for
enrolling Indonesians in Washington's International
Military Education and Training (IMET) program until it
cooperates fully in an investigation into the killing of
two US teachers in West Papua last summer.
The
administration's eagerness to restore military aid and
training to Indonesia - first restricted in 1991 after a
well-publicized massacre in East Timor, and then cut off
entirely in 1999 when TNI-backed militias ransacked the
former Portuguese colony - has made it a top
foreign-policy priority since the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon.
The administration has claimed that Indonesia,
the most populous nominally Muslim country, remains a
key recruiting ground and possible safe haven for
al-Qaeda and its sympathizers, a notion that was
bolstered by last October's terrorist attack on a
nightclub in Bali and the subsequent investigation.
The blast killed 187 people, mostly Australian
tourists, and police investigators have so far put
together a strong case implicating Islamist radicals.
But there has been substantial opposition to
renewing military ties with the TNI, which is widely
considered by international human-rights groups as one
of the world's most abusive and corrupt national
military institutions. Since even before the military
coup d'etat by former president Suharto in 1964, the
armed forces have dominated the state apparatus.
While the amount of money at stake in Thursday's
vote - only US$400,000 in training funds, according to
Congressional staff - was paltry, the symbolic
significance of renewed IMET eligibility for Indonesian
military officers is hard to overstate, according to
Indonesia analysts here and in Indonesia. In effect, it
represents a return to respectability on the part of the
TNI after its ostracism in 1999.
In October,
eight major Indonesian human-rights groups wrote to
members of Congress expressing "great alarm" at the
administration's efforts to lift restrictions on US aid,
including training, for the TNI.
"Irreparable
damage will be done to our efforts at reform," the
groups warned. "Any further attempts by the TNI to
change old practices will almost certainly end" if
Congress provides IMET training or other forms of
military aid, the letter said.
Rights groups
here, such as Human Rights Watch, also opposed renewing
IMET funding, and expressed outrage at Thursday's vote.
"The Indonesian military has sabotaged
international efforts to attain justice for crimes
against humanity committed in East Timor, exonerated
itself of the strong implication that its elite Special
Forces recently murdered two US teachers and beat a US
nurse - yet the Senate voted to give the military a
level of support not seen in more than a decade," said
Kurt Biddle, Washington coordinator of the Indonesia
Human Rights Network (IHRN). "Why is the Senate
rewarding this behavior?"
"Human-rights groups
understand perfectly well that if there is to be any
real reform in Indonesia, you've got to get the army out
of politics, and renewing ties now is not going to help
that," said Dan Lev, an Indonesia expert at the
University of Washington in Seattle. "On the contrary,
it's going to boost the army's political clout."
In support of renewing the aid, administration
officials did not claim that the TNI has made major
reforms, although they argue that the army no longer has
the clout that it enjoyed under Suharto, who was ousted
from power in 1998. Instead, the officials, principally
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his top deputy, Paul
Wolfowitz, who served as US ambassador to Jakarta for
three years in the 1980s, contended that the TNI's
cooperation was crucial to the success of anti-terrorist
efforts.
They also argued that Washington's
decision to cut military training in 1992 might actually
have had the perverse effect of making TNI officers less
sensitive to human rights concerns, which are supposed
to have been an integrated part of the IMET curriculum.
As Wolfowitz argued last November, "more contact
with the West and with the United States and moving them
in a positive direction is important both to support
democracy and to support the fight against terrorism".
Last month, the RAND Corp, a think-tank close to
the Pentagon, released a report that argued strongly for
renewing close ties. "Since military training for
Indonesia was effectively terminated in 1992, there has
been a 'lost generation' of Indonesian officers -
officers who have no experience with the United States
or who have no understanding of the importance that the
United States military attaches to civilian leadership,
democracy, and respect for human rights," it said.
But many veteran Indonesia observers, who note
that Jakarta sent scores of officers for IMET and
related training before and during the Suharto era,
strongly disagree with this argument.
"The case
that's being made is that training helps Indonesian army
officers understand human rights and not violate them,"
Lev said. "But, after nearly 40 years of experience, we
have to conclude that, if anything, they got better at
abusing human rights."
Activists had believed
that the killing of the two US teachers and an
Indonesian colleague in an ambush near the giant
FreeportMcMoRan gold mine in West Papua last September -
as well as the prolonged detention of a US nurse
volunteering in Aceh and the failure of the Indonesian
justice system to convict high-ranking military officers
for the 1999 East Timor rampages - would persuade
Congress to hold off on renewing ties.
Indonesian police, who were joined this month by
agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, have
pointed to Indonesian Special Forces as the most likely
culprits in what may have been an attempt to "punish"
Freeport for failing to pay enough for security.
But the October Bali bombing changed the
political dynamic in Washington, persuading many
lawmakers who had been skeptical about the threat of
radical Islamist groups in Indonesia to go along with
the administration.
(Inter Press
Service)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
