http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2317/
Features > September 13, 2005
Brothers in Arms
The United States moves a step closer to restoring military aid to
Indonesia, despite its massive human rights abuses
By Ben Terrall
A human rights activist carries a poster of Munir, who was poisoned
on a plane in route from Jakarta to Amsterdam, during a peace demonstration in
Jakarta.
On June 28, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to remove all
restrictions on foreign military financing for Indonesia in the fiscal year
2006 Foreign Operations Appropriations bill. The restrictions were first put in
place after the Indonesian military's destruction of East Timor following the
half-island's pro-independence vote in August of 1999.
The House decision follows years of Bush administration lobbying aimed at
rehabilitating Jakarta's image. When Indonesian President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono came to the United States in late May, the White House repeatedly
described Yudhoyono as a reformer. "The president told me he's in the process
of reforming the military and I believe him," Bush said.
But retired Foreign Service Officer Ed McWilliams, a political counselor
to the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta from 1996 to 1999 and now a human rights
activist, is not convinced. He points to this year's State Department Country
Report on Human Rights Practices, which said of Indonesia, "Security force
members murdered, tortured, raped, beat, and arbitrarily detained civilians and
members of separatist movements, especially in [the province] Aceh and to a
lesser extent in Papua."
"As a creature of the TNI [Indonesian military], Yudhoyono is even less
likely to assert civilian control over the military than the previous three
Indonesian presidents," McWilliams says. "The TNI continues to act with
impunity: It resisted allowing international help into Aceh for a critical
three days after the January tsunami. It repeatedly sought early departure of
international non-governmental organizations, and prevented international
assistance from getting to 120,000 Acehnese displaced from pre-tsunami
conflict."
The TNI in Aceh
The TNI also refused calls for a ceasefire in Aceh, until just days
before the government signed a tentative peace deal with Free Aceh Movement
(GAM) resistance fighters on August 15. As written, the agreement gives the
military a number of opportunities to circumvent it. The TNI has already
exploited the deal's ambiguities by arguing that a new human rights court and
separate truth commission for Aceh should not deal with past crimes.
Contradicting every credible human rights organization to issue a report
on the region, the new TNI commander in Aceh, Major-General Supiadin, told the
Jakarta Post on June 16 that military forces had never committed a single human
rights violation in the province. Regarding the impact of the tsunami, he said,
"Heart wrenching is the loss of firearms and ammunition, buried under the sand."
Shadia Marhaban, a member of a non-violent student group Aceh Referendum
Information Center, which organized a rally supporting a referendum for
self-determination in Aceh that brought out 1.5 million people, says, "TNI
higher-ups in Aceh are mostly from the group responsible for the [1999]
destruction of East Timor, and won't go along with any reform agenda."
One of those active duty commanding officers is retired general Kiki
Syahnakri, indicted for crimes against humanity by a U.N.-backed court in East
Timor for his actions as martial law commander during the 1999 Timor campaign.
Syahnakri now represents the conglomerate Artha Graha in its efforts to profit
from Aceh's reconstruction.
Marhaban, who was a civil society representative in recent peace talks
between GAM and TNI in Finland, believes Jakarta only agreed to the talks
because of the international attention focused on Aceh by the tsunami and the
enormous amounts of international aid money at stake. The previous talks
abruptly ended in July 2002 when Jakarta arrested civilian negotiators, citing
a sweeping, vaguely defined anti-terror law. The former chief negotiator for
GAM was among many prisoners trapped in jails destroyed by the tsunami. The New
York-based group Human Rights First wrote, "among those who died in detention
were many accused GAM supporters who had been denied access to a lawyer,
subjected to torture, and convicted in trials that did not meet international
standards."
Lessons from Iraq
In May, President Bush explained that in working to undo existing limits
on military aid to Jakarta, "we want there to be exchanges between our military
corps that will help lead to better understandings." But for four decades, such
"exchanges" have involved U.S. training of the notoriously brutal Kopassus
special forces troops and other "security" forces specializing in internal
repression. (Since it won its independence from the Dutch after WWII, Indonesia
has never faced a serious external military threat).
In the May 2003 imposition of martial law in Aceh-during which the TNI
launched its largest operation since the 1975 invasion of East Timor-the
military "embedded" journalists and established a media center to control the
flow of information. TNI spokesman Major General Sjafrie Sjamsuddin explained,
"These regulations were sent to us by the U.S. Pacific Command. It is what they
used in Iraq. . Of course, we have adapted them to our local environment."
Human Rights First argues that another aspect of the Iraq war has served
the TNI well: "Indonesian security officials responded to human rights
criticism aggressively, pointing to the United States invasion of Iraq and
subsequent acts of torture in Abu Ghraib prison to justify Indonesia's own
military operations and question the credibility of American human rights
policies."
A Climate of Impunity
Yudhoyono and his supporters in the West make much of efforts to combat
corruption in Indonesia. Yudhoyono told Business Week, "Fighting corruption is
very, very important to our competitiveness. If we fail, we will lose the
battle to attract foreign capital." But there is little evidence of any curbing
of military corruption, which Karen Orenstein, Washington Coordinator of the
East Timor and Indonesia Action Network (ETAN), calls "massive." Orenstein
points out that "the majority of the military's budget comes from legal and
illegal ventures, including extortion of U.S.-based corporations operating in
Indonesia, environmentally devastating illegal logging, prostitution, and both
drug and human trafficking."
Nor does the climate of impunity seem to have shifted regarding past
atrocities committed by the military. On May 26, a U.N. Commission of Experts
appointed by Kofi Annan released a report on Jakarta's Ad Hoc Human Rights
Court for East Timor, which was set up to investigate crimes against humanity
perpetrated by Indonesian security forces and their militia proxies in East
Timor in 1999. The U.N. experts found that the Indonesian tribunal was
"manifestly inadequate, primarily due to a lack of commitment on the part of
the prosecution." Of the 18 people indicted and tried, all but one (a Timorese
civilian) were either acquitted or freed on appeal.
The report further noted, "The failure to investigate and prosecute the
defendants in a credible manner has not achieved accountability of those who
bear the greatest responsibility for serious violations." It recommended that
if Jakarta does not successfully prosecute those charged within six months, the
United Nations should try them before an international tribunal or refer cases
to the International Criminal Court.
The Murder of Munir
Justice has been similarly elusive in the investigation of the murder of
Munir, a leading Indonesian human rights activist. The 38-year-old lawyer was
poisoned with arsenic on September 7, 2004, while flying to the Netherlands. An
Indonesian fact-finding team found that officials of BIN, Jakarta's main
intelligence agency, were involved in Munir's killing. The former BIN chief,
retired general A.M. Hendropriyono, refused to respond to a summons to testify
before the team. Hendropriyono is infamous for serving as district military
commander in Lampung when, in 1989, the TNI massacred hundreds of Muslim youth,
an incident that Munir later investigated.
Hendropriyono received U.S. military training at Fort Leavenworth in
1980. He was later involved in a training program for Indonesian officers at
Norwich University in Vermont, which was cancelled after sustained activist
pressure. Norwich's president conceded, "This army has not demonstrated a
commitment to . respect for civilian authority by the military."
The Commission for Disappearances and Victims of Violence (Kontras), an
organization Munir founded, recently came to a similar conclusion. In a June 21
report, "Difficult to Imagine TNI's Future Without Politics of Violence," the
group concluded that military impunity of human rights violations is growing
stronger. Among the reasons they cited were the continued presence within
structures of power of high military officers suspected of being responsible
for such crimes; the cessation of efforts to revise laws on military tribunals;
and the repeated refusal of the military to cooperate in efforts to uphold the
law.
Back in Washington, the House Appropriations bill is currently being
reconciled with the Senate version, which would keep some existing restrictions
and add new reporting requirements about the TNI's behavior. The two bills
could be reconciled as early as late September.
Orenstein calls the Senate version of the Foreign Operations
Appropriations bill "an improvement over the House version, which was nothing
less than a total sell-out on human rights and justice, under the leadership of
[Republican] Arizona Representative Jim Kolbe at the behest of the Bush
administration."
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