Indonesia: trouble in paradise
Tue Feb 27, 2007 at 06:45:06 AM PDT
This diary is another story about human rights getting overlooked in the Global War on Terror.
This isn’t breaking news: the aim is to give a little background and context to an often-overlooked country, one of the most fascinatingly diverse and beautiful countries on earth, whose strategic importance is increasing almost daily. Apart from its control of important shipping routes, Indonesia has the largest Muslim population of any nation, is a young democracy that (so far) protects religious freedom, and it is rich in natural resources including oil and gas.
The back story
It's fair to say that Indonesia was born in bloodshed, escaping from its Dutch colonial past at the end of the Second World War and then suffering almost 30 years of military dictatorship under the rule of General Suharto.
In the sixties and seventies, the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations all saw General Suharto as an important ally in the fight against the spread of Communism. The CIA helped to suggest a few names for Suharto’s 1965 chaotic post-coup purge of the Communist Party that killed somewhere between 150,000 and 2 million people.
A few years later, Ford and Kissinger gave the go-ahead for the 1975 invasion of East Timor, after claims by Suharto that the East Timorese political party FRETILIN was a communist organization. You all know what happened after that: over the next five years, the invasion and occupation by the TNI would cost East Timor around 200,000 lives, or one third of its population.
You might also know that the litany of of extrajudicial executions, torture, and arbitrary detention in East Timor has been repeated in other conflict areas such as Aceh and West Papua, and throughout the country.
Throughout all this, throughout Indonesia’s 25-year occupation of East Timor, the US continued to provide military support, transferring over $1 billion of weaponry to Jakarta.
The Indonesian Armed Forces: built for brutality?
In the US, in case you didn’t notice, the military gets a massive chunk of taxpayers’ cash to spend and this money finds its way back into the economy via private contracts: Eisenhower’s so-called military-industrial complex.
The Indonesian model is different. The Indonesian army (TNI) is part funded by the state, but it also funds itself privately through various shadowy military businesses. This financial arrangement gives the TNI an uneasy level of autonomy and independence from its civil government. To a significant degree, the TNI is unaccountable, beyond the law, and it’s not just the activists who are worried:
Last November [2006], in a Country Briefing on Indonesia, Jane's Defence Weekly [...] highlighted concerns about the business interests of the TNI, including illegal activities such as illegal logging, brothels, entertainment venues and gambling.
According to Human Rights Watch , US companies are getting mixed up in this whole dirty business; such as mining giant Freeport McMoRan who have put over $60 million in the pockets of local military commanders and units for their security services.
The internal structure of the TNI is also unusual – it mirrors that of the civil government, with representatives going all the way down to village level. Each village, or kampung, is assigned a local army representative – even if it’s just a solitary officer keeping an eye on things. The reason for this structure becomes clear when you remember that of all the 17,000 islands, it’s the Javanese who mainly provide the ruling class in Indonesia. The provinces must be pacified.
So, you have privately-funded armed forces, built for civilian control, with weak civilian oversight. Little wonder that the TNI have
"long been responsible for grave abuses", are essentially "above the law", and acting with impunity.
And, thanks to a certain Ms Rice, we are encouraging this impunity.
Encouraging impunity: bringing us up to date...
After a TNI massacre of civilians in East Timor in 1991, Congress cut off military aid. It was re-introduced in 1995, but with conditions attached – Indonesia had to improve its human rights record. This started to have an impact, and the conditions were renewed in October 2005.
Then, just a few weeks later, Condoleezzer Rice overruled Congress, waiving the conditions on the basis of National Security concerns, and re-establishing unconditional military support.
The motivation for this is not clear. However, in the wake of the Bali bombs and recent trends in Indonesia to more fundamental interpretations of Islam, the US is concerned about Al Qaeda getting a foothold in the most populous Muslim nation.
Even though Indonesian police, not the military, brought the Bali bombers to justice, the US administration seems to have made the decision that the TNI need to be let off the leash a little. Let them do what they’re good at: keeping order.
The freedoms and rights of Indonesians can come second.
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