Behind a recent, highly
controversial indictment by the US Department of
Justice, the administration of President George W Bush
is maneuvering to revive military ties with the
Indonesian armed forces (TNI, for Tentara Nasional
Indonesia), one of the world's most oppressive
institutions.
In late June, US Attorney General
John Ashcroft persuaded a federal grand jury to indict
Anthonuis Wamang for a 2002 ambush in West Papua that
killed two Americans and an Indonesian and wounded 12
others. The indictment identifies Wamang as a commander
in the Free Papua Movement (OPM, for Organisesi Papua
Merdeka) and, despite strong evidence to the contrary,
clears the Indonesian military of charges that it
engineered the incident.
Human-rights groups,
longtime observers of Indonesia, and even the Indonesian
police say the indictment ignores evidence tying the
ambush to the most notorious unit of the TNI, Kopassus.
Indeed, rights groups charge that Wamang works for
Kopassus, not the OPM.
The OPM has been fighting
a low-key rebellion since Indonesia - with US support -
short-circuited a United Nations-sponsored election and
engineered the seizure of West Papua in 1969. West Papua
is the western half of the island of New Guinea and
Indonesia's easternmost province.
The United
States has a long relationship with the TNI, dating back
to the 1965 coup that overthrew then-president Sukarno
and led to the murder of more than 500,000 communists
and leftists. According to declassified US documents, US
intelligence helped finger some of the coup's victims.
The United States also supported Indonesia's violent
takeover of East Timor in 1975.
The Bush
administration is currently pushing Congress to fund an
International Military Education and Training (IMET)
program for Indonesia, but Congress is holding up the
monies because of Indonesia's resistance to
investigating the 2002 ambush seriously.
The
United States first restricted Indonesia's IMET funds
after the 1991 massacre of 270 civilians in Santa Cruz,
East Timor. All military ties were suspended in 1999,
when TNI-organized civilian death squads ravaged East
Timor after that country's independence vote. And IMET
funds were suspended after the 2002 West Papua ambush.
While the TNI blamed the OPM for the attack, not
even the local police agreed. Two months after the
August 31, 2002, ambush, a police report found that the
OPM was an unlikely suspect because the group "never
attacks white people". It concluded that TNI involvement
"was a strong possibility".
At the time, US
officials concurred with the charge of TNI involvement.
A "senior [Bush] administration official" told Raymond
Bonner of the New York Times, "there is no question
there was military involvement. There is no question it
[the ambush] was premeditated."
According to the
Australian newspaper The Age, "The initial police report
on the attack concluded: 'There is a strong possibility'
that the attack was 'perpetrated by members of the
Indonesian National Force Army; however, it still needs
to be investigated further'." But further investigation
may be problematic. According to The Age, "Indonesian
police investigators were threatened, evidence appeared
to be planted, and the crime scene appeared to be
interfered with."
On the day of the attack, two
vans were ambushed leaving Freeport McMoRan's Grasberg
mine, the largest gold and copper mine in the world. The
attacker, or attackers, used M-16s, a weapon that has
never been associated with the OPM, many of whose
members use bows and arrows. OPM spokesperson John
Ondowame denied any involvement in the attack. "I can
say with assurance that the incident did not involve the
Free Papua Movement," he told the press in Melbourne.
It would hardly be surprising that the TNI, in
particular Kopassus, would engineer such an incident. In
2001 seven low-level members of the unit were jailed for
murdering Papuan independence leader Theys Eluay. The
seven are appealing their two-to-three-year sentences,
which, given the track record of such appeals for war
crimes committed in East Timor, are likely to be
overturned. Out of 18 Indonesians charged with war
crimes for their behavior in East Timor, Indonesian
courts acquitted 12 and convicted six. Of the six, four
had their sentences overturned, and one had his sentence
halved. The one civilian charged, the former governor of
East Timor, was sentenced to three and a half years. The
minimum jail time for such crimes is 10 years.
In the meantime, Jakarta has ignored the
UN-sponsored court in East Timor, which has charged
almost 400 people with war crimes, including former
Indonesian presidential candidate General Wiranto.
Indonesia has refused to hand over any of the
defendants.
Besides discrediting the OPM, the
military had a financial stake in the ambush. Freeport
McMoRan paid the TNI US$10.7 million in protection money
from 2000 to 2002, and provided military officers with
free airline tickets. The company stopped the payments
shortly before the ambush because a new US
corporate-responsibility law required disclosure of such
payments. One intelligence analyst told Bonner it was
"extortion, pure and simple".
But the stakes are
much bigger than bribes and free airline tickets.
Restarting the lucrative Indonesia-US arms
pipeline and roping in a potential ally against what
some in the Bush administration see as their future
competitor - China - overshadow greasing the palms of
local Indonesian military commanders. Indonesia could be
an important link in the chain of bases and allies the
United States is forging in Asia. Australia, the
Philippines, Japan and India already have signed up for
the US anti-missile system. The Bush administration says
it is directed at North Korea, but the Chinese are
convinced it targets their small missile fleet.
The US Department of Defense (DOD) has lobbied
to end the ban on arms sales and cooperation with the
Indonesian military, in spite of the latter's horrendous
human-rights record in the rebellious provinces of Aceh,
Maluku, East Timor and Papua. "I think it is unfortunate
that the US today does not have military-to-military
relationships with Indonesia," said Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld's right-hand man,
Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, argued, "More contact
with the West and the United States and moving them in a
positive direction is important both to support
democracy and support the fight against terrorism."
Wolfowitz served as US ambassador to Indonesia during
the Ronald Reagan administration (1981-89).
But
others argue the opposite.
Karen Orenstein,
Washington coordinator for the East Timor Action Network
(ETAN), said, "History demonstrates that providing
training and other assistance only emboldens the
Indonesian military to violate human rights and block
accountability for past injustices."
The
Indonesian military's "worst abuses", said Ed
McWilliams, former State Department political counselor
for the US Embassy in Jakarta from 1996-99, "took place
when we [the US] were most engaged".
"Abuses" is
a mild term for what the TNI has inflicted on such
places as East Timor and Aceh.
According to the
United Nations, Indonesia's 24-year occupation of East
Timor resulted in 200,000 deaths, a higher kill ratio
than Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot managed in Cambodia.
After the vote for independence in May 2002,
TNI-sponsored militias went on a rampage, killing up to
1,500 people, forcing another 250,000 into concentration
camps in West Timor, and destroying 70% of East Timor 's
infrastructure.
In May 2003, Indonesia broke a
ceasefire with the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakin Aceh
Merdeka, or GAM), sent in 40,000 troops and 10,000
police, and sealed off the oil-rich province in Sumatra
from journalists, human-rights groups and even
international aid organizations such as the UN
Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Red Cross and the World
Health Organization. Much of Aceh's civilian population
has since been moved into strategic hamlets and,
according to Amnesty International, there is "widespread
... torture of detainees in both military and police
custody".
As in East Timor, the military, with
the blessing of Indonesian President Megawati
Sukarnoputri, has organized "civilian defense groups
that are little more than death squads". According to
the government-run National Commission on Human Rights,
the military has been recruiting, training and arming
such groups, which are then unleashed on the population.
The TNI has also been accused of aiding the
right-wing Muslim organization Laskar Jihad, which is
associated with widespread violence in Maluku and is
increasingly active in West Papua.
Ashcroft's
indictment has stirred outrage among human-rights
groups, both in West Papua and the United States.
An August 4 joint press statement from three
Papuan rights groups, ELSHAM (the Institute for Human
Rights Studies and Advocacy), LEMASA (the Amungme Tribal
Institute) and YAHAMAK (the Women and Children Human
Rights Foundation), expressed "grave concern over the
actions of US Attorney General John Ashcroft" and
accused him of "suppressing evidence" that the groups
had supplied Federal Bureau of Investigation agents
probing the ambush.
The groups say that Wamang,
the target of the indictment, was "a business partner of
Kopassus". The groups also charge that the Indonesian
military "routinely uses civilians to stage attacks",
and that the former police chief of West Papua, General
Made Pastika, concluded that the TNI was behind the
attack. According to the three groups, none of this
evidence was presented to the grand jury.
In his
statement announcing the indictment, Ashcroft said, "The
US government is committed to tracking down and
prosecuting terrorists who prey on innocent Americans in
Indonesia and around the world. Terrorists will find
they cannot hide from US justice."
But according
to a 2002 study by the US Naval Postgraduate School, the
TNI's links to groups such as Laskar Jihad has made it
"a major facilitator of terrorism".
As John
Miller of ETAN pointed out, the Indonesian military
carries out and sponsors terrorism throughout the huge
archipelago. "Who," he asked, "are the terrorists here?"
Conn Hallinan is a lecturer in
journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz
and a foreign-policy analyst forForeign
Policy in Focus. Posted with permission from
FPIF.
