National interests and mil-to-mil relations with Indonesia - JFQ Forum - military relations

Joint Force Quarterly, Autumn, 2002 by John B. Haseman

East Timor

Indonesia opened East Timor to the outside in 1988, believing it had sufficiently repressed the decades-long Fretilin insurgency and could withstand domestic and international scrutiny, on November 12, 1991 troops fired on unarmed demonstrators at a cemetery in Dili. Hundreds were killed or wounded, and the tragedy was filmed by Western journalists. The so-called Dili incident be came the primary cause for a decline in the bilateral military relationship and in 1999 led to the East Timorese largely voting to seek independence rather than regional autonomy.

A government investigation contradicted the initial military announcement of 19 fatalities in Dili, estimating that fifty had died, while the East Timorese and foreign human rights organizations put the number at more than two hundred. The army appointed an honor council to investigate. For the first time, ABRI probed the chain of command in East Timor and punished or forced into early retirement five levels of officers, including the military regional commander and a two-star general who had freed a hijacked Garuda Indonesian airliner in Bangkok a decade earlier.

However, the military refused to confirm the number of casualties at Santa Cruz cemetery. The damage to its credibility became an irritant in country-to-country relations. Muted international criticism of the military role in East Timor, which Foreign Minister Ali Alatas had once described as "a pebble in Indonesia's shoe," turned into loud and persistent condemnation of the human rights record in the former Portuguese colony.

Congress halted IMET funding in 1993, ending perhaps the most effective way to influence Indonesian officers on the role of the military in society, civilian control of the armed forces, and professionalism (no IMET alumni were implicated in the Dili incident). Although limited funding continued for several years, the long history of U.S. training and education was on the wane.

Using operational funds not constrained by Congress, PACOM maintained programs that yielded reduced but key contacts. American officers visited Indonesia and their opposite numbers attended seminars in Hawaii and met with the PACOM leadership. Training enabled the command to keep in touch with counterparts through the 1990s. But the curtailment of education and training was profound, ending attendance at courses in the United States by future ABRI leaders.

But the worst was yet to come. After the events surrounding the fall of President Soeharto, whose rule began in economic turmoil and ended amid economic and political turmoil, the quixotic vice president-turned-president, B.J. Habibie, made a snap decision to give a choice to East Timor of regional autonomy or independence. It was a bad decision, reached without consulting most of his government and based on years of faulty intelligence that predicted that the Timorese would not exchange their heavily subsidized status for independent penury. In August 1999, despite months of harassment by military-backed militia, 80 percent chose independence.