U.S.-Indonesia military ties extensive

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 24, 1999 by Thomas C. Fox

U.S. has kept Jakarta in weapons used to suppress dissent in East Timor

Facing increased pressure from Congress, human rights groups and outraged world opinion, President Clinton earlier this month suspended military-to-military ties (including remaining training programs), government military transfers and commercial weapons sales to Indonesia.

The White House said the order would suspend $2.5 million in government-to-government military deals and $40 million in pending commercial transactions, including agreements for spare parts for F-16 fighter jets. It would also put a question mark on $400 million worth of military contracts already underway.

The announcement came just three days after State Department spokesman James P. Rubin downplayed U.S. influence upon Indonesia, saying that U.S. military, assistance this year comes to just $476,000. "It's not as if we have a military assistance program that could be cut off," he told reporters.

That remark triggered quick responses. Typical was one by William D. Hartung of the World Policy Institute in New York. "The Clinton administration's recent statements on the massive slaughter being undertaken by anti-independence militias in East Timor have portrayed the United States as an innocent bystander with little or no leverage over the Indonesian armed forces' actions in the territory. Nothing could be further from the truth."

What influence does the United States have to rein in the Indonesia military, by all reports deeply involved in the killings of thousands of East Timorese civilians? That question forces yet a larger one: What responsibility does the United States have in these killings?

The answers begin to emerge in a look at U.S.-Indonesian military, ties over the past quarter-century, a period involving five U.S. administrations. It is a story, with few exceptions, of presidents working with the Pentagon and arms manufacturers, placing economic interests ahead of human rights concerns.

U.S. military involvement in Indonesia developed in the mid-1970s after President Suharto succeeded President Sukarno, taking the archipelago out of the communist bloc and aligning it with the West. That's when the Ford administration and Secretary of State Henry. Kissinger got the United States involved.

Writing in the Aug. 26 issue of Mother Jones, J. J. Richardson states that a declassified memorandum of a July 1975 conversation between President Gerald Ford and then-Indonesian President Suharto demonstrates the extent of the new U.S. support. The memo shows Ford asking Suharto bluntly: "How big a navy do you have and how big a navy do you need?"

It was in December 1975 that Portugal pulled out of East Timor and Indonesia invaded. The Ford administration's implicit acceptance of Indonesia's actions there can be traced to the eve of that invasion. According to Richardson, on Dec. 6, 1975, Ford and Secretary. of State Henry Kissinger met with Suharto in Jakarta; the next day, Indonesian troops flooded into Dili, capital of East Timor. That same year, Ford approved the sale of 16 OV-10F Bronco ground-attack aircraft to Indonesia.

The Indonesian annexation, never approved by the United Nations, set off a bloody independence struggle in the territory. It also set off brutal acts of Indonesian military suppression that have lead to the deaths of an estimated 200,000 East Timorese, up to a fifth of the mostly Catholic population.

That struggle and those deaths went largely unnoticed in the Western press. This changed, however, in the wake of the Aug. 30, U.N.-sponsored independence vote. For five days, with the world's media focused on the island territory, the Indonesian military and militias and their brutal tactics were in full view.

The events following the vote cast U.S.-Indonesian military ties in a new light. During Clinton's first presidential campaign, he called the United States' approach to East Timor "unconscionable." As president, however, he has continued to supply the Indonesian military with much of what it has requested. In 1993, the first year of Clinton's presidency, the Pentagon negotiated nearly $30 million worth of arms sales to Indonesia.

A World Policy Institute analysis of official Pentagon and State Department statistics on arms exports reveals that since the first year of the Clinton administration in 1993, the United States has supplied Indonesian forces with over 5148 million worth of weapons and ammunition, including technical support and spare parts for Indonesia's arsenal of U.S.-supplied aircraft and armored vehicles.

Furthermore, commercial sales of U.S. military equipment licensed by the State Department have increased substantially over the past three years from $3.3 million in 1997 to an estimated $16.3 million last year.

As recently as 1997 the Pentagon, according to the World Policy Institute, violated the spirit of a congressional prohibition on providing U.S. military training to Indonesia by giving assistance to Indonesia's notorious Kopassus counterinsurgency units under the Joint Combined Exercise and Training program.