CIAO DATE: 7/5/2006

Putting the Cart Before the Horse: United States resumes military assistance to Indonesia

Rhea Myerscough

May 2006

Center for Defense Information

Introduction
In March 2006 the State Department formally ended a seven-year ban on U.S. exports of lethal defense articles to Indonesia.  Indonesia had been under various combinations of U.S. military sanctions over the past 14 years, due to persistent and grave human rights violations by members of its security forces.  This significant policy change removes all restrictions on military assistance for the first time since 1992.  However, in the absence of any documented human rights improvements by the Indonesian armed forces, the timing of the decision is perplexing.

Understanding the Ban
Although Indonesia had perpetrated countless human rights abuses in East Timor since invading and occupying the country in 1975, the existing ban on military assistance was a specific response to Indonesia’s actions in East Timor in the 1990s.  In 1991, the Indonesian armed forces (TNI), wielding U.S.-supplied weapons, massacred 271 civilians participating in a pro-democracy demonstration in East Timor.  In response, 52 U.S. senators sent a letter to President George H.W. Bush asking that the United States take a stronger stance against the gross violations of human rights coordinated by Indonesia’s security forces.  Congress first placed legislative restrictions on military assistance to Indonesia in the fiscal year (FY) 1993 foreign operations appropriations bill, banning all International Military Education and Training (IMET) funds for Indonesia.   Congress reenacted this ban in both FY 94 and FY 95.  At the same time, the State Department banned the sale or export of small arms and light weapons and crowd control equipment to Indonesia, and expanded the policy in FY 96 to prohibit exports of helicopter-mounted equipment and armored vehicles as well.  In FY 96, the IMET ban was relaxed slightly to allow civilian personnel (but not military officers) to attend Expanded IMET (E-IMET) courses.

During the period leading up to and following a referendum on independence in 1999, the TNI orchestrated a scorched-earth campaign in East Timor, killing over 1400 East Timorese citizens, displacing two-thirds of the population, and destroying three-quarters of the country’s infrastructure.  In response, President Bill Clinton severed all remaining military ties to Indonesia, including banning the export of all defense articles and services, lethal or non-lethal.  Congress translated this ban into legislation in FY 00, conditioning the resumption of IMET and Foreign Military Financing (FMF) on documented reform of the TNI and prosecution of abusive members.  Although E-IMET was reinstated in FY 02, the murders of three school teachers (two of them U.S. citizens) in the Indonesian province of West Papua in August 2002 caused Congress to extend the IMET ban until the Indonesian government and armed forces had sufficiently cooperated with U.S. investigations into the killings. 

Dismantling the Ban
In February 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that Indonesia would, for the first time since 1992, be eligible for full IMET funding. In May 2005 Rice also decided to permit non-lethal foreign military sales to Indonesia.  These decisions were made even though the State Department’s annual human rights reports continued to document serious abuses by the TNI.  During the FY 06 appropriations process, Congress rejected a Bush administration request to strike all remaining restrictions from the text of the foreign operations appropriations bill but, as a compromise, included a clause authorizing the secretary of state to waive the restrictions for reasons of national security.  Rice took advantage of this loophole only 48 hours after the appropriations bill was signed into law in November 2005.  On March 29, 2006, the administration announced that the export of lethal defense articles to Indonesia could resume as well, effectively returning the U.S.-Indonesian military relationship to its pre-1992 conditions.

Rice’s decisions to unilaterally erase restrictions that Congress supported in seven consecutive foreign operations appropriations bills have not been well-received.  Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., sent a letter to Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld expressing their disappointment in the administration’s actions.  Human rights communities in East Timor, Indonesia, and the United States argue that the administration has squandered leverage, granted by the legislated restrictions, to encourage positive change within the Indonesian armed forces and justice for East Timor.  The administration’s decision to bypass these conditions, by exercising the national security waiver instead of waiting for Indonesia to meet the conditions for resumption, has the symbolic value of exonerating human rights abusers within the TNI.

With the congressional restrictions on military assistance for the TNI suddenly and surprisingly out of the way, the Bush administration’s current budget request appears to be rapidly making up for lost time.  The most recent budget justification for foreign operations reveals a $1.3 million request for IMET and a $6.5 million request for FMF funds – a nearly seven-fold increase over the previous year’s expenditure.  The administration has provided several justifications for bypassing the legislated restrictions and reinstating this assistance to Indonesia.  Indonesia’s strategic role in the war on terror has been chief among these justifications, which fits a larger trend to increase U.S. assistance to countries willing to participate in counter-terrorist activities alongside the United States, regardless of their human rights records.  The administration has also cited a need for “increased professional links” with Indonesian security forces, after the 2004 tsunami, during which the United States and Indonesia collaborated on an international response to the humanitarian disaster.

* FY 05 DCS and FMS figures are estimates; ** FY 06 DCS, FMS, IMET, and FMF figures are estimates; *** FY 07 DCS and FMS figures are estimates; IMET and FMF figures represent the budget request

In spite of the ban on IMET and FMF, Indonesia has hardly been cut off from U.S. security assistance and, over the past several years, has been eligible for other forms of security assistance and training.  Since FY 02, Congress has appropriated more than $30 million for Anti-Terrorism Assistance (ATA) to Indonesia under the Nonproliferation, Anti-Terrorism, Demining, and Related Programs (NADR) account – funding that is not covered by other legislated restrictions.  In the FY 02 Emergency Supplemental alone, passed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, nearly $8 million of NADR-ATA funding was earmarked for Indonesia.  Through the NADR-ATA and other programs, the U.S. government has poured tens of millions of dollars into the Indonesian police, including the creation of a special anti-terrorism unit known as Detachment 88, which, according to some human rights organizations, is accumulating its own troubling human rights record.

During the first five years that the congressional ban on IMET was in place for Indonesia, U.S. Special Operations Forces trained with the Indonesian Special Forces (Kopassus) under the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program.  When this news became public in 1998, outrage in the Congress led to the immediate suspension of the program.  However, as of FY 05, JCET has again been made available to Indonesia.  The United States has also engaged the Indonesian armed forces in other joint and combined exercises alongside the U.S. military.  In 2005, Indonesia was scheduled to participate in more than 132 events under the U.S. Pacific Command Theater Security Cooperation Program.  Members of TNI participated in the 2005 and 2006 Cobra Gold joint-combined exercise, and the commander of the notorious Kopassus participated in the Pentagon’s 2006 Pacific Area Special Operations Conference.

Additionally, since 2001, Indonesia has been the top recipient of funds from a new Pentagon program known as the Regional Defense Counterterrorism Fellowship Program (CTFP).  Many observers have pointed out the similarities between CTFP and the IMET program, as well as highlighted the one main difference – CTFP recipients are subject to much less human rights scrutiny than IMET recipients.  Indonesia is slated to receive $700,000 in CTFP funding for FY 06.  A new $200 million Pentagon fund for increasing the counter-terrorism capabilities of foreign militaries may also substantially benefit Indonesia, as the waterways surrounding Indonesia, such as the Straits of Malacca, are a primary target for this funding.   On May 5, 2006, the administration announced that up to $19 million will be available for Indonesia under this new funding authority.

Conclusion: The Wrong Way Forward?
Since the fall of the dictator Suharto in 1998, Indonesia has been transitioning towards a fully democratic government.  The election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in September 2004 marked the country’s first direct presidential election.  However, bringing the security forces fully under civilian control has not yet been accomplished.  The U.S. State Department’s most recent human rights report (2005) stated that, “security forces continued to commit unlawful killings of rebels, suspected rebels, and civilians in areas of separatist activity, where most politically motivated extrajudicial killings also occurred.”  Additionally, the TNI garners an estimated 70 percent of its budget from unaccountable sources, such as illegal logging, and military commanders still outrank civilian officials in the Ministry of Defense.  Moreover, not a single Indonesian officer has been held accountable for the crimes against humanity committed in East Timor in 1999, not to mention the previous quarter-century of Indonesian military occupation that killed well over 100,000 East Timorese.
 
The TNI remains largely unreformed, and the Bush administration’s decision to substantially increase military ties with the Indonesian armed forces in spite of this fact perpetuates the cycle of impunity in Indonesia.  Ultimately, by pressuring for the inclusion of and immediately invoking the national security waiver, the administration has dismantled an important source of leverage the United States possessed for improving human rights conditions in Indonesia and East Timor.  The administration avows that it is, “important to the United States that the world’s largest Muslim population is a stable democracy,” but providing lethal defense articles and military training to security forces that are not fully accountable to a civilian administration is an ineffective means to that end.

 

 

The author wishes to thank Karen Orenstein, of the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network, for her contributions to this article.