US lifts ban on sale of lethal arms
to Indonesia By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Moving with unusual speed,
the administration of US President George W Bush
officially normalized military relations with
Indonesia on Wednesday when the State Department
posted a formal notice permitting the sale of
lethal military equipment to Jakarta for the first
time in seven years.
The announcement in
the Federal Register came just two weeks after
Condoleezza Rice made her maiden visit as US
secretary of state to the Indonesian capital,
where she called for closer ties
with
the military as part of an expanded "strategic
partnership" with the sprawling Southeast Asian
nation of more than 200 million people.
It
also follows the State Department's announcement
last November that it intended to waive
congressionally imposed human-rights conditions on
military aid and sales to Indonesia in
appreciation of Jakarta's "unique strategic role
in Southeast Asia".
"This marks the final
legal step to open up the arms flow to the
Indonesian military," John Miller, director of the
East Timor and Indonesian Action Network (ETAN),
said of the Federal Register notice. "It remains
for Indonesia to draw up a shopping list of items
they want to buy."
ETAN, along with
several other major rights groups, including Human
Rights Watch and Amnesty International, has
strongly opposed the restoration of full military
ties with Indonesia until the government of
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono makes much
greater progress in asserting control over the
country's armed forces (TNI) and prosecuting
officers responsible for serious abuses,
particularly in East Timor.
They have
argued that normalizing military relations now
gives the army a "Good Housekeeping Seal of
Approval" that will in effect encourage it to
resist reforms that would make it more accountable
to civilian authority and improve its human-rights
practices.
"The thing about the renewal of
the military relationship is that it gives a
political boost to the army and makes it more
likely that they will stave off pressure for
reforms," said Daniel Lev, an Indonesia expert at
the University of Washington in Seattle.
Yudhoyono, he said, "is pushing very hard for
reforms, but none really has to do with the army,
which is the core of the problem".
The US
Congress first imposed military-related sanctions
against the TNI in 1991 after a widely reported
massacre against unarmed protesters in East Timor,
a province that had been invaded and subsequently
annexed by Suharto's New Order regime in the
mid-1970s. Over the next eight years, Congress
gradually added restrictions on the
military-to-military relations because of evidence
that the army's human-rights performance had not
improved.
In August 1999, the TNI and
TNI-backed militias went on a deadly and
destructive rampage in East Timor after its
inhabitants voted overwhelmingly in favor of
independence in a United Nations-backed
plebiscite. Congress responded by severing
virtually all military ties, making their
restoration conditional on a number of mostly
rights-related reforms, including the prosecution
and punishment of those responsible for the mayhem
in East Timor.
But the terrorist attacks
on New York and the Pentagon on September 11,
2001, changed the mood in Washington. The Bush
administration began pressing Congress to exempt
from the ban certain kinds of military assistance,
such as "anti-terrorist" training and equipment,
joint military maneuvers, and the supply of some
"non-lethal" military equipment.
This was
despite overwhelming evidence that the TNI was not
only refusing to cooperate in efforts to bring to
justice the perpetrators of the East Timor
violence, but was also engaged in serious abuses
on other islands, including Aceh, West Papua, and
the Malukus.
After the tsunami disaster of
December 2004, the administration accelerated the
pace toward normalization. In February, it lifted
the ban on Indonesia's participation in its
International Military Education Training (IMET)
program and in May, it exempted from the ban on
military sales certain kinds of "non-lethal"
military equipment.
Congress nonetheless
remained skeptical and last November extended the
ban on certain kinds of financing for military
equipment and training and on licenses for the
export of "lethal" military equipment until the
secretary of state could certify that three
conditions are being met by Jakarta and the TNI.
They included the prosecution and
punishment of TNI members "who have been credibly
alleged to have committed gross violations of
human rights"; cooperation by the TNI with
civilian judicial authorities and international
efforts to resolve gross abuses in East Timor and
elsewhere; and implementation of reforms "to
improve civilian control of the military".
The bill, however, also provided that the
administration could waive these conditions in the
interests of "national security". Unable to
certify that Jakarta was indeed meeting these
conditions, the State Department decided to waive
them in late November, although in doing so, it
stressed that it remained "committed" to the
fulfillment of Congress' conditions and would only
approve sales of "lethal equipment" on a
"case-by-case basis". The latter assurance was
included in the Federal Register's announcement on
Wednesday.
Between November and this week,
however, Washington made no secret of its
eagerness to normalize ties fully despite the
emergence of new evidence in January that the TNI
had been involved in the murders of two US
teachers in Papua in 2002.
In its budget
request for 2007, the State Department increased
Indonesia's IMET allocation by 50% and asked
Congress to approve more than US$6 million dollars
to aid Indonesia's purchases of military equipment
- a nearly sevenfold increase over the previous
year.
At the same time, Admiral William
Fallon, commander of the US Pacific Command,
publicly urged a "rapid, concerted infusion of
assistance" to the Indonesian military.
Washington's major strategic interests in
Indonesia relate to its status as, in the words of
the State Department, "the world's most populous
majority-Muslim nation" and "a voice of moderation
in the Islamic world" at a time when Washington is
engaged in its "global war on terror" against
radical Islamists. In addition, its proximity to
and control over some of the world's most
important sea lanes has long given it a special
cachet with the United States.
Indonesia
has also long been seen as a potential ally in US
efforts to "contain" China in Asia and the
Pacific, a theme that dominated Rice's tour in the
region this month, which climaxed in a meeting
with her Australian and Japanese counterparts.
The Pentagon reportedly is most eager to
upgrade Indonesia's maritime forces to help it
secure the strategic sea lanes against potential
threats, which include piracy, terrorist
operations, and, presumably, China's efforts to
build a blue-ocean navy. In addition, Indonesia's
navy is considered the least problematic of the
country's armed forces from a human-rights
perspective.
The TNI, according to
analysts, has placed a higher priority on
upgrading and securing spare parts for its fleet
of aging fleet of warplanes, some of which have
been used for counter-insurgency operations.
