By Allan Nairn
JAKARTA — Activists and observers here speculate that the country — reeling from hunger and mass lay-offs promoted by the IMF — is moving toward social upheaval and perhaps a change of regime. At the dumps in Bantar Gebang, the ranks of scavengers have soared as sacked day labourers pick through garbage to survive. In the midst of this, western reporters are casting Washington as a champion of reform because it is twisting Suharto's arm to implement a 50-point IMF plan that includes some popular clauses that cut against the Suharto family's vast corruption. Largely unknown is that the Clinton administration, against an understanding with Congress, is shoring up the Indonesian military against its own people.
The Suharto regime counts on its armed forces, ABRI, to survive, and is intensifying the grip of the police state with each week of crisis.
The US and the IMF are using the crisis to push Indonesia from protected capitalism, crony-style, to a harsher, multinational and corporate variety based on submission to global markets. The IMF plan means wage restraint, mass lay-offs, "more flexible" labour markets and the phased-in end of all existing food and fuel subsidies for the poor.
Stanley Roth, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and an IMF booster, says: "We're going to see tremendous hardship in the Indonesian countryside as millions of unemployed go back to their villages".
A senior US official here calls the IMF the "lance point" of US policy and says that if Suharto doesn't go along he will be "committing suicide". But regardless of what happens to the dictator, US policy is grounded on maintaining control inside Indonesia through backing and strengthening ABRI.
The current planning, according to officials familiar with Pentagon, White House and State Department discussions, envisions a post-Suharto regime perhaps headed by a civilian or civilians but under which ABRI keeps its vast apparatus and "dual function" security-political role. Sources here say that Washington has queried Megawati Sukarno — the most popular opposition figure — on whether she would accept an ABRI vice-president or a candidate approved by the army.
Indonesians know well that ABRI is the co-manager with Suharto of state repression and the author, under his command, of two of the most intensive slaughters of the postwar era (the massacre of a million Indonesians when Suharto and ABRI seized control starting in 1965, and the post-1975 extermination of one-third of the populace of occupied East Timor, some 200,000 people).
The US collaborated with the 1965 slaughter, providing a list of 5000 communists and dissidents, most of whom were then assassinated. The US approved the East Timor invasion, blocked the UN Security Council from enforcement action and, after the 1991 massacre in Dili (which I survived but at least 271 did not), helped the ABRI with damage control.
On December 10, 1991, according to a State Department cable, the US convened a secret meeting in Surabaya and assured ABRI that Washington did "not believe that friends should abandon friends in times of adversity". That same sentiment is now being reiterated in Jakarta.
Since the crisis began, senior Pentagon and service officials have flown here to meet top ABRI officers at least two or three times a month. When defence secretary William Cohen visited in January, he refused to call for ABRI restraint in dealing with demonstrations.
Noting that many weapons sales have been curtailed in the years since the Dili massacre, many foreign observers, the press and some in Congress have wrongly assumed the White House is distancing itself from ABRI. In reality, those cut-offs, which included fighter plane and small-arms sales, were imposed on two recalcitrant administrations by a bipartisan coalition in Congress responding to grassroots organising pressure.
The cut-off that most stunned Jakarta was the vote by Congress, in the [northern] autumn of 1992, to end the military training that Indonesian officers received in the US under the International Military Education and Training program (IMET).
After a fierce counterattack by Jakarta and US corporate partners of Suharto, the IMET was partially restored in 1994 and 1995, as a smaller program called E-IMET that purported to instruct ABRI in human rights. After 1995 Congress agreed in its foreign aid appropriations bills that the only training Indonesia could get would be E-IMET-style classroom instruction.
But newly obtained Pentagon documents and interviews with key US officials indicate that, unknown to Congress and unremarked by the US press, the US military has been training ABRI in a broad array of lethal tactics.
Known as the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET), it dwarfs IMET in size and scope, and is being intensified. Unlike the E-IMET stateside classroom lectures, this operation has involved at least 36 exercises with fully armed US combat troops flying or sailing into Indonesia.
The US participants have included Green Berets, Air Force commandos and Marines. The ABRI trainees have run the gamut from Suharto's presidential guard to KOSTRAD, the key Army Strategic Command that anchors the regime in central Jakarta.
By far the main recipient of the special US training has been a force legendary for specialising in torture, disappearances and night raids on civilian homes. Of the 28 Army/Air Force exercises known to have been conducted since 1992, Pentagon documents indicate that 20 have involved the dreaded KOPASSUS Red Berets.
Asked about KOPASSUS, a leading Indonesian human rights monitor called its work "spying, terror and counter-terror", meaning that it stages violent provocations. He said KOPASSUS battalions from Aceh and West Papua were relocated to Jakarta two months ago and have recently been deployed to contain street demonstrations along with units of ABRI's regional command.
His group believes that KOPASSUS has two clandestine jails (in Cibubur and Bogor) for detaining and questioning dissidents they have abducted and "disappeared". A knowledgeable US official confirms that KOPASSUS has been implicated in torture and civilian killings in West Papua, Aceh and occupied East Timor.
The US exercises for KOPASSUS in the period since the Dili massacre have included "sniper level II" (1993), "demolitions and air operations" (1993) and "close quarters combat" (1994).
The last of these was performed after the State Department, to stave off stronger action by Congress, had imposed the ban on the sale of small arms to Indonesia.
Ensuing KOPASSUS sessions covered special air operations, air assaults and advanced sniper techniques.
On July 27, 1996, Jakarta erupted in riots, after ABRI-backed paramilitaries raided Megawati Sukarno's headquarters, leaving at least 60 people listed as missing. In its wake, ABRI launched a crackdown and intimidation campaign against non-governmental organisations.
In the midst of this, KOPASSUS was given training in psy ops by a US team flown in from Special Operations Command-Pacific.
From then until late 1997 there were seven more KOPASSUS exercises, one (mortar training) focusing on the unit of Colonel Slamat Sidabutar, an East Timor occupation commander whose troops have conducted torture sessions that were photographed and later published abroad.
The US Marines have trained the Indonesian Denjaka Counter-terrorism Force in demolition and small weapons instruction as well, and also run a course for the Indonesian First Infantry Brigade on small boat operations, reconnaissance, surveillance and raids.
As the financial crisis hit and protest grew last fall, KODAM Jaya, one of the main anti-demonstration forces, and the Infantry Training Centre received 26 days of instruction from the US Army in military operations in urban terrain.
Reached by phone at the US embassy, Colonel Bob Humberson, who coordinates the training programs, said: "We want to make sure they know the right way to do it by minimising casualties and with proper treatment of the enemy or unidentified personnel".
Asked what enemy might be found on the urban streets of Indonesia, he said the training was designed to repel "an enemy from outside". He contended that since some Indonesian troops had served in Bosnia with the UN, this kind of urban training would make troops ready for action there.
Humberson said that none of the urban terrain schooling had to do with crowd control and that all the exercises fit the guidelines of the E-IMET program.
His aide, Major Rick Thomas, called the exercises "very tame" and said all were approved by the State Department. Thomas estimated that for the remainder of 1998 there would be 20 exercises, including smaller scale exchanges of experts.
The US focus on KOPASSUS seems to be part of a systematic effort to build it up. It has also cemented links with its recent commander, General Prabowo.
Prabowo is Suharto's son-in-law, the Indonesian business associate (through his wife) of Merrill Lynch and one of the key sponsors of the US-Indonesia Society, an influential pro-Suharto US front group launched in 1994 and backed by ABRI, US corporations and former Pentagon, State Department and CIA officials. Prabowo is also Indonesia's most notorious field commander.
When I first visited East Timor in 1990, he had recently chaired a meeting in which the army had openly debated whether to assassinate future Nobel Peace laureate Bishop Carlos Belo. Today, Prabowo is the KOSTRAD commander, an often-touted Suharto successor and the recipient of a steady stream of high-level US visitors.
Assistant secretary of state Stanley Roth has dined frequently with him recently. When Secretary Cohen visited, he raised eyebrows in Jakarta by going to KOPASSUS headquarters. Spending three hours by Prabowo's side, he watched as the US-trained killers executed manoeuvres for their sponsor from Washington.
[Veteran journalist Allan Nairn was banned from Indonesia as "a threat to national security" after he was injured while attempting to stop the 1991 East Timor massacre. He has since campaigned against US support for the Suharto military regime and is now organising Justice for All, a grassroots human rights group.]
[Reprinted by permission from the March 30 issue of the US Nation. To subscribe for one year (47 issues), send US$52 to: The Nation, PO Box 37074, Boone, IA 50037-2074, USA. Outside the US, add US$55 for air mail or US$18 for surface mail.]