The Foreign Service Journal, May 2005

Even more recently, Farid Faquih, a leading anti-corruption campaigner who has targeted military and other government malfeasance, was badly beaten by military officers as he sought to monitor tsunami aid distrib- ution. He was then arrested and is now facing trumped-up charges of theft of the assistance he was moni- toring. And the Papuan human rights advocates who supported FBI investi- gations of the U.S. citizens murdered in 2002 in West Papua are undergoing continuing intimidation by the mili- tary. More generally, the TNI consti- tutes a threat to the fledgling democ- ratic experiment in Indonesia. The many businesses it operates generate over 70 percent of its budget, freeing it from accountability either to the civilian president (himself a retired general) or the parliament. Much of this income comes from extortion, prostitution rings, drug-running, ille- gal logging and other exploitation of Indonesia’s great natural resources and — as documented in the State Department’s latest Human Rights Report and an August 2004 Voice of Australia report — human trafficking. With its great institutional wealth, the TNI maintains a bureaucratic struc- ture that functions as a shadow gov- ernment, paralleling the civil adminis- tration structure from the central level down to sub-districts and even the village level. For much of the last decade, advo- cates of closer ties between the Indonesian and American militaries have contended that a warmer U.S. embrace, including training programs and education courses for TNI offi- cers, could expose them to democrat- ic ideals and afford a more profession- al military perspective. Of course, this ignores the decades of close U.S.- Indonesian military ties extending from the 1960s to the early 1990s, when the Indonesian military com- mitted some of its gravest atrocities and when a culture of impunity became ingrained. The argument for reform through engagement also ignores the fact that the U.S. Defense Department already maintains exten- sive ties and channels for assistance with the TNI under the guise of “con- ferences” and joint operations billed as humanitarian or security-related. In the post-9/11 era, proponents of restored U.S.-Indonesian military ties have adduced a new argument for restoring IMET funds: however unsa- vory the Indonesian military may be, we need it as a partner in the war on terrorism. But the TNI has close ties to numerous indigenous fundamen- talist Islamic terror groups, including the Front for the Defense of Islam and the Laskar Jihad. It even helped form and train the latter group, which engaged in a savage communal war in the Moluku Islands between 2000 and 2002 that left thousands dead. So long as the Indonesian military refuses to curb its human rights abuses, submit itself to civilian rule, end corruption and end its sponsor- ship of terrorist militias, it will remain a rogue institution and a threat to democracy. And until that changes, the longstanding restric- tions on military-to-military ties between the United States and Indonesia must remain in place. ■ Edmund McWilliams entered the Foreign Service in 1975, serving in Vientiane, Bangkok, Moscow, Kabul, Islamabad, Managua, Bishkek, Dush- anbe, Jakarta (where he was political counselor from 1996 to 1999) and Washington, D.C. He opened the posts in Bishkek and Dushanbe, and was the first chief of mission in each. In 1998, he received AFSA’s Christ- ian Herter Award for creative dissent by a senior FSO. Since retiring from the Senior Foreign Service in 2001, he has worked with various U.S. and foreign human rights NGOs as a vol- unteer. M A Y 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 17 S P E A K I N G O U T