The Foreign Service Journal, May 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2018 57 body in addressing systematic or specific abuses. The body has no formal powers of investigation, such as subpoena power, and the government is not obliged to act on its recommendations. Its reports have not led to effective prosecutions, even in notorious cases like the 2005 murder of a prominent human rights advo- cate, Munir SaidThalib. Press Freedoms Grow, But ... The Indonesian media scene in 2018 is vastly different from that of the Suharto era, when government censorship and self- censorship characterized print and broadcast media. Indonesian media today are robust and largely free of government control and sanction. Nevertheless, journalists, and sometimes publishers, face extra-judicial threats and sometimes violence by entrenched economic elites and religious organizations. Security forces, either acting in league with these interests or on their own behalf, are often the agents of intimidation and violence. The corrupt Indonesian justice system gives those who are targets of critical media treatment over corruption and other abuses avenues to challenge journalists, publishers and NGOs in the courts. The U.S. State Department’s annual human rights reports for Indonesia have consistently noted that “elements within the government, judiciary and security forces obstruct corruption investigations and harass their accusers.” The same can be said of efforts by security forces and other government elements to block investigation of abuses of human rights, including crimes against humanity dating back to the birth of the Suharto dictator- ship in 1967. Security Force Impunity The armed forces’ political and economic clout remains essentially unchallenged. Ever since its founding, the Indone- sian military has derived funds from legitimate and illegitimate businesses, as well as rent-seeking relationships with national and international enterprises operating in Indonesia. Because its responsibility is based on a concept of “dwi fungsi,” or two functions, the military is empowered to play both a defense role and a sociopolitical role. The latter, its “territorial” role, involves maintaining a security, political and economic presence down to the village level. This “territorial” role is supported by intelligence operations that include both monitoring of and sometimes involvement in local political activity, especially dissent and media activ- ity. Through this involvement of active military forces, and in collaboration with retired military officers, the military retains significant influence over political party activity at the local, provincial and even national level. Security force members are regularly and reliably accused of arbitrary arrest and brutalization of prisoners, including beat- ing, torture and killing. The U.S. State Department notes that in addition to the military, many police officers also fail to conduct themselves in a manner that protects Indonesia’s democratic institutions and values. Its Indonesia human rights report cites “police inaction, abuse of prisoners and detainees, harsh prison conditions and insufficient protection for religious and social minorities.” Command responsibility is not acknowledged in these abuses, and when officers are charged the investigation is inter- nal. In the rare event of a conviction, perpetrators receive admin- istrative actions and sentences that are not “commensurate with the severity of [the] offenses,” as the State Department’s human rights report puts it. This absence of appropriate justice encour- ages security force personnel in such conduct and intimidates the general population. In 1999 the people of East Timor voted in a United Nations– supervised referendum for independence from Jakarta. The vote, which was undertaken under conditions of severe intimida- tion by Indonesian security forces, resulted in the death of an estimated 1,500 East Timorese and the physical destruction of approximately 80 percent of the country’s infrastructure. Despite rulings by U.N. tribunals, Indonesian security force officials still have not been punished for these crimes, much less for those carried out during their 24-year occupation of East Timor. Six years later, the Indonesian government and separatists in the province of Aceh reached an accord, ending a decades-old conflict in which the abuse of insurgents and civilians had been rampant. In the Suharto and early post-Suharto era, the Indo- nesian military, acting in part to defend commercial interests including logging and drug running, employed tactics developed in similar repression campaigns in Papua and Indonesia-occu- pied East Timor. The 2005 peace settlement was memorialized in a memoran- dum of understanding that pledged formation of a human rights court and a truth and reconciliation commission to address decades of security force abuses. Thirteen years later, the govern- ment still has not created either body. The Special Case of West Papua Papuan resistance to Indonesian control has been active since 1969, when Jakarta, in violation of its commitments under a 1962 U.N. mandate, forcefully annexed the province. Government-