ALLAN NAIRN: President Obama wants to restore
military aid to the Indonesian armed forces, including Kopassus, the
Red Berets. I’ve just come out with a piece that shows that the
Indonesian army and Kopassus have been involved in a series of recent
assassinations of civilian political activists. The piece names the
names of the officers involved, including a Kopassus general named
Sunarko. These assassinations were carried out in the region of Aceh in
late 2009.
They targeted activists for the Aceh—the Partai Aceh, which is
pro-independence. In one case, the case of a man named Tumijan, he was
abducted, tortured to death. His body was dumped in a sewage ditch near
an army post. In another, a man was sitting in his car outside his
house. An assassin walked up, put two bullets in his head through the
window.
According to a senior Indonesian official with detailed
information on these murders, they’re part of a program of political
murder being carried out by TNI, the Indonesian armed forces, and
Kopassus and by military intelligence. And so, these killings are still
going on today. And Obama is about to give them new aid on the pretense
that the Indonesian army has reformed and has stopped killing
civilians, which is false.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know this, Allan?
ALLAN NAIRN: From
people inside the Indonesian government, who gave the names of some of
the killers and the officers they work for. And just a few hours ago, I
spoke on the phone with General Aditya, who is the head of the police
in Aceh, and he confirmed that his forces had in fact detained some of
the assassins who were working for the army. They’d been holding them
for months, but they never announced this, because they were afraid to
do it. The police are afraid of the army. But when I asked him about it
directly, he admitted it publicly for the first time. The Indonesian
police have confirmed this. They know about it, but they’re afraid to
act. The Indonesian army and Kopassus are running a program of killing
civilians, and it’s active right now. And Obama wants to give them new
US weapons, training and money.
AMY GOODMAN: Why does President Obama want to give them this money? I think we’re hearing a lot about the war on terror.
ALLAN NAIRN: Well,
first the White House makes the argument that the atrocities are a
thing of the past. The Indonesian military has killed hundreds of
thousands, perhaps close to a million, civilians. But the White House
argues, well, that’s in the past. But as I’ve just described, that’s a
lie, that’s not true. Secondly, the White House claims that they want
to use the Indonesian army to fight Islamist terror groups in
Indonesia. They want to use them and a special anti-terrorist unit
called Densus 88.
Densus 88 is a police SWAT-style task force that was originally
created by US intelligence under the initiative of Cofer Black,
formerly of the CIA, now with Blackwater. Two nights ago, I met with
the Densus people, who described how were they—were trained in Jakarta
and elsewhere by a CIA personnel in tactics including surveillance, how
to pursue and snatch people, and interrogation.
AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, talk about the significance of President Obama postponing his trip to Indonesia until June.
ALLAN NAIRN: I think it is still possible that the deal
they were making with the Indonesian army may still go forward, because
for the past few days, other top US officials, including Kurt Campbell,
the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, have been in Indonesia.
US generals have been in Indonesia. In fact, Kopassus general—Kopassus
generals even went to Washington and were welcomed by the Obama people
with open arms. They were working out the details of this new pact. And
it is possible that even though Obama himself won’t visit, they will
still try to push this deal through. So that means specifically that
they may go ahead with their already announced plans to circumvent the
US congressional Leahy amendment, which bans training for units
involved in atrocities, and boost their training for Kopassus.
I think, however, politically, practically speaking, that it may
be possible to at least defeat politically that aspect of the deal.
There are various reasons to think that’s possible. The East Timor
Action Network is running a campaign to stop it. Just in the past few
hours, human rights groups and survivors to [inaudible] terror in Aceh
have come out, and Indonesian national human rights groups have come
out, with a statement asking Obama to not increase the training for
Kopassus. So I think that deal perhaps could be stopped, and people
should contact Congress and the White House, demand that the US cut off
all military aid to Indonesia. And they can to go to the East Timor
Action website
and get details about the Kopassus aspect of the problem.
AMY GOODMAN: But this issue of terrorism, of Islamist terror, can you expand on that more?
ALLAN NAIRN: In Indonesia, there are currently Islamist
terror groups that have killed several hundred people. They bombed
luxury hotels in Jakarta. They bombed a night club. They bombed two
night clubs in Bali. They’ve killed several hundred in recent years.
The Indonesian military and police, on the other hand, have
killed many hundreds of thousands. And for years, the Indonesian
military and police have been sponsoring Islamist terror groups.
They’ve been using them for their own purposes. They sent them into
Poso and the Malukus. Indonesian generals back them. They went on
Indonesian military transports. They use them to attack Christian
villagers, while other elements of the army and police back the
Christian villagers. The idea was to create chaos to try to destabilize
the government of then Indonesian president Gus Dur. And it succeeded.
On another occasion, the Indonesian army sent a group called
Laskar Jihad, an Islamist terror group, into Aceh to try to wean people
away from supporting the pro-independence movement in Aceh. They were
immediately driven out by the Acehnese. The Indonesian police have
backed a group called the FPI, the Islamic Defenders Front, which goes
around Jakarta in Islamic dress busting up bars which don’t give
sufficient payoffs—payoffs to the police. Then the presidential
intelligence agency, which reports now directly to General Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono, the president of Indonesia, they have in the past
made payments to Laskar Jihad and sent them into Papua.
Papua is a region in the eastern part of Indonesia, which is under de facto
occupation by the Indonesian armed forces and Kopassus. They’re
conducting terror operations there, sometimes using these Islamist
forces, sometimes using Kopassus men directly. There have been
abductions, assassinations. And in one case, the Densus 88
antiterrorist force went into Papua and arrested a man because he had
been sending SMS text messages that were critical of President Susilo.
So here you have the CIA-trained supposed anti-terror unit arresting a
peaceful civilian because he uses his cell phone to send out messages
criticizing the President. This particular unit, Densus, is expected to
be one of the groups that is focused on in Obama’s visit, and he’s
expected to highlight their work with the US and perhaps even announce
new aid for them.
So what they’ve been doing, what the TNI and POLRI, the
Indonesian armed forces and police, have been doing, with these various
Islamist terror groups is they’ve been setting them up, funding them,
using them for their convenience. But also, when it is sometimes
convenient, they’ve been killing them. And that’s what they’re doing
right now.
In the run-up to Obama’s visit over the past two weeks, they’ve
done a series of raids on these various Islamist groups. They’ve killed
a number of them. They’ve arrested many others. They’ve arrested people
from mosques, who they claim are linked to them. And as one police
general privately put it the other day, they’re putting on a show for
Obama. They want to get new helicopters, new transport planes, new
interrogation equipment and training, more computers to spy on more
cell phones, more surveillance equipment. They want more of everything
from the United States. And by killing people from the Islamist
movement that they’ve been sponsoring for years, they cynically hope
that that will sell America. It’s actually similar, in some respects,
to the situation in Pakistan with ISI, the military Inter-Services
Intelligence agency.
It says something about the state of US politics now that this
push to renew aid or increase aid to the Indonesian military is coming
under a liberal Democratic President Obama. It’s coming while Obama has
as his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights a man named
Michael Posner, who used to be one of the leading human rights
advocates in the US. He ran a group in New York called the Lawyers
Committee for Human Rights, later renamed Human Rights First. They did
very good work, for example, on pushing for justice in the case of
Munir, the top Indonesian human rights lawyer who was assassinated by
BIN, the presidential intelligence agency, by General Muchdi and
General Hendro Priyono, who was a CIA asset. But now Posner is in the
State Department. He’s running the Human Rights Bureau. And he and
Obama and others are, by all reports, getting ready to circumvent
congressional restrictions and push through, restore aid to—restore
training aid to Kopassus, the most notorious of the killer forces and
the one of the forces that, as I’m reporting today, have been involved
in this recent wave of assassinations against political activists in
Aceh.
AMY GOODMAN: What would the effect, Allan Nairn, of full restoration of military aid to Indonesia have?
ALLAN NAIRN: It would mean more killing, more killing of
civilians, because it would make the Indonesian armed forces and police
more confident. It would send the message to the Indonesian public that
they have more reason to be afraid of the army and police, because now
they will be able to see that those forces have the full might of
America behind them. So it’ll mean more death and more terror on the
popular level.
On the other hand, it’s also the case that the situation is now
different than it was in the 1990s. In the 1990s, after the Dili
massacre in occupied East Timor, the massacre that we survived, a
grassroots movement grew up in the United States, including the East
Timor Action Network, and we were all able to pressure the US Congress
to cut off a lot of the military aid to Indonesia. That was under the
dictatorship of General Suharto. And that cutoff had a huge effect
within Indonesia. It actually contributed to the downfall of Suharto.
That’s what Suharto’s former security chief, Admiral Sudomo, told me.
The cutoff was very damaging to them. It helped to bring down Suharto.
Then, over the years after that, the aid has—much of the aid has
gradually been restored. But Indonesia is not now in a moment where the
army’s power is in the balance. Popular movements are very weak. Much
of the middle class, including many middle-class NGO people, have been
essentially bought off by the regime. They have very comfortable lives.
Foreign expatriates have very comfortable lives. They’re making the
claim that Indonesia is the new model of democracy, even though the
poor, who are the vast majority in the country, are being terrorized by
the police on a daily basis and, in key areas like Papua, terrorized by
the army.
So, at this moment, it’s not as if, if the US withheld the
military aid, that could bring down the army as earlier withholding
helped to bring down Suharto, but it will have a marginal effect of
definitely increasing the killing and torture that Indonesians suffer.
So if Obama does that, he should be held to account.
It’s especially outrageous on his part, because Obama is a US
president who actually understands Indonesia. He was a young boy when
he lived there, but in his books he makes it clear that he knew about
the massacres that were going on in the 1960s, the massacres that
brought the current regime to power. The army ousted Sukarno, the
founding president. The US backed the terror in which more than 400,000
rural peasants, many of them members of the Communist party, were
executed. The CIA gave a list of 5,000 dissidents, who they called
Communists. Also they were also shot and strangled and slashed to
death. And Obama knew about all this. He lived there afterwards. He
wrote about it in his book. And he’s a smart guy. I’m sure he knows the
story of the invasion of East Timor, which was authorized by President
Ford and Henry Kissinger; about the very recent terror in Aceh; about
the ongoing de facto occupation of Papua. And yet, on the
transparently ridiculous excuse that the TNI is the agency to fight a
small Islamist terror group which is in Indonesia, he’s about to
supposedly restore, increase US weapons and training to this army.
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