US Trained Butchers of Timor
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/sep/19/indonesia.easttimor1
US trained butchers of Timor
Exclusive: Washington trained death squads in secret while Britain has
spent �1m helping Indonesian army
Indonesian military forces linked to the carnage in East Timor were
trained in the United States under a covert programme sponsored by the
Clinton Administration which continued until last year.
The Observer can also disclose that the Government has spent about �1
million in training more than 50 members of the Indonesian military in
Britain since it came to power. Human rights campaigners claim a number
of these are likely to have links with those complicit in the attrocities.
The US programme, codenamed 'Iron Balance', was hidden from legislators
and the public when Congress curbed the official schooling of
Indonesia's army after a massacre in 1991. Principal among the units
that continued to be trained was the Kopassus -- an elite force with a
bloody history -- which was more rigorously trained by the US than any
other Indonesian unit, according to Pentagon documents passed to The
Observer last week. Kopassus was built up with American expertise
despite US awareness of its role in the genocide of about 200,000 people
in the years after the invasion of East Timor in 1975, and in a string
of massacres and disappearances since the bloodbath. Amnesty
International describes Kopassus as 'responsible for some of the worst
human rights violations in Indonesia's history'.
The Pentagon documents -- obtained by the US-based East Timor Action
Network and Illinois congressman Lane Evans -- detail every exercise in
the covert training programme, conducted under a Pentagon project called
JCET (Joint Combined Education and Training). They show the training was
in military expertise that could only be used internally against
civilians, such as urban guerrilla warfare, surveillance,
counter-intelligence, sniper marksmanship and 'psychological operations'.
Specific commanders trained under the US programme have been tied to the
current violence and to some of the worst massacres of the past 20
years, including the slaughter at Kraras in 1983 and at Santa Cruz in
1991. The US-trained commanders include the son-in-law of the late
dictator General Suharto, Prabowo Subianto, and his mentor, General Kiki
Syahnakri -- the man appointed last week by the so-called 'reform'
government as commissioner for martial law in East Timor.
The secret programme unveiled in the document became the focus for
military training when above-board aid was curtailed by Congress after
the Santa Cruz massacre. Congress had stepped in after up to 270
peaceful protesters -- many of them schoolchildren -- were murdered by
Kopassus shock troops as they paraded through Dili.
American sponsorship of the Indonesian regime began as a matter of Cold
War ideology, in the wake of defeat in Vietnam. The left-wing movement
in East Timor was feared by Jakarta and seen by the US as an echo of
those in southern Africa and of Salvador Allende's government in Chile.
Jakarta's harassment of the Timor government and the invasion of 1975
were duly encouraged by the United States.
The training of Indonesia's officer corps peaked during the
mid-Eighties. In 1990 a former official at the US Embassy in Jakarta
cabled the State Department to say US sponsorship had been 'a big help
to the (Indonesian) army. They probably killed a lot of people and I
probably have a lot of blood on my hands'.
But the horror of Santa Cruz in 1991, when trucks were seen dumping
bodies in the sea, was too much. The US decided that the training, while
still available, should be paid for by the recipient nation -- in other
words, it would no longer be military aid. The covert programme then
became the main means of training Indonesia's military -- still at the
American taxpayers' expense.
In an undated prospectus, the Pentagon says the prime mission was to 'to
develop, organise, equip, train, advise and direct indigenous
militaries'. The scale was small, to offer concentrated 'significant
special training' which would create 'self-sufficient small units'. In
1996, for instance, 10 exercises involved 376 US personnel and 838
Indonesians or 'loyal' Timorese.
Britain also made a significant contribution to Indonesia's military
training. The Observer has established that, since May 1997, 24 senior
members of Indonesia's forces have been trained in UK military colleges.
This included training in running military units efficiently and how to
used technical equipment like guided missiles. In addition, 29
Indonesian officers have studied at non-military establishments.
Revelations of the extent to which Labour has used taxpayers' money to
aid the Indonesian military has angered many MPs, who claim it makes a
mockery of Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's 'ethical foreign policy'. In
the last four years of the Tory Government, only one Indonesian soldier
was trained in the UK.
Ann Clwyd, the Labour chair of the all-party group on human rights, has
previously shown that Indonesian military trained here have subsequently
committed atrocities. She said: 'It is simply not acceptable that we
have been training these people. We know the police, the army, the
militia are all interlinked. How many of those trained by this
Government are now involved in the East Timor operation?'
Last week both America and Australia suspended military co-operation
with Indonesia. Funding for the military training would have been made
available by the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence through the
Defence Military Assistance Fund. Earlier this year Defence Minister
Doug Henderson admitted that training one Indonesian navy officer at the
Joint Service Command and Staff College and another on the International
Principal Warfare Course at HMS Dryad cost the Government �170,000.
Many of the Indonesian officers were trained at the Royal Military
College at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire, as part of a ' private and
commercial initiative' by Cranfield University. As well as courses on
managing army units, the training includes map-making and electronics.
In the past two years the Foreign Office has also given �200,000 to
eight Indonesian high-flyers through its Chevening scholarship
programme. This included two policemen, two from the army and two from
the navy. On Friday, the Indonesian authorities stopped three servicemen
taking up their scholarships.
Both the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office defend the training
given as 'constructive engagement' . A spokesman for the MoD said: 'It
is a way of ensuring professionalism in foreign armies. It encourages
higher standards, good governance and greater respect for human rights.'
The Foreign Office points out that many of the Indonesian officers on
non-military courses are studying subjects such as international law and
human rights.
Last summer seven members of Kopassus finished a post-graduate course in
defence studies at Hull University. The Ministry of Defence arranged the
deal after liaising with General Prabowo. Although the course was
initiated before the general election, it started after Labour's
victory. George Robertson, then Defence Secretary, was happy for it to
continue. Despite Prabowo's links to atrocities in East Timor, Robertson
once described him as 'enlightened'.
The Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, meanwhile, says in today's Observer
that 'there is a mopping-up operation to be done in Britain on the myths
that have mushroomed among commentators who have only discovered the
plight of East Timor in the last fortnight'. He denies that Britain has
'armed Indonesia to the teeth', or provided weapons to the militias, and
says that Britain has not given fresh subsidies to buy Hawk trainers.
Amnesty International's East Timor country specialist, Deborah Sklar,
traces the regime's 'over-reliance on thuggish military operations' as
being due to the demands of the foreign investment community and even
from the World Bank.
She cites a blueprint called The East Asian Miracle, written by US
Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, in which he urges governments to
'insulate' themselves from 'pluralist pressures' and to suppress trade
unions. This, she says, became a primary Kopassus role during the years
of training by the United States.
'If the US,' says Sklar, 'has supplied to the Indonesians equipment that
has been concerned in the perpetration of human rights abuses, then that
is an outrage.'
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord We�rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
James A. Donald
> Australia has been complicit in the training of Indonesian defense
> personnel over a long period of time.
Very recently Australia and Indonesia came close to war over East
Timor. Australian forces ejected Indonesian forces at gunpoint from
East Timor. Australian forces repeatedly crossed the border between
East and West Timor and got into shootouts with Indonesian forces in
West Timor.
--
----------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.