Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The Indonesian armed forces, known as ABRI, have long been the chosen instrument of American foreign policy in the area, bolstering Suharto’s stoutly anti-Communist regime. In 1965, when General Suharto was in the process of coming to power, the United States provided ABRI with lists of suspected Communists, over half a million of whom were slaughtered. It also publicly endorsed ABRI’s 1975 invasion of East Timor and the subsequent elimination of two hundred thousand East Timorese through what the State Department in its 1996 Human Rights Report calls “extrajudicial killings.” From the time of the European voyages of “discovery,” East Timor, an island in the Indonesian archipelago, was a colony of Portugal. When in the mid-1970s a revolution in Portugal precipitated the decision by Lisbon to liquidate the remnants of its empire, the heavily Catholic population of East Timor sought autonomy or independence. Indonesia instead annexed it. Rebellion and repression have been endemic there ever since. As an unexpected benefit of the end of the Suharto era, President Habibie offered East Timor the opportunity to affiliate with Indonesia or become independent. East Timor voted for independence, but army-incited murders and scorchedearth tactics have also plagued the territory.

When the 1997 financial crisis spread to Indonesia and it became apparent that the International Monetary Fund’s bailout policies were likely to end the seventy-six-year-old Suharto’s further usefulness to the United States, American policy remained focused on maintaining control inside Indonesia through its backing of the 465,000-man-strong ABRI. Indonesia totally lacks external enemies. Its armed forces are therefore devoted almost entirely to maintaining “internal security.” During most of the Suharto years, the United States actively trained ABRI special forces in a variety of what the New York Times calls “specialized acts of warfare and counterinsurgency.”¹³ The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency have long maintained close ties with ABRI, which has often been implicated in cases of torture, kidnapping, and assassination. Special Warfare, the professional magazine of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, calls Kopassus the “guarantor of national unity in the face of many threats and challenges.”¹⁴

After November 12, 1991, when Indonesian troops killed 271 people allegedly demonstrating for independence in Dili, the capital of East Timor, Congress cut off financial support for further training, although it did not end arms sales to Indonesia. The Pentagon has nonetheless expanded its ABRI training programs under cover of JCET.¹⁵ At least forty-one exercises involving fully armed U.S. combat troops—including Green Berets, Air Force commandos, and marines—transported to Indonesia from Okinawa have taken place since 1995. The American 1st Special Forces Group is permanently deployed at Torii, Okinawa.

The primary Indonesian beneficiary of this effort was evidently intended to be forty-seven-year-old Lieutenant General Prabowo, Suharto’s son-in-law and business partner. Prabowo’s wife, who is Suharto’s second daughter, owned a sizable piece of Merrill Lynch, Indonesia. Prabowo, a graduate of elite military training courses at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, spent ten years fighting guerrillas in East Timor, where he earned a reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness. In 1995, donning the red beret of Kopassus, he managed to enlarge the special forces corps from 3,500 to 6,000 troops. He worked closely with his American supporters; of the forty-one JCET training exercises conducted since Congress ordered all training stopped, at least twenty-four were with Kopassus. According to the Nation magazine’s Indonesian correspondent Allan Nairn, one Kopassus unit received twenty-six days of American instruction in “military operations in urban terrain” after the economic crisis began.

When Secretary of Defense Cohen visited Jakarta in January 1998, he stated, “I am not going to give him [Suharto] guidance in terms of what he should or should not do in terms of maintaining control of his own country.” However, Cohen also made a point of publicizing his visit to Kopassus headquarters, where he spent three hours with General Prabowo reviewing Kopassus units as they executed maneuvers. Indonesian officials said to Allan Nairn that they took the Cohen visit as a “green light” to use force to maintain the political status quo in the face of protests against the International Monetary Fund’s hyperausterity measures.