Obama: stand up to the Indonesian military

Meanwhile, the number of Indonesian students in the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program is increasing. IMET was the first military assistance program that Congress restricted in the early 1990s. Indonesia was a major beneficiary of the Regional Defense Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, created soon after the September 11 attacks to circumvent the IMET ban on Indonesia and other countries.

Joint military exercises have covered counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, among other topics. However, the Indonesian police, not the military, tracked down and arrested those responsible for a series of bombings in Bali and Jakarta in 2002 and 2003. The Indonesian military tolerates and, more ominously, continues to back militias and vigilante groups that intimidate civilians, particularly those in ethnic, religious, and political minorities.

Ultimately, the size of the military assistance package may not matter. The United States had restricted aid as a means to build pressure for human rights accountability and reform. Now that Indonesia is eligible for unrestricted aid, its military can assume those issues no longer matter to their once and future patron.

A new era with Obama?

President-elect Obama has described US engagement in Indonesia, where he lived as a child, as less than positive. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that "for the past sixty years the fate of [Indonesia] has been directly tied to US foreign policy." This policy included "the tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption, and environmental degradation when it served our interests."

In his earlier book Dreams from My Father, Obama writes of Suharto's bloody seizure of power: "The death toll was anybody's guess: a few hundred thousand, maybe, half a million. Even the smart guys at the [CIA] had lost count."

Based on these early positions, Obama is quite conscious of the problems with the Indonesian military. While in the Senate, he rarely spoke about these issues.

Indonesian advocates have called on Obama and Congress to pressure Indonesia's government to respect human rights. Rafendi Djamin, co-ordinator of the Human Rights Watch Working Group, acknowledged the US's past "huge role in pushing for rights advocacy in Indonesia … I have seen that during the Bush administration, the US Congress is still concerned with Indonesia's democratisation and human rights advocacy, but Bush has rarely given a direct warning of the importance of human rights advocacy."

Djamin said in the Jakarta Post, "We are now expecting Obama to put more pressure on Indonesia to resolve unfinished human rights cases by directly questioning the government about them and by addressing their importance." Another advocate said that "if Indonesia does not respond positively to US pressure … the US would reinstate its military embargo against us."

East Timor's official Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation, after examining in detail the impact of Indonesian occupation and destructive withdrawal on the East Timorese, called on countries to make military assistance to Indonesia "totally conditional on progress towards full democratisation, the subordination of the military to the rule of law and civilian government, and strict adherence with international human rights." President Obama and the next Congress should follow that recommendation.