In 1991, Congress inadvertently gave the military’s special forces a green light to penetrate virtually every country on earth. It passed a law (Section 2011, Title 10) authorizing something called the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program. This allowed the Department of Defense to send special operations forces on overseas exercises with military units of other countries so long as the primary purpose of the mission was stated to be the training of our soldiers, not theirs. The law did not indicate what JCET exercises should train these troops to do, but one purpose was certainly to train them in espionage. They return from such exercises loaded with information about and photographs of the country they have visited, and with new knowledge of its military units, terrain, and potential adversaries. As of 1998 the Special Operations Command had established JCET missions in 110 countries.
The various special forces have interpreted this law as an informal invitation to train foreign military forces in numerous lethal skills, as well as to establish relationships with their officer corps aimed at bringing them on board as possible assets for future political operations. Most of this has been done without any oversight by Congress, the State Department, or ambassadors in the countries where JCET exercises have been conducted. As a series of exposé articles in the Washington Post indicated in 1998, most members of the foreign policy apparatus had never even heard of JCET, and the assistant secretary of defense in charge of these special operations was noticeably vague in his answers to congressional questions about the programs.8
It has only slowly come to light, for instance, that in JCET exercises Americans offered crucial training to the Turkish mountain commandos, who in their ongoing operations against their country’s rebellious Kurdish population have killed at least twenty-two thousand people; that during 1998 multiple special forces operations were carried out in each of the nineteen countries of Latin America and in nine Caribbean nations; and that United States special forces units have given training in such skills as advanced sniper techniques, close-quarters combat, military operations in urban terrain, and psychological warfare operations to military units in Colombia, Rwanda, Surinam, Equatorial Guinea, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Papua New Guinea, among other nations. In each of these cases, they were acting in violation of U.S. human rights policies and sometimes of direct presidential or congressional prohibitions. (For example, special operations training continued in Colombia even after President Clinton had “decertified” that country for most military aid and assistance.)
The Washington Post obtained a copy of a 1990 Department of Defense manual entitled Doctrine for Special Forces Operations, which describes the main activity of special forces on JCET missions as giving instruction in FID, or “foreign internal defense.” In other words, most of the training exercises are meant to prepare foreign militaries for actions against their own populaces or rebel forces in their countries. The manual defines FID as organizing, training, advising, and assisting a foreign military establishment in order to protect its society from “subversion, lawlessness, and insurgency.” Brig. Gen. Robert W. Wagner of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami told Douglas Farah of the Washington Post that FID is the “heart” of special operations, and an officer of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces Command assured Dana Priest that FID is “our bread and butter.” FID is, of course, hardly what Congress specified in the law as the function of JCET, but congressional control over military activities is by now so minimal that the Pentagon pays little attention to specifications that are displeasing. Stripped of its euphemistic language, FID amounts to little more than instruction in state terrorism. Republican representative Christopher Smith, chairman of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, says, “Our joint exercises and training of military units—that have been charged over and over again with the gravest kind of crimes against humanity, including torture and murder—cry out for explanation.” But the U.S. secretary of defense seems to be unconcerned. “In those areas where our forces conduct JCET,” Secretary Cohen averred, “they encourage democratic values and regional stability.”9
Just how JCET training contributes to “democratic values and stability” is nowhere better illustrated than by the case of Indonesia, a place Secretary Cohen has visited often to review the results of America’s educational efforts. Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country and the world’s largest Islamic nation. During its early years, after fighting for its independence from the Netherlands, when its founder and leader was President Sukarno (like many Indonesians, including General Suharto, he has only one name), it was a champion of neutralism and a thorn in the side of American foreign policy. Many CIA covert operations were mounted against Indonesia in that period, including during the revolution of 1965, when Suharto came to power, ousted Sukarno, and in a bloody pogrom eliminated leftist forces throughout the islands. Suharto and the army ruled with a strong authoritarian hand until May 1998.
During this period and with considerable American and Japanese support, Suharto overcame starvation on the main island of Java and led the country into sustained economic growth. However, Indonesia was clobbered by the 1997 financial crisis that depressed its stock and currency values to as much as 80 percent below precrisis levels. Because of misguided policies by the United States and the International Monetary Fund, discussed later in this chapter and in chapter 9, the number of people in Indonesia living below the poverty line grew in a matter of months from twenty-seven million to over a hundred million (half the population), and thirty years of economic gains were wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs. The country remains destitute and threatened with possible disintegration, even though its political life has been invigorated by the return of democracy after thirty-two years of one-man rule. Thus far, the blowback from American policies in Indonesia has affected primarily Indonesians and, in particular, the Chinese minority in the country, which is also the entrepreneurial elite. Americans have not been affected, but this is unlikely to last as Indonesia emerges from its present trauma and starts to assess what happened to it and who was responsible.
The bloody ouster of General Suharto as president of Indonesia and as one of America’s favorite dictators in East Asia is a case study in the dangers of JCET programs. Between May 13 and May 15, 1998, nearly 1,200 people were killed in Jakarta in rioting that led to the resignation of General Suharto. It was subsequently revealed that during this “rioting” at least 168 women and girls, most of them of Chinese ancestry, had been raped by “organized groups of up to a dozen men” and that 20 had died during or after the assaults.10 It was also revealed that groups of men had traveled the city in vehicles inciting the crowds to violence. Many Indonesians accused the army and its clandestine security forces—the elite commando regiment Kopassus, known as the “red berets”—of committing these acts. (The army later did publicly acknowledge that members of its special forces had been involved in the “disappearances” of opposition activists in the weeks before the riots.)
In his years of rule, General Suharto had long had a reputation for using Kopassus, run from 1995 on by his son-in-law Lt. Gen. Prabowo Soemitro Subianto, to abduct, torture, and kill dissidents and political rivals. In 1990, for instance, he declared the western area of the island of Sumatra around Aceh a “military operational zone” in order to suppress an Islamic secessionist movement. He then sent in Kopassus units. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in the area “disappeared” and are presumed to have been executed by Kopassus. In August 1998, after Suharto’s ouster, General Wiranto (also just one name), commander in chief of the Indonesian armed forces, flew to Sumatra, inspected mass graves, apologized for “abuses committed by the military there,” and ordered all combat troops pulled out of the province. Under Suharto’s order, Kopassus had carried out similar campaigns in the past in East Timor and Irian Jaya (New Guinea).
In January 1998 some Kopassus battalions from western Sumatra and New Guinea were transferred to J
akarta, where during the following three months at least fourteen activists against Suharto also “disappeared.” After Suharto’s fall, the army high command itself concluded that Kopassus was responsible for at least nine kidnappings in the capital. Five of the kidnappees are still unaccounted for and presumed dead. Singled out for immediate responsibility was one of General Prabowo’s deputies, Colonel Chairawan, commander of the plainclothes Kopassus Group 4. Before his arrest, Chairawan, a figure well known to the American military, told Nation magazine correspondent Allan Nairn that his primary contact at the U.S. embassy was Colonel Charles McFetridge, the DIA attaché.11 Nonetheless, the orders for these kidnappings and executions probably came from Suharto himself.
After the 1998 rioting and the mass exodus from Indonesia of those Chinese who could afford to emigrate, the elites of Indonesia, no longer as threatened by police-state methods as they were under Suharto, demanded an investigation. The successor government of President B. J. Habibie appointed an eighteen-member investigating team, including representatives of the government, private groups, the armed forces, and the Indonesian Commission on Human Rights. In its report of November 3, 1998, the team concluded that much of the violence had been organized and deliberately provoked by the armed forces, probably in order to create enough of the look of chaos to make a military coup seem a plausible and acceptable step. The Indonesian military had earlier claimed that it could find no evidence of any rapes at all during the disturbances, whereas the report confirmed that seventy-six women, virtually all of Chinese descent, had been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. The initial Chinese community’s claim of more than twice that number may actually be closer to the truth, since many women were understandably reluctant to reveal what had happened to them. The report also charged two generals, Lieutenant General Prabowo of Kopassus and Major General Syafrie Samsuddin, head of the Jakarta Military Command and a Prabowo aide, with responsibility for organizing the riots and killings. Officials of the Indonesian government, who had initially ordered the report, failed to show up for the meeting at which it was delivered.12
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.
There were good reasons why the United States would want to keep General Suharto in power. In the early years of his rule, Suharto contributed greatly to regional stability, while bringing at least a modicum of prosperity and optimism to the Indonesian people. The greatest single success of the green revolution occurred under Suharto’s rule: in 1984, Indonesia achieved self-sufficiency in rice production. During Suharto’s rule Indonesia’s per capita income rose from around $75 in 1966 to almost $1,200 in 1996; former president Sukarno’s belligerence toward Malaysia was ended; and Indonesian diplomats played an instrumental role in the creation in 1967 of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), which has proved to be by far the most important regional organization in East Asia.
Like the government of another American-supported autocrat, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Suharto’s government developed over time into a kleptocracy—firms still controlled by members of his family are said to be worth many billions of dollars; but unlike Marcos his achievements were formidable. He not only brought a measure of political stability and economic growth to Indonesia’s diverse islands, he also restrained Islamic militancy, while allying himself with indigenous Chinese entrepreneurs. It can be argued that without his type of strong rule, Indonesia would have been rife with separatist movements (of the very sort now gaining strength) and the likelihood of conflicts with other ASEAN nations would have been far higher. The current decline of Indonesian economic and, possibly, political power certainly means that China is more likely to assert its political primacy in the region.
The U.S. government was aware of these dangers, and therefore when, in 1997, international financiers began to
exploit the Indonesian currency and foreclose on their short-term loans, leading American officials loudly proclaimed their backing of Suharto, signaling their lack of desire to see him overthrown. This position was, however, undercut by a politically uncoordinated agent of American power, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which agreed to lend huge amounts of money to Indonesia to help meet its debts, but only if it imposed economics-textbook prescriptions for reordering its economy.
The IMF, it must be noted, is staffed primarily with holders of Ph.D.s in economics from American universities, who are both illiterate about and contemptuous of cultures that do not conform to what they call the “American way of life.” They offer only “one size (or, rather, one capitalism) fits all” remedies for ailing economic institutions. The IMF has applied these over the years to countries in Latin America, Russia, and East Asia without ever achieving a single notable success. Nonetheless, the IMF’s officialdom assumed a triumphalist posture toward Suharto’s government, denouncing its “crony capitalism” and using its failings to trumpet the benefits of Anglo-American neoclassical economics over an Asian model of economic development. They ignored the fact that Suharto, while enriching members of his own extended family and firms that cultivated their good graces, also granted ordinary Indonesians food and fuel subsidies. On May 4, 1998, the IMF ordered these subsidies stopped. This alone made political instability inevitable.
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