-Caveat Lector-
[Sorry if this is the same article that was already posted to
ctrl under this topic. I only skimmed the other and seem to
remember it from a US news service? Better safe than... MS]
The Guardian
US trained butchers of Timor
Exclusive: Washington trained death squads in secret while
Britain has spent £1m helping Indonesian army
Ed Vulliamy in New York and Antony Barnett
Sunday September 19, 1999
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.'
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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