INDONESIA: Planned Arms Sales Would Continue U.S. Tradition

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Mar 11 1997 (IPS) - Plans by U.S. President Bill Clinton’s administration to sell at least nine F-16 fighter planes to Indonesia represent one of the largest arms sales to that country since its 1975 invasion of East Timor, a new report argues.

According to the World Policy Institute, a division of New York’s New School for Social Research, the F-16 sale would put U.S. arms sales to Indonesia under Clinton at 270 million dollars in a little more than four years.

Much of that amount would come from the Lockheed Martin-built, F-16 package, which the institute estimates to be worth roughly 200 million dollars, including upgrades, spare parts and support equipment. The rest include M-16 rifles made by Colt Industries, 500-MD helicopters, and air-to-air missiles made by General Motors/Hughes and armoured vehicles and helicopters made by Textron.

The total amount is more than double the level of arms sales to Jakarta under former President George Bush, argue William Hartung and Jennifer Washburn, co-authors of the institute’s new report, ‘U.S. Arms Transfers to Indonesia 1975-1997: Who’s Influencing Whom?’

The report says this is just the latest chapter in a tradition of heavy U.S. arms sales to Indonesia ever since President Suharto’s rightist regime invaded the small Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975, annexing it a year later. Some 200,000 Timorese are believed to have been killed immediately after the invasion, human rights groups claim.

During that same period, the report says, the United States has sold more than 1.1 billion dollars in weaponry to Indonesia, making it by far the biggest arms dealer used by the Suharto regime.

In the months before the invasion, the report notes, “not so coincidentally, U.S. arms sales to Indonesia more than quadrupled from 1974 to 1975, from 12 million dollars to more than 65 million dollars.” Under President Jimmy Carter’s 1977-80 administration, yearly arms sales to Indonesia averaged nearly 60 million dollars, while the numbers declined steadily during the 1980s, dropping to an average of 28 million dollars a year under Bush (1989-1992).

The impact of the sales on Jakarta has been immense, the authors claim. At the time of the 1975 invasion, “roughly 90 percent” of Indonesian arms came from the United States, then- U.S. State Department deputy legal advisor George Aldrich testified in 1977. From 1992 to 1994, the report says, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency calculated that 53 percent of all Indonesian weapons imports came from the United States.

Timorese leaders have long been upset over such sales. “It’s like selling weapons to Saddam Hussein,” argued pro-independence leader and 1996 Nobel Peace Prize co-winner Jose Ramos Horta.

Ramos Horta said in an article in the International Herald Tribune last year that he had lost one sister to a U.S.-built Bronco aircraft, one brother to gunfire from a U.S.-made rifle, and another brother to strafing from a U.S.-supplied helicopter. The Timorese leader this week met U.S. Under-Secretary of State Tim Wirth and Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck in his ongoing efforts to discourage rights abuses and arms sales in East Timor.

But Clinton contends that his stance on Indonesian arms sales and East Timor has been strong on human rights considerations.

“We changed our policy on arms sales because of East Timor, not to sell small arms,” Clinton said last year. “And we co- sponsored a resolution in the United Nations in favour of greater human rights in East Timor. And I’m proud we did that.”

Washburn, however, counters that the Clinton administration may be on the defensive because of embarrassment following recent revelations that the Indonesian-based Lippo Group contributed millions of dollars in “soft money” contributions to Clinton’s Democratic Party during last year’s elections.

She told IPS that the Democrats’ sticky ties to Indonesian fund- raising could haunt the White House when the subject of F-16 sales comes up next. The sale was postponed several times last year, following a crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Indonesia last summer and the revelation of the Lippo funding.

But the White House is still eager to make the sales, and has noted that, under a State Department ban on small arms sales to Indonesia, Washington refuses to sell Jakarta handguns and rifles that would more likely be used for repression. “You don’t use F- 16s to kill civilians or crack down on dissidents,” White House spokesman Mike McCurry said last year.

The White House is missing the point, the authors argue. “While F-16s may not be used directly to put down street demonstrations or torture human rights activists, the Indonesian military’s ability to sustain its illegal hold over East Timor ultimately rests on all of the weaponry it has at its disposal…not just the items used in day-to-day repression,” the report says.

Some Timorese leaders hope Washington’s stance on the issue may be changing at least slightly. “I left the meeting (in Washington) really persuaded that I am dealing with people in the State Department who are genuinely concerned and trying to help find a solution to the East Timor problem,” Ramos Horta said this week.