<nettime> indonesia info

[McKenzie Wark <mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>]

[headers edited]

>Testimony of Aryati
>At a Hearing of the Committee on International Relations
>Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights
>United States House of Representatives
>May 7, 1998
>
>
>I come to speak to you here today with some trepidation. Indonesia is not a
>free country where one can express criticisms of the government without
>worry about the possible consequences upon one's safety. I have no
>guarantees of protection: I am not a prominent leader of a mass
>organization, nor a member of the elite who has high connections. I am an
>Indonesian from a middle class background who is scared about telling you my
>honest opinions.
>I take this risk because I feel compelled to. I am one of the youths of my
>country who will have to bear, for many years into the future, the burden of
>what mistakes and crimes the government is committing today. I take this
>risk also in the hope that the U.S. government, so long a staunch and
>powerful supporter of Suharto's militarism, will reform itself and do
>something to ensure that Indonesia does have a government that respects and
>guarantees basic civil liberties, such as the freedom of speech, the freedom
>of the press, and the freedom of association.
>Military
>To understand the Suharto government you have to understand the Indonesian
>military. We have been living under what is an institutionalized martial law
>regime for the past thirty three years. It is no ordinary military. It has
>what is officially called a "dual function": external defense and internal
>policing. Imagine for a moment that the US military had overthrown the US
>government by staging a coup and orchestrating the slaughter of about
>500,000 people. Imagine the military then set up headquarters in each state,
>each county, each city and each town. Imagine that it placed one third to
>one half of the US military's troops in these headquarters. Imagine that
>there were no laws governing their actions nor any legislative oversight.
>Imagine further that the civilian administration was constantly monitored
>and controlled by the military and that many of the civilian administrators
>were themselves military officers. If you can imagine this scenario then you
>have a pretty good idea of how the Indonesian military operates. It is
>ubiquitous, all-pervasive, and beyond the law.
>When the US military speaks about training Indonesian military officers to
>respect human rights, we can only laugh. The structure of the Indonesian
>military places it as an all-powerful institution and the laws of our
>country allow it complete freedom to do what it wills. A few courses in good
>behavior are not going to alter what it is a very oppressive system of
>military rule. Besides, we are not even certain that the US military is
>sincere in claiming that it is providing such training.
>The US Congress should feel no qualms about cutting off JCET training if it
>is thinking about our benefit. Once the JCET training became public
>knowledge, the Pentagon claimed that it was meant only for the benefit of US
>soldiers who were given the opportunity to see how another military
>operates. So, by the Pentagon's own admission, the training was not designed
>to help the Indonesian military acquire less brutish habits.
>Let me explain how the government instills in us a culture of fear and robs
>us of our basic civil rights. In response to the student protests sweeping
>the country, the government has decided to intimidate the students by
>resorting to the tactic of 'disappearances.' According to the leading legal
>aid organization in Indonesia (Yayasan Lembaga Bantuan Hukum Indonesia),
>there are fifty persons that have disappeared over the past three months.
>One student activist who disappeared is Andi Arief.  Military personnel
>kidnapped him from his home, in full view of his family, on March 28. The
>top generals of our country not only denied that the military had kidnapped
>him, they joked to the press that he had simply disappeared of his accord.
>For three weeks, his family, his friends, and his fellow students, worried
>themselves to the point of exhaustion. Knowing how the military operates,
>they were concerned for his very survival. On April 22, he turned up in the
>Jakarta central police station. The police had no arrest warrant and no
>explanation for how he got there. Andi Arief told his lawyers that he had
>been kidnapped by the special forces, Kopassus, held for three weeks of
>interrogation, and then dumped at the police station.
>One must note that the military did not break the law by kidnapping these
>fifty activists because none of the laws of our country apply to the
>military. Thus, Andi Arief's parents can not sue Kopassus for arresting
>their son without a warrant and holding him in detention without a habeus
>corpus. This is precisely what makes ordinary citizens so terrified of the
>military: it is unpredictable and unaccountable.
>It has been said that one can judge a government by its prisons. Well then,
>let us look at Indonesian prisons. There we will find people whose only
>crime was to criticize the government. Sri Bintang Pamungkas, the leader of
>an independent political party, criticized the government. He is now in
>Cipinang prison in Jakarta on charges of subversion.  Accompanying him in
>that prison are 12 members of the banned People's Democratic Party (PRD)
>convicted of thought crimes. In the language of the prosecutors, they
>"deviated from the state ideology."
>There are presently at least twenty five political prisoners in Indonesia's
>prisons, some are in their teens, some in their seventies.  Just in the past
>three months, 250 people have been arrested on political crimes-such heinous
>crimes as holding peaceful meetings and holding peaceful demonstrations. We
>have a government that has a pathological fear of any public assembly that
>it does not control and any public leader who does not grovel before our
>president. Every single independent political party and trade union has been
>systematically destroyed by the government. In regions of the country where
>there has been serious organized resistance to the government-Irian Jaya,
>Aceh, occupied East Timor-it has not has been satisfied with arrests. It has
>resorted to massacres.
>You can guess what type of society we have. We are a people who are
>terrified of expressing our own opinions and terrified of getting involved
>in politics of any kind. Politics for us is a spectator sport -- and a cruel
>sport it is. We are daily bombarded by the statements of officials who are
>barely literate, barely articulate, and barely educated. When faced with
>public criticisms, they speak of 'crushing', 'smashing,' and 'hacking.' They
>treat the youths of our country, those in their teens and twenties who are
>sincerely and peacefully attempting to change this society, as though they
>were foreign agents bent on subversion. We are not citizens of a state; we
>are subjects of a modern, militarized sultanate.
>It is obvious today that Suharto's reign is coming to a miserable end. A
>necessary condition for democracy in Indonesia is the ending of Suharto's
>presidency. But it is not a sufficient condition. The military, with its
>dual function, is prepared to continue Suhartoism without Suharto. What I
>mean is that the sources of the systematic human rights abuses we see today
>are not going to vanish with the demise of the Suharto presidency. For
>genuine democracy to exist in Indonesia, our laws will have to be changed to
>embody basic principles of human rights and the military will have to be
>confined to the barracks and put under civilian oversight.
>Economics
>For the past thirty three years we have been told this system of martial law
>was necessary for our material benefit. The religion of the government, its
>legitimating ideology, has been economic development, what is called in
>Indonesian, pembangunan. But what do we have to show for thirty years of
>development? Two hundred families have fat Swiss bank accounts while
>millions of people have had their land expropriated.  A few timber
>contractors and palm oil companies have accumulated fortunes while chopping
>and burning down most of the rain forest. Thirty years of development has
>meant the victimization of many Indonesians.  And we have not heard all
>their laments precisely because there has been no freedom to criticize what
>the state calls its 'development program.'
>Thirty plus years of development under martial law has meant the
>accumulation of an enormous debt. For thirty years, the United States, Japan
>and Europe provided billions of dollars annually as foreign aid to the
>Suharto regime. The US government, since Suharto took power in 1965 by
>ordering the massacre of thousands of people, has consistently maintained
>that his regime provides stability and security. Every single US president
>since Nixon, including the present incumbent, has, to their shame,
>celebrated the Suharto regime for its economic accomplishments and political
>stability. In effect, the US government has said that the Indonesian people
>were best kept under the thumb of a sultanate and that democracy was opposed
>to our best interests. US academics and retired Foreign Service personnel,
>such as those at the US-Indonesia Society here in Washington, have been
>saying that Indonesians would just have to sacrifice their political
>freedoms for economic growth. The economic crisis of the past nine months
>has put paid to these cynical propositions.
>Now, after suffering so that development could proceed, what is the prospect
>of the Indonesian people under the IMF bailout? In short, we are now
>expected to suffer even more to pay off a debt that we did not incur. Thanks
>to the Suharto regime's deal with the IMF, all Indonesians have been put
>into debt bondage. Our labor and resources are supposed to be devoted to
>paying off the debt for the next generation. Meanwhile, those 200 families
>who contracted the debt have enough money in their own personal accounts to
>pay it off many times over. Is it possible to deny that this current
>economic austerity plan by the IMF is a gross injustice? The Indonesian
>people never approved of accepting all those loans. We weren't even allowed
>to know what the government's economic policy was for all those years. Not
>even our farcical showcase parliament was given authority over economic
>policy, nor is it given any authority now. But the IMF is telling us that we
>have to share the debt burden equally. While it is apparently acceptable to
>the IMF that political power is monopolized, it absolutely insists that the
>debt be democratically distributed. Those governments that have loaned money
>to the Suharto regime and its crony capitalists for the past thirty years
>are now supporting the IMF's agreement. Thus, they appear to us like heroin
>pushers who, after keeping an addict hooked for years and driving him ever
>deeper in debt, throw him back on his family when he is near collapse,
>telling them that they have to foot the bill for his rehabilitation and for
>all his past debts.
>Please do not believe that you are doing us any favors by authorizing money
>for the IMF loans to Indonesia. We need democracy in order to settle our
>economic problems but that is not a word you will find in the agreement
>between Suharto and the IMF. The IMF, with the blessing of the Clinton
>administration, is actually hoping to engineer an economic recovery under
>the same political conditions of institutionalized martial law. This is, I
>assure you, an impossible dream. The protests against the Suharto regime
>have by now reached the point of no return.  The Indonesian people, now that
>they have had the opportunity to express their long supressed grievances
>against this regime, are not going to be satisfied until it falls. Democracy
>is a rare commodity these days but it is no less vital to us than rice.
>It is paradoxical that the IMF is willing to dictate terms to Suharto when
>it comes to managing the economy but not when it comes to fundamental
>economic rights, such as the right of workers to organize.  The IMF refuses
>to insist that, as a condition for receiving the loans, the government
>recognize workers rights. It calls that meddling in the internal affairs of
>Indonesia-when it already controls the government's economic policy. If the
>IMF's agreement meddled in such a way as to allow the Indonesian people to
>have a greater voice over economic policy then perhaps the US Congress
>should support it. But, as it stands, the agreement is a worthless piece of
>paper signed by a collapsing dictator.
>The IMF money is not going to benefit us. As you know, much of the money
>will be simply transferred to foreign banks that made risky loans to the
>Indonesian government and Indonesian enterprises. The money will enter
>Indonesia for a moment and then get sent back out as debt payments.  These
>payments are supposed to restore "investor confidence" but one has to wonder
>what kind of investors these are who believe in being rewarded for making
>bad decisions. It is astonishing that the foreign banks that made risky
>loans to a corrupt and unstable economic system want to be repaid in full.
>It is even more astonishing that they want the Indonesian people to pay for
>their bad decisions.
>Look at the tragic conditions Indonesia is now in after thirty years of
>US-supported stability and development. Indonesia has an abundance of
>fertile land yet we are now begging other countries to give us supplies of
>our staple food: rice. The Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that
>Indonesia needs to be given 2 million tons of rice for the estimated 7.5
>million Indonesians who will require "food assistance" within the next year.
>There is a famine in eastern Indonesia now. We, living in other parts of the
>country, hardly hear anything about it and what we do hear are government
>whitewashes. We have been told by the Suharto regime and the US government
>to exchange our political freedoms for economic prosperity. We have wound up
>with neither.
>Recommendations
>As US Congressmen, you must realize that the only force that the military
>appears to feel accountable to is the US government. You greatly determine
>whether the Indonesian government receives economic aid from the IMF and
>political legitimacy in international forums such as the United Nations. I
>can assure you that the Suharto regime, feeling entirely unaccountable to
>the Indonesian people, does feel beholden to the US government. It panics on
>seeing any sign of displeasure with it here in Washington.
>I urge you to listen to more people than just Indonesian government
>officials and retired State Department officials. Since the government has
>not allowed for any opposition political leaders or parties to exist, it may
>seem difficult to know to whom one should listen. I suggest that you listen
>to those who have had the determination to sacrifice for their beliefs and
>the bravery to risk military violence to assert what they believe to be the
>truth. You should listen to people such as Sri Bintang Pamungkas who has
>demanded the international community refrain from loaning money and giving
>military aid to Indonesia until a democratic regime can be established. You
>should especially listen to the youth, such as Pius Lustrilanang, who have
>no interests other than those of the nation's.
>In conclusion, I would recommend that:
>1)	The US military not assist the Indonesian military. The US government
>should restrict itself to civilian relations with the Suharto regime.
>2)	The US Congress should not authorize money for the IMF to be loaned to
>the Suharto regime.
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