Exxon? - U.S. Stakes in Indonesia's "Territorial Integrity"
Pacific News Service, Peter Dale Scott, Posted: Aug 13, 2001
The U.S. government has moved with unusual speed to reestablish military relations with Indonesia's new regime, emphasizing the need to maintain the country's "territorial integrity." In reality, the territory in question involves two of the largest U.S. corporate investments in the region, and the U.S. move evokes memories of a very unhappy history.
Berkeley -- Indonesia is in the front and center of the U.S. radar screen not only because it has a new president.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, visiting Australia, announced on July 29 that the Bush Administration intends to resume aid and training for the Indonesian Army. A U.S.-Australian joint statement pledged support for maintaining Indonesia's territorial integrity.
Both moves were advocated in policy papers issued earlier this year by two prestigious organizations -- the RAND Corporation and a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) task force, chaired by former Senator Robert Kerrey.
Both papers stressed that resuming relations could move the Indonesian Army in a more humane and democratic direction. But this is hard to reconcile with their principal recommendation that the U.S. support Indonesia's territorial integrity.
"Territorial integrity" is a popular phrase in the Bush administration, and in other areas.
For example, Paul Wolfowitz, former U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia and now deputy secretary of defense, has assured Turkey that the U.S. will maintain Iraq's territorial integrity if Saddam Hussein is overthrown. Translated, this means the U.S. will not allow the Kurds to create an independent state in northern Iraq, which Turkey would see as a threat.
In Indonesia, maintaining territorial integrity means continuing the Army's bloody repression campaigns in the oil- and mineral-rich provinces of Aceh and West Papua.
The RAND and CFR papers argue that revenues from these areas are vital for a stable Indonesia. They are also the sites of two of the largest U.S. investments in Indonesia:
* in Aceh, the Exxon-Mobil natural gas facility, which according to the Wall Street Journal, produced nearly a quarter of Mobil's earnings worldwide in the early 1990s
* in West Papua, the huge mining development of Freeport-McMoran
It is hard to imagine that any campaign to insure territorial integrity in these areas could be compatible with democracy and human rights. Some 6000 people have been killed in Aceh in the last decade -- more than 1000 of them in the last six months .
Former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid tried to institute a cease-fire and peace process in Aceh, but the military ignored his directives, and in his waning months he consented to a renewed crackdown.
The Army provided security for Exxon-Mobil installations, and human rights activists have charged that the company's facilities were used by the Army for rape, torture and murder. The corporation is being sued in the U.S. by relatives of Acehnese victims. One U.S.-based human-rights worker, investigating these charges, was murdered.
U.S. aid to the Indonesian Army became a bone of contention between the Pentagon and the U.S. Congress in 1994, when news of atrocities committed in East Timor by the Indonesian Special Command -- Kopassus -- led Congress to forbid further Pentagon contact with the unit.
The Pentagon continued to train Kopassus secretly as part of another program until all U.S. aid was finally terminated in 1999, after a paramilitary rampage, orchestrated by army units including Kopassus, killed more than 600 East Timorese.
Under former President Clinton, the U.S. pressured Indonesia to investigate Indonesian officers for war crimes. The U.S. denied a visa to former Kopassus commander Prabowo Subianto, once a special favorite of the Pentagon, under the provisions of the UN Convention Against Torture.
Kopassus has been playing a central role in coordinating activities in Aceh, but this has not yet been mentioned in discussions of resuming aid.
On the contrary, the CIA made headlines by trying to suppress a published historical study documenting U.S. collaboration with the Special Command, known as RPKAD in 1965, in the Indonesian Army campaign that resulted in the murder of as many as one million Indonesians.
A CIA spokesman justified recalling the State Department publication as a way to "avoid U.S. roiling relations at a time of political turmoil in Indonesia."
Many U.S. papers saw this as a reference to the fact that Indonesia's new president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, is the daughter of Indonesian President Sukarnom, deposed as a result of the 1965 campaign. More likely, the Pentagon worries that the ugly facts in the 1965 study will strengthen the arguments of members of congress opposed to resuming aid to the Indonesian Army.
Almost certainly, these opponents will have to deal with companies like Exxon-Mobil, which have been lobbying recently for increased U.S. military involvement in Colombia. Controversy over the Aceh repression campaign led Exxon-Mobil to close its facility this past March only to reopen last month after the Army resumed its crackdown.
Congress may soon have to decide between two conflicting priorities: to protect human rights, or to protect overseas investments.
PNS contributor Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat, has authored numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign affairs (pdscott@socrates.berkeley.edu).
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