Posted on: Saturday, June 16, 2001

Editorial
Bush faces dilemma in Indonesia unrest

On one level, a report that the Bush administration has decided to restore some U.S. military ties with Indonesia is encouraging.

It suggests that Secretary of State Colin Powell has had a healthy dose of regional reality since, early in the Bush tenure, he suggested that serious troubles in Indonesia might best be left to Australia to cope with.

Indonesia — the world's largest Muslim nation and fourth-largest overall, a nation of more than 13,000 islands and 300 languages, a nation that controls the straits through which most of East Asia's oil must pass — is coming apart at the seams.

Its president faces impeachment, its economy is in shambles and several separatist rebellions are under way.

Until now, this strategic crisis has barely registered on Washington's radar screen, either in the Clinton or Bush administrations. The only outfit taking up the slack has been the Pacific Command right here at Camp Smith — that is, until 1999.

Indeed, it seemed from an Island perspective odd that Adm. Joseph Prueher, former Pacific commander, was recruited by the Clinton administration to serve as its last ambassador to China. That's because his expertise seemed to be squarely centered in Indonesia.

That expertise nearly came back to haunt Prueher, however, when he said in a speech in Singapore, in March 1998: "What we must try to do is help the Indonesians avert a crisis in every way we can, and we're trying to do that without being too invasive."

Those words set off alarms in Congress, which in its revulsion to human rights abuses by President Suharto's forces0 had banned training missions much like those it appeared were ongoing on Prueher's watch.

The military's presence in Indonesia then was scaled back to "feel-good" missions in which troops quietly tried to build schools and hospitals.

But that didn't stop Prueher from maintaining a close relationship with Indonesia's top soldier, Gen. Wiranto. What halted that connection was the upheaval in East Timor, in which some members of the Indonesian armed forces were found to have been complicit in abuses committed by armed militias there.

Hundreds of East Timorese civilians were killed and more than 200,000 people were driven from their homes. What Wiranto did, or failed to do, in that connection remains an important question in Indonesia.

That leaves Washington with a cruel dilemma: Indonesia's military may be the strongest institution in Indonesia, and the only one that can hold the nation together. That suggests that military-to-military contact is important.

But Indonesia's military is also in many ways tainted goods, which means the approach must be handled most carefully.

Moreover, the renewed attention may be too little, too late. The dimensions of the problem simply are too huge for the amount of attention and resources Washington appears prepared to bring to bear on it.