Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0173/01734.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 37KB | 590 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01734}
$Pretitle{239}
$Title{Indonesia
Chapter 5D.   Foreign Military Relations}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Riga Adiwoso-Suprapto}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{kopkamtib
military
criminal
intelligence
new
security
law
political
special
armed}
$Date{1982}
$Log{}
Country:     Indonesia
Book:        Indonesia, A Country Study
Author:      Riga Adiwoso-Suprapto
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1982

Chapter 5D.   Foreign Military Relations

     Consistent with its foreign policy of nonalignment, Indonesia maintained
no defense pacts with foreign nations. It did, however, have military aid
agreements with the United States and various other nations and participated
in joint military exercises with several other countries. Indonesia has also
supplied troop contingents to the United Nations peacekeeping forces.

     The nation is a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) and supports its goals. These include noninvolvement in any rivalry
between the United States and the Soviet Union or between the Soviet Union and
China, and support for the establishment of the Zone of Peace, Freedom, and
Neutrality (Zopfan) in the area. ASEAN has no defense aspect, however;
military cooperation between Indonesia and its ASEAN partners was conducted on
a bilateral basis and was limited to informal ties, to exchanges of military
representatives at national defense institutions, and to joint military
exercises. Following the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea, ASEAN foreign
ministers meeting in Bali in mid-1979 pledged their nation's support for the
security of each of the other ASEAN nations but stopped short of discussing
the creation of a military alliance. As of mid-1982 the Indonesian government
continued to stress that defense cooperation among ASEAN nations was only a
function of each nation's right to protect itself and that bilateral
cooperation would not lead to any bilateral or ASEAN-wide defense pact.

     Indonesia has also held joint military exercises with non-ASEAN nations,
including Britain and France. Regular joint exercises with Australia were held
in the 1972-82 period, and joint training and exercises with New Zealand air
force and naval elements and with the Indian navy took place in 1978-80. In
mid-1982 some defense officials suggested that joint border patrols might be
set up with Papua New Guinea. That nation supported the idea in principle but
stated that it did not have sufficient personnel to put it into practice.
Indonesian armed forces personnel have sometimes crossed the border from Irian
Jaya into Papua New Guinea in pursuit of armed insurgents being sheltered
there.

     The nation maintained military assistance agreements with several
countries. The United States funded security assistance throughout the 1950-82
period, except for the years 1965 and 1966. Grant aid averaged US$13 million
per year from 1971 to 1978 and was used mainly for logistics equipment,
communications systems, and combat materiel for internal security. The United
States also provided training in English and other subjects to armed services
personnel in Indonesia and funded the education of some 3,250 in the United
States in the 1968-81 period. Foreign Military Sales credits were made
available to Indonesia beginning in 1974 and have helped defray the expenses
of purchases of United States-made military equipment. In the early 1980s
Indonesia also received military aid from Australia, West Germany, and the
Netherlands, among others. It also continued to make payments to the Soviet
Union for equipment acquired in the early 1960s but largely inoperative by the
1970s.

Security and Intelligence Agencies

     At least four different organizations shared occasional overlapping
responsibilities for security and intelligence functions. The foremost was the
Operational Command for the Restoration of Security and Order (Kopkamtib),
which focused primarily on internal matters and mounted operations and
collected intelligence data. The central intelligence-gathering body, however,
was the State Intelligence Coordination Agency (Bakin), which studied both
domestic and foreign developments. The Special Operations Service (OPSUS)
compiled political intelligence and was sometimes used by the president to
conduct delicate foreign diplomatic assignments. The armed services' Strategic
Intelligence Center was responsible for intelligence relating to defense
matters.

     Kopkamtib was created in late 1965 as a special organ for dealing with
internal security problems. Its original function was to purge from the
government and the armed forces PKI members and others suspected of complicity
with the Communists in the attempted coup of that year. By the late 1960s its
initial task had been largely completed.

     In early 1969, however, Kopkamtib was given new life by a presidential
decree that provided it an organizational basis closely interwoven with
Hankam. Kopkamtib was assigned a mandate on all matters concerning internal
security as defined in its widest sense and quickly began to exercise
sweeping powers of supervision over the national political life, using the
army's territorial forces. These tasks had previously been performed by the
army itself. By the early 1970s Kopkamtib had become a large and powerful body
that concerned itself with the activities of every political and social
organization in the nation; its powers of interrogation, arrest, and detention
were not subject to the restriction of the nation's regular legal channels.

     As of late 1982 Kopkamtib still had no statutory foundation, but the
government held that the legal basis for Kopkamtib had been affirmed by the
People's Consultative Assembly in 1973. At that time the agency was assigned
the task of "safeguarding the national development" in addition to its
previous missions of preventing communist subversion, defending the 1945
Constitution, and upholding the principles of the state philosophy, pancasila.

     Little was made public about the organization of Kopkamtib. As of
mid-1982 it was an autonomous organ within Hankam and had been headed by the
deputy commander in chief of the armed forces, Admiral Sudomo, since March
1978. It was unclear whether internal Kopkamtib or Hankam regulations
specified that pattern of dual officeholding; Soeharto himself headed
Kopkamtib for a few months in 1969 and again later, from 1974 to 1978, after
its former head, Lieutenant General Sumitro, was dismissed in the wake of
large-scale anti-Japanese riots in early 1974. Organizationally, Kopkamtib was
essentially a command structure with regular military officers assigned to it.
Below the central headquarters level, Kopkamtib policies were predominantly
implemented by officers, army commanders who were appointed concurrently to
Kopkamtib positions and whose jurisdictions coincided with the armed forces'
territorial organization rather than that of the civilian administration. The
most important of these were the 16 army Kodam commanders who, when acting as
Kopkamtib functionaries, bore the title of special territorial executive, or
Laksusda, and were authorized sweeping powers on security matters within Kodam
jurisdictions. Army officers also served as Kopkamtib functionaries as far
down as the level of district command, or Kodim. Others included selected
police officers and navy and air force officers serving in the four integrated
Kowilhan and elsewhere. Kopkamtib had no special uniform, independent
personnel recruitment, or troop forces, but it did maintain its own
communications channels.

     The Kopkamtib chain of command evidently ran directly from the president
to the deputy commander of ABRI in 1982 and thence to Kopkamtib special
executives who were Kowilhan or Kodam commanders-usually but not always
bypassing the minister of defense and security and commander of ABRI. By
skipping regular command echelons in this manner, Kopkamtib could act in
critical situations as a quick-action force wi