In President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Indonesian army had one of its own back in the Merdeka Palace, following a bewildering variety of civilian presidents: a mercurial scientist-engineer, a bold-thinking but erratic Islamic mullah, and a phlegmatic dynastic daughter. The five years of these presidencies had seen the military retreat from its octopus-like hold on political institutions and many elements of the economy. Would the retreat continue?
In that 1998–2004 reformasi period, the army had given up the most resented aspects of the Dwifungsi (Dual Function) doctrine formulated by General Nasution in 1958—a “middle way” in which the military did not take charge of government but was not simply a professional fighting force. This had been encouraged by the US Army’s doctrine of “civic action” for the soldiery in weak states and then enormously distorted beyond reasonable balance under Suharto. Figures are hard to come by, but in the late 1980s about 16,000 commissioned and noncommissioned officers were in kekaryaan (civilian assignment) positions. At times these military personnel were more than half the senior executives in the civilian bureaucracy and three-quarters of the provincial governors and district bupati. Others sat in the national, provincial, and district legislatures.
Under General Wiranto, the military wisely decided not to defend Dwifungsi in the face of overwhelming public and elite support for democracy and the civilianization of politics. The army withdrew any remaining officers delegated to civilian ministries and state enterprises, and abolished the three-star position of assistant to the chief of staff for kekaryaan affairs. Around the same time, the military formally severed its ties with Golkar, telling its personnel that they now had to help secure elections in an entirely neutral way. As we have seen, the armed forces’ representation in the DPR and the MPR also fell, and ended altogether in 2004. To emphasize the army’s political neutrality, serving personnel were not even permitted individual votes, despite the removal of block representation on their behalf, a measure that continued through the 2014 elections.
Another notable strand of reform started in 2004 with the passing of a law requiring the armed forces to divest themselves of all business activities by the end of 2009. Under the New Order, side businesses had provided the forces with most of their operating funds, since the official budget at times covered only 30 percent of their needs. Companies owned by various military foundations gained lucrative contracts from state enterprises, such as the oil company Pertamina, often with help on the inside from kekaryaan officers or—as with the army’s holding company, Tri Usaha Bhakti—control over state rights, such as forestry leases. Units leased out spare land for factories, hotels, and golf courses.
The army’s more dubious corporate activities included the provision of security for individual businesspeople, factories, offices, and mines, which in many cases was no more than a protection racket; and then there were outright illegalities, such as gambling, prostitution, logging, smuggling, and drugs. Ostensibly, the businesses (at least the legal ones) were justified as topping up the miserable salaries and barracks of the 450,000 uniformed personnel. But it was all too evident that only droplets were trickling down after the very senior officers had taken their shares. Although the 2004 defense budget of $2.2 billion barely covered half the military’s estimated expenditure for that year, Yudhoyono was tasked with ending the extrabudgetary support by the end of his first term.
The reform that most challenged the military, however, was one that sounded very simple when it was first proposed by Habibie in 1999: to detach the police from the armed forces command and the Ministry of Defense. The goal was to make it a standalone agency, renamed the Indonesian National Police, that would operate directly under the president.
Initially, nothing seemed different in practice. The police numbered only 170,000 for the vast nation. Their official budget was even more meager than that of the military. The police were generally despised: they collected small on-the-spot fines with a blow of the whistle, they ignored gambling joints and brothels, they stood back from thuggery committed against strikers and protesters, they assisted with land grabs, and they made themselves available for prosecution by the rich. “Polisi tak mampu” (or “The police aren’t capable”) was the general refrain from army personnel when they were reminded that the police now had legal responsibility for internal security.
Yet vast change started as foreign aid in the security sector switched from the army to the police. The national police began a steady expansion that was to increase numbers to 400,000 over the fifteen years after 1999. Resources were poured into training, high-tech equipment, and other areas. The police continued to be a major problem in the fight against corruption, but by the time the first major strike came from a new threat to the state—a jihadist group named Jemaah Islamiyah (Islamic Congregation), which operated from the myriad mosques and Koranic schools in crowded Java—the police were able to demonstrate their competence in handling it. Within a month of the first Bali bombing, in which 202 foreigners and Indonesians were killed at Kuta Beach nightspots in October 2002, the Indonesian police had tracked down and arrested one of the perpetrators. Although further bombings hit Bali, the Australian embassy, and several luxury hotels in Jakarta over the next five years, a new antiterrorism unit, named Detachment 88, steadily wound up the most dangerous Jemaah Islamiyah cells by the end of the decade.
That unit and the lead investigators, including police generals I Made Mangku Pastika and Tito Karnavian, attained a celebrity status once assigned to the military’s fighting generals. Consequently, the stocks of the police have risen, and those of the armed forces are falling in career favor among the young.
“Compared to my era, where military cadets and young officers were favourites for mothers-in-law to be, now as in the general case, pragmatism is the word,” says an influential retired army general, Agus Widjojo, at the Jakarta think tank he now heads, the Centre for Policy Studies and Strategic Advocacy. “We are starting to feel we are trailing in the competition to attract the best and brightest of the young generation. We are late in trying to find a system to attract them. What shall we put in place as an incentive?” The police force is now more favored by young people than the army, navy, or air force, Widjojo says. “We see that police officers are better off compared to officers of the defence services, and they see no way for defence officers to have expectation to better their welfare. Because practically the defence forces are now cut off from their interaction with society. They only train, carry out tasks and missions.”
The Indonesian army generals watched this development with some chagrin, but they were themselves partly to blame for it. The long string of human rights abuses—from the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre up to the abduction of students and the alleged promotion of anti-Chinese rioting over 1997–98, and the use of violent militias in East Timor’s 1999 referendum—had made the Indonesian military a pariah in the West. Its officers were barred from attending staff colleges and other specialist courses, and sales of military equipment and spare parts were embargoed, grounding much of the air force.
The remedy would have been a thorough purge and the prosecution of personnel widely known to bear responsibility for the various atrocities. Instead, the response was partial and partisan in terms of internal army rivalries. The notable prosecutions were of eleven Kopassus junior officers and soldiers in the Tim Mawar case. But only some received (very light) jail terms, and they were released early. Their two commanding officers at the time—the Kostrad chief, Prabowo Subianto (who admitted “command responsibility”), and the Kopassus commander, Muchdi Purwopranjono—were dishonorably discharged and did not face court-martial. Their colonel was let off. As we shall see, the main case was the court-martial of other Kopassus members who took part in the November 1991 murder of the Papuan leader Theys Eluay, which also resulted in light sentences and pats on the back from the then army chief, Riyamizard Ryucudu.
Kopassus itself was reorganized in June 2001. Group 4, its component most notorious for the New Order’s extrajudicial killings, and Group 5 were dissolved and replaced by a training command and a new antiterrorism force of two battalions, named Unit 81. But the 6,000 Kopassus personnel—a number that made it one of the world’s largest Special Forces units—remained largely in place. Military chiefs insisted that the visible efforts, which included regular lectures on human rights by the International Red Cross and other bodies, satisfied all the necessary reforms.
Numerous international witnesses observed the military-sponsored campaign to intimidate the East Timorese against voting for independence in August 1999 and the deliberate killing, destruction, and forced population movement that followed. The permissive and complicit stance of the Indonesian army and police were all too apparent. Leaked intercepts showed a chain of command and control back to generals in Jakarta. Indonesia’s own National Human Rights Commission identified many of those implicated. Yet at an ad hoc human rights tribunal, established in Jakarta, only six defendants were convicted: four of them Indonesian army and police officers, and two Timorese civilians. The convictions were all overturned on appeal, except for that of the hapless last provincial governor, a Timorese named Abilio Soares. Several other figures regarded as leaders in the state-sponsored terror campaign went on to higher positions; one of them, Mahidin Simbolon, became the military commander of the Papuan region.
The American-led “War on Terror” that began after the September 11 attacks by al-Qaeda in New York and Washington, and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, began to break the isolation of the Indonesian military. Jakarta became a more important friend in the Islamic world. Australia and Britain took an early lead in resuming training with and support of Kopassus. The US military was prevented from following suit, however, by legislation known as the Leahy provisions. And all these governments maintained blacklists, against which defense attachés ran the names of personnel to be involved in training and visits. It was a constant source of Indonesian complaint and diplomatic démarche when high-level officers found themselves excluded.
The Aceh peace settlement in 2005 took the last big internal conflict out of the hands of the Indonesian military. The following year it was to hand over responsibility inside Papua to the police, along with lucrative assignments, such as protecting the Freeport mine, while its own combat soldiers there were tasked with protecting the very quiet borders. “The question now is: what does the defence force do?” asks the retired general, Agus Widjojo. “I don’t see them out in the society. I don’t see them being employed in counter-terrorism, or anything. So there is a challenge to inject the tradition and classical form of pride that [serving in] a defence force is an honour to defend the sovereignty and national integrity of the country.”
The pathway to this dilemma can be traced back to the very start of reformasi. In 1998 Yudhoyono, Widjojo, and another army general, Agus Wirahadikusumah, were invited to Canberra by the Australian defense department. The three had been classmates at the Indonesian armed forces academy in Magelang, Central Java, graduating in 1973. As the New Order began breaking open, they had all become known as critical and reformist thinkers who were advocating a more “professional” army that would fit into a more open society.
Apart from being too liberal, any one of the three would have met the widely perceived requirements to follow Suharto within the New Order: they were all Javanese, Muslim, and of the army, and all had formal higher education and international savvy. Wirahadikusumah had New Order lineage, being the son of one of Suharto’s trusted generals who became a vice president, while Yudhoyono had married into an even more illustrious line. His wife, Kristiani Herawati, was a daughter of the Special Forces general Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, who had led the forerunners of Kopassus in the deadly campaign against the PKI in Java and Bali.
Wirahadikusumah was the boldest in advocating a complete and immediate return to the barracks. Widjojo supported a longer-term move in the same direction. Yudhoyono had had much more intellectual engagement with Western democracies than any of his peers. Two years after topping his class at the academy, he began the first of several postings overseas for military courses and a master’s degree in business administration in the United States, alternating with service in East Timor (where no specific abuses were attached to him or his unit). Yet those who talked with the group found Yudhoyono to be the least comfortable with the idea that an Indonesian president should be open to free criticism by an uncontrolled media. “That has always been SBY,” says Widjojo, speaking of his friend’s notorious caution.
After returning from Canberra, Yudhoyono became the headquarters general in charge of social and political affairs, renamed as the Territorial Command, which supervised all the many garrisons of the army. He stood stoically at the shoulder of General Wiranto as reports streamed in of military-sponsored violence during the East Timorese referendum. Wahid made him minister of mines in late 1999 and then coordinating minister for politics and security from August 2000 but sacked him in July 2001 when he refused to back Wahid’s desperate plan for a state of emergency to prevent his impeachment.
As a cabinet minister under Wahid, Yudhoyono is not known to have played any role, except passively, in what turned out to be the career suicide of his classmate, friend, and coauthor, Agus Wirahadikusumah, who had been a strong internal critic of Wiranto and had supported his sacking by Wahid in January 2000. Wirahadikusumah had also irked senior colleagues with his call for an immediate end to the “territorial” role of the army, by which it stationed posts at the levels of province, the regions (or kabupaten), the subdistricts (called kecamatan), and even the villages below them, where noncommissioned officers, known as babinsa, kept an eye on the very grass roots. In some ways this system was another aspect of Dwifungsi, allowing the army to closely monitor and intervene in civil affairs. It had been strengthened by Suharto, first in order to eradicate the PKI and then to enforce tight political supervision. But it had also become an excellent way to spot openings for moneymaking, legal or illegal.
The territorial role was one of the army’s activities that the majority of senior generals were not willing to give up. It went to the historic heart of their strategic doctrine. The military’s change of name in 1998—from the Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia (ABRI, Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia) to the Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI, Indonesian National Army)—was drawing a line in the sand. It connected the military directly to the nation rather than to the state and harked back to the revolutionary days of 1945–49. “The territorial function is a religion for the TNI,” says Agus Widjojo, quoting military historian Salim Said. “They perceive the territorial function as the frontline for the oneness of the TNI with the people, the frontline for social stability and intelligence gathering, and TNI thought. As long as it is not used for political purposes or business purposes, it’s just normal.”
Yet to its military critics, the territorial role was based on the strategic premises of the 1940–70 period. The first of these was that the Indonesian air and sea forces were not strong enough to prevent a foreign enemy from lodging in its territory, nor then to defeat that enemy with conventional power. Instead, Indonesian soldiers would have to be ready to sustain an indefinite people’s war, in which the support and supplies of the civilian population would be critical. The second was that the TNI had to prepare for a war for hearts and minds against an enemy within domestic communities—ideological, religious, or separatist.
Wahid had Wirahadikusumah, the son of a general who had been one of Suharto’s vice presidents, elevated to head the powerful Kostrad command in March 2000 and saw him as a future army chief. In this new role, Wirahadikusumah quickly began making waves, holding discussions on military reforms with a few likeminded officers and civilians. He also uncovered a large amount of embezzlement in Kostrad’s welfare foundation. In June a mysterious document surfaced that claimed to be the record of a meeting held by Wirahadikusumah and another general, Saurip Kadi, at their military housing in Jakarta. It contained strong criticism of their senior officers and became the pretext for sidelining the two generals from important command roles. Wirahadikusumah died suddenly in August 2001, aged forty-nine, of a suspected heart attack.
It can only be said that Yudhoyono was one of the majority of generals who did not support the call for a radical retreat to “professionalism.” On replacing Wahid, Megawati restored Yudhoyono as coordinating minister, and his time in that role included the return to conflict in Aceh in May 2003. Leaked cables from the US embassy in Jakarta show Yudhoyono equivocating about American suggestions to delay the withdrawal of foreign monitors, part of a diplomatic effort to keep the cessation-of-hostilities agreement alive.
When Yudhoyono became president in October 2004, many hoped he would push boldly ahead with deeper reforms in the area of political security, after the regressions under Megawati. The Aceh peace accord encouraged these hopes. His sweeping first-round victory in the 2009 presidential elections gave him an unprecedented, powerful mandate. When one looks back on his personality and record, however, it’s clear that both Indonesians and outside observers should not have expected anything other than great caution from Yudhoyono in the area of military reform.
Early in his term, he showed some nervousness about possible intervention by disgruntled elements of the army. The WikiLeaks cables from the US embassy report that presidential aides sought urgent updates on the Thai military coup of September 2006, which overthrew the elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. Dadan Irawan, a member of Golkar’s central board who had good access to the palace, told the embassy that “the President was concerned that his enemies in the military, as well as the political elite, might find inspiration in the success of the bloodless coup.”
Yudhoyono was also linking the Thai coup to another event. That June, an army officer visiting the house of a recently deceased general to collect his service pistol had been astonished to find a collection of 185 firearms, including assault rifles and ammunition. Yudhoyono’s advisers were saying that the president took “extremely seriously” rumors of destabilization plans, based on the dead general’s closeness to Riyamizard Ryacudu and other displaced generals. But this message could equally have been Yudhoyono’s gambit to discredit his opponents.
But in general the military had a lot to thank Yudhoyono for. He dug in his heels against persistent American pressure to open up the records of Kopassus and remove individuals involved in abuses. Kopassus, backed by the airborne brigades of Kostrad, remained the spearhead of the Indonesian army’s fighting force. Although, like Wellington’s troops, it sometimes frightened its own commanders in chief, its mystique as the force that held the nation together at moments of extreme peril was something Yudhoyono and his family circle were evidently as keen to preserve as anyone else in the military.
The WikiLeaks cables reveal him saying that a resumption of ties with Kopassus was the key to the “strategic partnership” sought by George W. Bush’s administration. With his brother-in-law Pramono Edhie Wibowo taking a turn as the force’s commander, Yudhoyono felt able to give assurances of its transformed institutional culture. For one thing, all orders now had to be given in writing, which created an evidence trail of command responsibility. Things had been different in the past: the writer of a Kopassus history, author Ken Conboy, records Prabowo Subianto telling him in 1997: “Indonesia is the best country for conducting covert operations because there are no written orders.”
The transition to American acceptance, however, was slowed when news got out in mid-2007 that the Kopassus Group 2, based near Yogyakarta, had feted Tommy Suharto, newly free after serving just five years of his fifteen-year sentence for the contract killing of the judge who had convicted him of fraud, at their anniversary party. “Officers interviewed by journalists after the event casually dismissed Suharto’s checkered past as unimportant,” the embassy reported.
As late as October 2009, when a visit by the new US president, Barack Obama, was being planned, the standoff between Indonesia and the United States was unresolved. “Yudhoyono takes the issue seriously to the extent that he wonders how he can proceed with a Comprehensive Partnership with the United States if the United States does not treat Indonesia as a true partner,” presidential aide Dino Djalal (who later became his country’s ambassador in Washington) was reported as telling the embassy. Joint activities with the Kopassus Unit 81 were eventually cleared during Obama’s visit the next year.
Yudhoyono also stuck by his old academy classmate, Syafrie Syamsuddin, despite a UN investigation putting him near the top of its recommended list for war crimes prosecution over the 1999 violence in East Timor, over his presence in Dili at the time of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, over his command of the Jakarta garrison during the 1998 violence, and over his alleged role in the murky side of the Aceh conflict. Syafrie had remained the military chief of information while Yudhoyono was coordinating minister and then became the vice minister (or administrative head) of the defense ministry throughout Yudhoyono’s presidency. He remained persona non grata in the United States, which was something of a handicap for Jakarta as it tried to develop a strategic partnership with the Americans. Ultimately, however, he was passed over by Yudhoyono in 2007 when he might have been made army chief.
A telling episode took place in August 2009, when an East Timorese man named Martenus Bere came across the border from Indonesia to attend a wedding in his hometown, Suai. Ten years earlier Bere had led a militia group that, along with Indonesian army and police, had massacred priests and civilians who had gathered for safety in the town’s cathedral after the independence referendum. He was spotted, arrested, and taken to Dili. Timor’s prime minister, José Xanana Gusmão, came under heavy pressure from Yudhoyono to return Bere to Indonesia. He was duly handed over to the Indonesian embassy and allowed to leave.
In 2008 members of the DPR initiated a bill to put military personnel under the jurisdiction of civilian courts for offenses under civil law. Initially, Yudhoyono seemed to be in favor. Then the executive swung against it. Certainly, there were sound reasons to have misgivings. The law would have handed responsibility for investigating crimes by soldiers to the police. Ongoing interforce rivalries and suspected turf wars over protection rackets, which sparked frequent street brawls between soldiers and police, were one thing. But with the police still widely involved in case fixing with prosecutors and judges, the potential for soldiers to be drawn into corrupt settlements was very real.
The decision to stay with military justice did, however, create a need for the armed forces to demonstrate that they were serious about punishing abuses. In 2008 a court-martial gave jail terms to thirteen marines who had fired toward a crowd resisting eviction from their unit’s land near Surabaya, killing four civilians. The military police opened cases against two generals for misappropriating state property. One of them, a retired officer who had become a film actor, saw the arresting party off with a firearm but then died before his case came to court-martial in 2010. In 2013 a military court gave a four-year jail sentence to a former Kostrad chief, Djaja Suparman, for selling military land in Surabaya to a toll-road company in 1998 and pocketing some of the proceeds; the case is now under appeal.
In March 2013 Kopassus again blotted its copybook. A sergeant attached to the Yogyakarta garrison in intelligence duties got into a late-night argument in a city nightclub with four toughs from the southeastern Nusatenggara islands. The four killed the soldier and were soon arrested by police. Three days later, eleven of the victim’s Kopassus comrades, disguised in ski masks and armed with AK-47s, forced their way into the city’s Cebongan prison. They threatened and beat twelve prison guards, two of whom required hospitalization, and then went to the cells and executed the four suspects. On the way out, they seized the prison’s closed-circuit television recordings.
The case resulted in much stiffer punishments than those given in the Tim Mawar and Theys Eluay cases a decade or more earlier, with jail terms ranging from four to eleven years. Yet the sentences were widely seen as lighter than what could be expected for premeditated murder in civil law. In addition, the court-martial atmospherics caused much concern. The three judges were outranked by the defense officers. Several witnesses declined to testify. At no point was it explained why the Kopassus sergeant had been at the nightclub or what had sparked the fatal fight. Was he moonlighting as a security guard? Was he collecting intelligence of some sort? Or was he dealing drugs?
Inside and outside the court milled hundreds of former soldiers and other muscular civilians, dressed in camouflage, from a group called the Sekber Keistimewaan (roughly, the Secretariat of Special Autonomy), a coalition of Yogyakarta royalist and paramilitary groups. They disrupted hearings with shouts praising the accused as “heroes” and “warriors,” locked the gates of the court compound, threatened civilian monitors, and shouted racist remarks at attendees from the home province of the victims. On being sentenced, the convicted ringleader vowed to serve his jail term and then resume the fight against premanisme (gangsterism). Clearly, training about human rights and the rule of law still had some way to go with Kopassus.
Progress on the divestment of military businesses lagged until March 2008, eighteen months out from the legally stipulated deadline. A Ministry of Defense team had identified 1,520 businesses, but only a dozen were of any size. Many of the others were bankrupt. The vast majority were small-scale cooperatives and charitable foundations aimed at helping out soldiers and their families with cut-price household supplies and education fees.
A respected accountant and stock market official previously on the board of the anticorruption commission, Erry Riyana Hardjapamekas, was brought in to sell off the larger concerns and to set rules for the smaller ones. He found twenty-three TNI-related foundations, with fifty-three associated enterprises, plus 1,098 cooperatives with a gross value of about $320 million at the end of 2007. About 40 percent of the 8,493 staff running the cooperatives were active-duty soldiers. In addition, about 25,000 hectares of military land was being farmed out for commercial use as mines, golf courses, markets and stores, factories, offices, storage facilities, animal keeping, meeting halls, gas stations, car showrooms, restaurants, hotels, television relay stations, mosques, public roads, hospitals and clinics, primary, secondary, and tertiary schools, and residential complexes.
Hardjapamekas recommended selling off the enterprises, putting the land under the control of the Ministry of Finance, and setting up a chain of civilian PX stores to provide goods for military families without active soldiers being employed. The divestment was reported to have been completed by the end of 2009, but few details were released. Anecdotally, it appeared that many prime military-owned assets, such as Jakarta’s Borobudur Hotel, had already been sold to businessmen close to army leaders, such as the property, hotel, and entertainment industry tycoon Tomy Winata, as had some landholdings of the Suharto family.
The civilian defense minister during Yudhoyono’s first term, a respected political science professor named Juwono Sudarsono, had been steadily working on the military budget to compensate for the loss of irregular income. The defense allocation rose steadily from $2.2 billion in 2004 and by 2014 was around $8 billion. Sudarsono pulled more civilian talent into his ministry and gradually assumed more influence over force structure and equipment procurement. His ministry developed a doctrine of the “minimum essential force” necessary for Indonesia’s defense and gradually got it accepted by the uniformed services. The initial focuses were on improving airlift capability, so that forces and supplies could be quickly moved around the country, on reviving the navy’s maritime security capability, and on building the army’s ability to respond swiftly to the natural disasters that frequently hit the nation.
By 2007, resources were being found, somehow, for new strike capability. The air force gained spare parts to refurbish its largely grounded F-16 fighter squadron and ordered a squadron of newer models. On a trip to Moscow, Yudhoyono accepted credits worth about $1 billion to order a small number of the Sukhoi-30 fighters. Other orders were to follow over coming years; in August 2013 the defense vice minister, Syafrie Syamsuddin, announced a five-year weaponry modernization program costing $13.2 billion. The reported components included twelve of a version of a German-designed submarine to be built with South Korea, Dutch frigates, trainer jets, new-model Hercules and C-395 transport aircraft, and a fleet of eight Apache attack helicopters, declared to be for use against piracy in areas like the Malacca Strait.
Not to be outdone, the army spent $287 million to buy 104 used models of the German-made Leopard-2 main battle tank, as well as about fifty heavy armored cars, which Syamsuddin announced would be parked around Jakarta to “defend the capital,” including some in a new underground car park under Merdeka Square. Military analysts were baffled by the deal, since the 62-ton tank was too big to put on any existing air force or navy transport to take to the Indonesian peripheries or to cross most of the country’s bridges. Its most likely use would be to intimidate crowds in Jakarta, should riots on the scale of 1998 ever break out again. Prestige was also seen as a factor: Singapore had also bought the Leopard-2, and Malaysia, a similar tank from Poland.
The US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the Indonesian air force was the most willing service to join supply-and-exercise arrangements with the United States; the “truculent” navy was the most wary. The diversity of sourcing reflected a lesson the Indonesian military had drawn from its experiences of the previous decades: it would try to minimize the risk of being immobilized by any further arms embargoes, particularly from the West.
But what is the army for? Agus Widjojo’s question still haunts the 340,000-strong force. The legislated tasks “other than war” scarcely keep it busy, apart from after major natural disasters. Involvement in UN peacekeeping operations has been a valued activity, with about 1,000 personnel assigned to the UN force in Lebanon and contingents sent to the Congo and elsewhere. But rather than accepting a sharp cut in numbers, the army has turned back to its traditional doctrine of people’s warfare, embodied in its “territorial” arm.
On being installed as the armed forces’ chief in December 2006, army general Djoko Santoso pledged to work on “professionalizing” the military but added that professionalism, in the Indonesian context, meant not only tactics and control but also its identity as a “people’s” and a national army. In November 2008 he declared that the territorial system, which had been undergoing dissolution, had been “reactivated” after the second Bali bombing, in order to help the police combat terrorism. Although the noncommissioned officers, or babinsa, at the lower levels of this system had only one role—intelligence collection—he claimed that they had proven effective in this role: in one case, they had tipped off the authorities to some non-Indonesian terrorists hiding in a mosque. Being permanently resident in local communities, these babinsa were able to detect in local residents’ daily behavior evidence pointing to nonlocal elements. This program had been so successful that terrorists were no longer staying in the villages, Santoso claimed. (The general was wrong on the latter point, as the police continued to find Jemaah Islamiyah elements hiding in villages across Java in subsequent years.)
Widjojo sees little use for the babinsa. “If we go to the villages they are idle,” he says. “What mission or task can you give them? Counter-terrorism—what can they do? They note down how many bearded people pass the Kodim headquarters? There’s no legality of how a TNI soldier can act. And if we force them and give them expectations as though they can act, we will push them into problems. Just like we have pushed them in various instances before, including in East Timor.”
But even the civilian defense minister at the time, Sudarsono, was sharing similar concerns with his uniformed counterpart, Santoso. He pointed out to American visitors the new threats from nonstate actors and the importance therefore of the Security Forces having the cooperation of the civilian population.
One corollary was that the army, if it wanted to win support across the whole diverse nation, had to reduce the historical dominance of the Javanese in its officer corps. In this, Sudarsono’s efforts appear successful. In 1970 recruits to the armed forces academy comprised 58 percent Javanese (the Javanese proportion of the national population was then 51 percent) and 15 percent Sundanese (from West Java). A 2009 study by researcher Riefqi Muna found that 39 percent of the new recruits were Javanese (by then 42 percent of the population), while the Sundanese component had dropped back to 8 percent, even though they made up 15 percent of the population.
The usefulness of the army in fighting terrorism and unrest is now a constant refrain of successive armed forces chiefs, while the police continue to demonstrate that, at least with terrorism, they are coping quite well. In cases of serious civil unrest, the police have been less adroit. Particularly where religious or sectarian clashes are involved, police have hesitated to intervene, have sometimes ended up charging the victims of attack, or have been overwhelmed by the scale of rioting. Their ground commanders are reluctant to admit losing control. Any requests to call out the army would have to be passed to the police command, across to the president or his coordinating security minister, and back down the army’s chain of command.
As the second decade of the century began, a series of attacks on the minority Ahmadiyah sect (regarded as heretical by many orthodox Muslims) and on Christian proselytizers for alleged blasphemy brought the issue to the fore. Colonels from both forces were sacked, and generals had their appointments to regional commands cut short, before Yudhoyono’s government set down rules allowing provincial governors to call out the army whether or not requested by the police. But in a democracy, the use of armed soldiers must surely be the very last resort. A better answer is a well-trained police force, which should be able to use graduated methods of nonlethal crowd control, and whose local commanders should feel confident enough to call early for reinforcements if they are needed.
Still, the drumbeat behind the army’s territorial role has grown louder. In 2000, the army announced a new scheme called TNI Manunggal Membangun Desa (Army Focus on Village Development), a name that recalled the ABRI Masuk Desa (Armed Forces in the Villages) program during the New Order, a version of the civic-action doctrine that became intensely resented for the intimidation that came with it. Army engineers were volunteered for new road building in Papua. New kodam (regional commands) have been created, one in Aceh and two in Kalimantan, each with its own hierarchy of “organic” posts stationed down to the villages.
The army has not eschewed the use of civilian militias to apply violence and collect intelligence at a remove. Of course, this is not unusual in counterinsurgency campaigns: it became a feature of American, Australian, and perhaps other allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Widjojo points out, it has spread to Indonesia’s political parties, which all deploy various satgas (taskforce) or pemuda (youth) wings dressed in camouflage uniforms for their members’ security.
In 2012, veterans of the first class to graduate from the Magelang defense force academy (in 1970) reflected ruefully on their careers, which were largely spent trying to quell resistance in Timor and to defend the New Order, only to end in retreat from both. Their book of reminiscences is bittersweet. “It’s an irony that the involvement of East Timor in the history of Indonesia began and ended with a failure of intelligence,” the authors wrote, referring to the assurances that their invasion of Timor in 1975 would meet no significant resistance and that the grateful Timorese would vote in 1999 to stay in Indonesia.
They also made a more general point: “The question that always crops up among us is that the 1945 Constitution never mandated the Dual Function, never mandated the integration of the police as a part of the armed forces, or the formation of civilian groups as part of the armed forces as well as the formation of armed civilian groups.” The latter was the result of the “romanticism” that lingered from the last years of the 1940s in wujud kelaskaran (the formation of volunteer irregular soldiers).
Outside the military, the territorial doctrine also has many critics. Regarding the military business divestment, according to a leaked US embassy cable, the financial expert Erry Riyana Hardjapamekas privately expressed his belief that it was inevitably linked to the illegal side of moneymaking, including fishing, logging, the misuse of military assets, prostitution, and gambling. He rated these as more significant in their value and in their impact on morale than the legal activities and more widespread across the archipelago through the territorial commands. “Hardjapamekas sees the territorial administration as a legacy of the past which needs to disappear in order for a modern military to emerge,” the embassy reported. “Curtailing the illegal lifeline would hasten the transition, he believes. This would go hand-in-hand with troop reductions to pare the TNI down to a leaner force commensurate with Indonesia’s defence needs.” Hardjapamekas saw extensive support within the TNI for such a move, as most of the illegal activities were in the hands of senior officers. The more junior officers and the rank-and-file soldiers either were not able to benefit or rejected the activity in principle, due to their exposure to democratic values. An order from the top could set this process in motion.
That order has not yet been given. The Indonesian army still has thousands of officers living and operating among the civilian population, carrying loaded sidearms. At their best, the territorial officers act as advocates and defenders of the powerless citizens, where the police are often more closely linked to local power groups and mafias. At their worst, they are oppressive and extortive. At the end of Yudhoyono’s two terms, the armed forces remain in an awkward halfway position, stuck between being the pervasive political and social institution they were during the Suharto era, and developing as a modern fighting force that is capable of beating off external attacks.