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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 07:38:04 -0400
From: Barbara Larcom <larcom@mail.bcpl.lib.md.us>
To: Peter Grimes <p34d3611@jhu.edu>, Denis Nikitin <dgnikitin@hotmail.com>,
Frida Berrigan <disarmnow@aol.com>, Howard Ehrlich <HJEhrlich@aol.com>,
Leslie Bilchick <baltimoreaction@erols.com>
Subject: [Fwd: Anti-IMF testimony from Indonesia]
---2133065211-1476776241-895271292=:7897
Thu, 14 May 1998 19:13:24 -0700 (PDT)
Thu, 14 May 1998 21:15:10 -0400 (EDT)
Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 21:08:46 -0400
From: 50 Years List Server <75721.1264@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Sender: owner-50-years@igc.apc.org
Subject: Anti-IMF testimony from Indonesia
To: 50 Years National List Serv <50-Years@igc.org>
Aryati is a pseudonym for an Indonesian human rights activist/researcher.
She testified before the House human rights panel along with Pius
Lustrilanang, Constancio Pinto, and Jaffar Siddiq Hamzah on May 7, 1998.
This testimony has some very strong critique of the IMF bailout and
"debt" in the second half.
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Testimony of Aryati, May 7, 1998
At a Hearing of the Committee on International Relations Subcommittee on
International Operations and Human Rights - United States House of
Representatives
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 Suhartois reign is coming to a miserable end. A
necessary condition for democracy in Indonesia is the ending of Suhartois
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
governmentis 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.
---------------- Begin Forwarded Message ----------------
Suharto accused of torture, White House concerned With Indonesia
By Harry Dunphy
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Opponents of Indonesian President Suharto charged
Thursday that his military forces were responsible for repeated human
rights abuses, including killings, disappearances, torture and arbitrary
arrests.
They also called for an end to all U.S. military training of Indonesian
forces and recommended that the United States and the United Nations send
representatives to Indonesia to investigate their claims.
Meantime, White House spokesman Mike McCurry said the Clinton
administration is calling on Indonesia's government "to respect the
individual human rights of those who are voicing legitimate dissent" and
use caution in trying to restore order.
"And most importantly, (we ask) that they address the fundamental
concerns that many people in Indonesia have about the status of their
economy," McCurry said.
On Capitol Hill, a veiled, unidentified witness told a House Judiciary
human rights panel that many ordinary Indonesians "were terrified of
expressing our own opinions" because they feared reprisals by Suharto's
government.
Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., who chaired the hearing, said the
testimony, "ripped away any respectability the Suharto regime may claim
and exposed daily atrocities" that made it difficult to support
international aid for Indonesia.
The International Monetary Fund last week resumed payments that are part
of a $43 billion rescue package to help Indonesia face its most serious
economic crisis in 30 years. The World Bank is expected to approve a $1.5
billion loan to the Jakarta government before the end of the month.
Pius Lustrilanang, 30, a prominent opposition figure, told the panel he
was abducted for two months earlier this year, probably by Indonesian
special forces, and administered beating and electric shocks in attempts
to learn of his political activities. After international pressure on the
government, he was released last month and fled the country.
Weakened by the economic crisis, Lustrilanang said, the "government has
become more vicious and brutal towards voices of dissent. ... The human
rights situation in Indonesia is fundamentally flawed."
Constancio Pinto, U.S. representative of the National Council of
Resistance in East Timor, the former Portuguese colony Indonesia annexed
in 1975, urged the United States to "stop all types of military support
to a dictator that for 33 years has continually committed gross human
rights violations."
"Training Indonesian ... (special forces commando units) is just like
training (Iraqi President ) Saddam Hussein's troops," he said.
AP-WS-05-07-98 1813EDT, Posted at 3:39 p.m. PDT Thursday, May 7, 1998
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