ABOUT a week before East Timor’s 1999 referendum, an Indonesian general asked me how I thought the United Nations – administered ballot would turn out. He expressed genuine astonishment when I said I thought it would be a vote for independence.Five weeks earlier, in a little-known assessment, Rear-Admiral Yoost Mengko, the assistant chief of staff for intelligence, had told military chief General Wiranto that Jakarta would not only lose, but lose badly. The warning was not something anyone wanted to hear.
Rear-Adm Mengko, the former defence attache to Australia, no doubt went against the grain because he had nothing to lose in the twilight of his career. He was outside the all-powerful army hierarchy and a Christian with few prospects of further promotion.
In his book, Military Politics, Islam, And The State In Indonesia, academic Marcus Mietznerdiscusses how ‘decades of manipulated intelligence reporting’ misled Gen Wiranto into thinking that for all the brutality, the East Timorese appreciated what Indonesia had done for them.
It is wise to remember this in the context of the recent release of purported Indonesian Special Forces (Kopassus) intelligence reports detailing a picture of a chronically paranoid military hell-bent on preserving Indonesian sovereignty over the troubled Papua province.
None of it – from the network of informants to the long list of perceived enemies – should come as any surprise to those aware of what Dr Mietzner calls ‘the deep entrenchment of an officer corps in traditional paradigms of military doctrine and dominance’.
Conflating peaceful political expression with criminal activity, particularly where it relates to territorial integrity, is par for the course for the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI), whose history is steeped in the struggle for independence and the importance of national unity.
So is the belief, shared by other right-wing diehards, that the Indonesian government should not be seen to be in dialogue with separatist rebels – an attitude that had to be overcome in the years leading to the 2005 Aceh peace agreement.
The military’s penchant for blaming outside agitators, as it did with the UN in the East Timor referendum, masks an unwillingness to accept that the government’s policies may be at fault.
If the state had involved Papuans in the drafting of the 2001 Special Autonomy Law and had delivered on all of its promises, it would be in a much stronger position to dictate events.
Instead it has sunk into an all-too-familiar shell game, buying off the elites and tamping down opposition. The longer Papua festers, the more the risk of the issue reaching the international stage – the one thing officials are trying to avoid.
Experienced military analysts say part of the military’s intransigence stems from its ‘everyone is out to get us’ mythology, borrowed from World War II Japan, that is ground into new recruits. Until a few years ago, there was even an irrational belief among some Indonesian officers that the Dutch were keen to destabilise their former colony so they could stage a comeback.
Those with little experience of the outside world were the worst. ‘They really believed the Pentagon was burning midnight oil planning the destruction of Indonesia,’ says one retired United States officer. ‘I could never convince the sceptics that it was the last thing anyone in the Pentagon wanted.’
However, when the discourse veered into the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) controversial role in supporting the Permesta rebellion in the 1960s, as it almost always did, the Americans found themselves struggling on shaky ground.
The other problem is the TNI’s inability to engage in rational analysis. Even at the Command and Staff College, officers are not taught to think in lateral terms, or to extrapolate from the data before them to see anything but the standard solution.
Those who have seen some of the military’s assessments are struck by how simplistic, superficial and sophomoric they are. Despite the quality of some of the raw information, gleaned from a once-pervasive territorial structure, rumour, speculation and conspiracy-mongering all too often take precedence.
With loyalty still the only must-have qualification, only a small handful of bright young officers are selected for civilian universities. Therefore, there is a dearth of staff men who possess the intellectual capacity to make a difference.
Education is not always a guarantee of rational thought. Take the notorious claim by the late Major-General Zen Maulani, then head of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, that the 2002 Bali bomb was a micro-nuclear device planted by the CIA.
Maj-Gen Maulani was deadly serious. Yet the devout South Kalimantan Muslim Dayak was an intelligent US-educated officer who had previously served as an adviser to president B.J. Habibie.
Foreign officers formerly stationed in Indonesia say the TNI was more difficult to deal with than the activists and the politicians. As one put it:Â ‘Sometimes I thought they were the only group of people in the world who could reach into a bucket of gold coins and find a lead washer – every time.’
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