Good, but not enough
Without doubt, the dismissal of Lieutenant General Prabowo Subianto from active military service and the relief from "all structural duties" of two other high ranking officers from the Army's Special Force (Kopassus) is headline news for the Indonesian media. Not since the failed communist coup of 1965 has the Indonesian Armed Forces (ABRI) been challenged to clean up such a nasty mess within its ranks. Prabowo's discharge and the actions that are being taken against his two former Kopassus subordinates, Maj. Gen. Muchdi and Col. Chairawan, are seen as a significant parts of those efforts.
Under examination by an Officers Honor Council, Lt. Gen. Prabowo reportedly confessed to having "misinterpreted" an order from an as yet unidentified superior officer, leading to the alleged abduction and torture of dissident political activists by Kopassus soldiers. Announcing the decision to reporters yesterday after receiving recommendations from the Honor Council, Armed Forces Commander Gen. Wiranto said he did not rule out the possibility of the three officers being tried by a court martial "if evidence warrants".
It is no exaggeration to say that what started as a covert intelligence operation against anti-Soeharto dissident groups before the former president's downfall in June has grown into a cause celebre even before the court martial of soldiers accused of physically undertaking the kidnappings has been convened. The reasons for this are simple enough.
First, of course, is the fact that reports of the brutality which defenseless political activists were allegedly subjected to has inevitably touched a very sensitive nerve in the public's conscience. Second is the reported involvement of officers from the Indonesian army's most elite combat force -- not to mention illustrious names such as Lt. Gen. Prabowo Subianto, who was not only one of the fastest rising stars in the Indonesian Armed Forces, but is also a son-in-law of former president Soeharto. Third, with army personnel suspected of having committed similar, or possibly even more brutal atrocities in areas such as Aceh, East Timor and Irian Jaya, the popularity and good standing of the Indonesian Armed Forces is at present at its lowest ebb.
Considering all this, and given the fact that the abductions were obviously politically motivated, the measures that have been taken against the three senior Kopassus officers, while good enough as a beginning, do not go sufficiently far to allow us to get to the bottom of the affair. Clearly the involvement of Kopassus and some of its most senior officers indicates that some as yet unexplained political agenda lay behind the kidnapings.
Unless Prabowo, Muchdi and Chairawan are brought before a military tribunal together with the men under their command who actually carried out the abductions, we may never know what that agenda was, how big the scope of the operation was, the name of the more senior officer whose orders were "misinterpreted" by Prabowo, and what precisely those orders were. We must also keep in mind that if the accounts of some of the kidnapped activists are true, then some units of the military other than Kopassus may have been involved, which again could be indicative of the scope of the operation.
There is of course the possibility that getting answers to these questions will be very painful to the Armed Forces, at least in the beginning. Yet allowing them to remain unanswered will not make the problem disappear and will in the long run only serve to cast the Armed Forces in an even more sinister light. Allowing suspicions of what ABRI is really trying to conceal to fester will obviously do no good, either to the Armed Forces or to the nation as a whole. The wise, and only, path to take is to let the truth emerge and thus rebuild the foundation of mutual trust between the Armed Forces and the people.