Howard told not to have ties with RI military
Howard told not to have ties with RI military
Reuters,
Canberra
The Australian government should not make any move to strengthen
military ties with Indonesia's elite Kopassus special forces on
Thursday, an Australian think tank said on Thursday.
A new report from the Australian National University's
Strategic and Defense Studies Center said Kopassus had not
changed from its history of illegal operations and human rights
abuses.
"Based on evidence since 1998, it appears that Kopassus has
not altered its methods of operation to bring them more into line
with wider (if sometimes failed) political reform processes,"
said the report by Indonesian military expert Damien Kingsbury.
Australia strongly pushed for closer military ties with
Indonesia during the Soeharto regime in the late 1980s and early
1990s. But Australia cut military links with Indonesia in 1999 in
response to the Kopassus role in the destabilization of East
Timor after the former Indonesian province voted to become an
independent nation.
In August 2003, Prime Minister John Howard announced the
return of training links between Australia's special forces and
the Kopassus counterterror unit.
At the time, Australia said Kopassus could help if Australians
were taken hostage by militant groups. But the closer ties
collapsed due to restrictions on the training imposed by
Australia.
Kopassus and Indonesian intelligence agencies were aware of
the rise of organizations linked to the October 2002 Bali
bombings that killed 202 people including 88 Australians, but
they did nothing to thwart them, the report said.
"While Australia (and other countries) retain a deeply
ingrained abhorrence of the activities of organizations such as
Kopassus, and such organizations in turn refuse to (or are
structurally incapable of) reform, any attempt at normalizing
relations will ... founder on a fundamental mutual
incompatibility," Kingsbury said.
Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, last month
completed its transition to democracy by electing Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono as its first democratically elected president.