U.S. has shipped spare parts to Indonesia

U.S. has shipped spare parts to Indonesia

The Jakarta Post, New York/Jakarta

The U.S. has provided tsunami-hit Indonesia with spare parts for
five of its 24 U.S.-made C-130 cargo planes without lifting its
long-standing ban on weapons sales to its military, the Dow Jones
Newswires reported on Tuesday quoting an U.S. official as saying.

U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters
in New York on Monday (Tuesday in Jakarta) that the spare parts
were sent to Indonesia under existing provisions of the law that
allowed for certain kinds of sales to the country.

Indonesia has pressed the U.S. to lift the ban on weapon sales
to its military, and said a lack of spare parts left 17 of its C-
130 cargo planes grounded when the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami
hit Sumatra island, preventing it from reaching many remote areas
cut off when roads and bridges were destroyed.

Without the U.S. ban, the planes may have been fit to fly, its
government said.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said during a visit to
Indonesia's disaster zone in early January that the U.S.
government would begin allowing spare parts for C-130s into
Indonesia.

Supporters of the ban say Indonesia is lying about its C-130s
parts to get concessions out of the U.S. They say Indonesia has
been allowed to buy the C-130 spare parts under U.S. law since
2002 and before that bought them on the black market.

"We told the Indonesians we would sell them these parts four
years ago, but they chose to buy them elsewhere," the Associated
Press quoted Sen. Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the
Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations
Committee, as saying earlier this month.

"Yet they have continued to falsely blame our law for denying
them this equipment. It is a myth, used to push for a relaxation
of our human rights conditions, so they can use these aircraft
for combat purposes," said Leahy of Vermont.

But Indonesia's Ministry of Defense's director general of
defense strategy Maj. Gen. (ret) Sudrajat said Indonesia had not
been allowed to purchase C-130 spare parts directly from the U.S.
eventually the ban was partially lifted in 2002.

Jakarta was forced to procure the spare parts from third
countries like Singapore, Malaysia and Europe, Sudrajat said.

All the purchases, however, had to be with the consent of U.S.
authorities, he added.

"This forced us to shop for double prices, while there was no
guarantee that other countries wanted to merchandise their U.S.
spare parts," Sudrajat told The Jakarta Post last month.

The ban was first imposed in 1991 when Indonesian troops
gunned down unarmed protesters in East Timor, killing more than
250 people. Eight years later, the ban was tightened after
Indonesian troops and their proxy militias killed 1,500 East
Timorese when the half island territory voted for independence in
a UN-sponsored independence referendum.

President George W. Bush's administration has campaigned hard
for lifting the ban, but Congress has resisted, in part because
Indonesia has failed to jail any military leaders allegedly
responsible for the 1999 Timor violence.