Indonesia HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Pilots of the Dutch colonial air force. After the Dutch
retreat from Java in 1942, these pilots received training and
aircraft from the United States.
Courtesy Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
The Dutch colonial period (1602-1949), the Japanese
occupation (1942-45) during World War II (1939-45), and
the
National Revolution (1945-49) provided a diversified
experience
from which the Indonesian armed forces evolved. During the
colonial period, until the expulsion of the Dutch during
the
Japanese conquest of Indonesia in 1942, a small number of
Indonesians, virtually all in the enlisted ranks, were
recruited
into the Royal Netherlands Indies Army (KNIL).
Subsequently, the
Japanese occupation forces recruited Indonesians for use
as
auxiliaries (heiho), supply and support personnel
attached
to the Japanese army and frequently sent to the front in
the
Pacific, the Philippines, and other war zones. In 1943 the
deteriorating military situation led the occupation
authorities
to organize a native militia, the volunteer army called
Defenders
of the Fatherland (Peta). Some 37,000 Peta enlisted
personnel and
officers were given training in combat tactics and, along
with
the heiho and some KNIL personnel, provided the
emergent
Indonesian state in 1945 with a ready source of trained
military
personnel. This force was supplemented by large numbers of
youths
having experience in various paramilitary youth corps
organized
by the Japanese to mobilize the population and to provide
a
recruiting base for Peta.
These elements became the nucleus of the nation's
embryonic
military organization, the People's Security Forces (BKR),
which
was formed on October 5, 1945, after the proclamation of
independence by the government of revolutionary leader
Sukarno in
August. From the beginning, the Western ideal of a
politically
neutral military had few proponents. Many of those who
joined the
new force, renamed the National Army of Indonesia (TNI) in
1947,
were nationalists who sought both military victory and
political
change for their nation. They were aided in the resistance
struggle against the Dutch by several locally based,
irregular
units that were often politically aligned to dissimilar
causes or
loyal to prominent local figures.
Experiences during the struggle against the Dutch
generally
strengthened the military's concern for political
involvement.
Faced with better trained and better equipped Dutch
forces, the
Indonesians conducted a guerrilla war in which fighters
had to
rely heavily on the support of the local population. This
tie to
the populace formed the basis for the military ideology of
perjuangan--the struggle--which stressed that the
military
must rely on the people for support against both external
threats
and internal divisiveness, and which is at the core of
modern
Indonesian military thought.
In many areas, military commanders came to exercise
wide
powers in both civilian and military affairs. Under these
circumstances, many armed forces personnel came to believe
that
the military had at least as much right as--and perhaps
more
ability than--the civilian leadership in determining the
course
of the nation. This experience led directly to the
dwifungsi concept of direct involvement in
nominally
civilian governmental functions. Many members of the
military
also felt that civilians had made unnecessary concessions
to the
Dutch in the negotiations over independence in 1949, and
they
accepted the authority of the civilian government only
reluctantly.
During the war for independence, struggles among
national
political factions surfaced within the military,
influencing the
character of the armed forces that emerged from the
revolutionary
period. Conflict between regular army units and irregular
doctrinaire Muslim forces as well as separatist units from
the
Outer Islands (see Glossary)
eventually led to a conscious
effort
to weed out the more militant followers of Islam and
separatists
from the armed forces. This left the military relatively
free of
internal conflict, but keenly attuned to the dangers of
such
destabilizing influences. An attempt by communists to
seize power
in East Java in September 1948 resulted in much resentment
toward
the communists. Political and military leaders charged
that the
armed rebellion--it came to be called the Madiun
Affair--had
occurred at a time when the Dutch could have taken
military
advantage of it and had endangered the existence of the
republic.
The Madiun Affair has been widely credited with
eliminating most
communists from the army and with instilling in many in
the armed
services a long-lasting anticommunist orientation.
At the end of the war in 1949, the government had as
many as
500,000 armed fighters at its disposal. These men served
primarily in the TNI--which also included rudimentary air
and
naval elements--but some were attached to guerrilla bands
and
irregular forces under the control of local leaders.
Widespread
demobilization reduced this number to 200,000 by 1950,
however,
when the armed forces were given their official
designation as
the Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia (ABRI). A
large
majority of these personnel were poorly trained and
undisciplined. The first priority of the military
leadership,
therefore, was to form some semblance of a united,
structured
military out of these disparate elements and to establish
central
control over them. Progress was made in this direction
under the
leadership of General Abdul Haris Nasution, army chief of
staff.
Nasution, a native of Sumatra, had served in KNIL before
joining
the republican army in 1946. Within two years, Nasution
had risen
to deputy commander and chief of operations. He was a key
person
in making plans for "rationalizing" the armed forces, a
move to
establish better administrative control by confirming the
army,
the navy, and the air force as separate services.
Operational
units in all three services were reorganized in accordance
with
organizational tables borrowed from Western armed forces,
and
formal training was instituted. Similar changes were made
in the
structure of the national police.
The efforts of the military leadership under Nasution,
who
was army chief of staff throughout most of the 1950s, to
"reorganize and rationalize" the defense establishment
quickly
met with resistance, however. Several primarily
Peta-trained
officers feared that the leadership's plans to centralize
command, stress "professionalism," and pare even further
the size
of the military would downgrade their own status. These
officers,
who strongly opposed the "professional" faction, wanted to
maintain regionally decentralized forces, a revolutionary
spirit,
and a minimum of hierarchy. In their view, a
"professional"
military meant one strictly attuned to traditional
military
missions and skills, formed as a primary arm of a strong
central
government, and kept separate from involvement in the
political
development of the country. In what became an intra-army
struggle, these officers gained the support of some
sympathetic
members of parliament who demanded that the central army
leadership be dismissed and the defense department
reorganized.
Nasution and his supporters deeply resented the injection
of
civilian authority into the military domain. They
considered the
legislature to be meddling in purely army affairs. On
October 17,
1952, supporters of the military leadership staged
demonstrations
in Jakarta to support demands that Sukarno dissolve the
legislature. When Sukarno, who cared little for Nasution's
scheme, refused to do this and encouraged the faction of
the army
resisting the reforms, mutinies occurred in several units.
By the
end of the year, Nasution and several of the most
influential
members of the "professional" faction were forced to
resign.
In the following two years, factionalism in the
decentralized
army contributed to its increasing politicization. As soon
became
clear to most officers, factionalism also seriously
weakened the
military's position relative to the civilian authority. In
early
1955, in what one observer of the Indonesian military has
called
a "watershed" meeting, officers from both factions
resolved to
support the unity of the army and to heal its internal
rifts.
Whereas before 1955, politicians had "intervened" in what
the
military considered to be its internal affairs, after that
meeting the military played an increasingly assertive role
in
civilian matters. Later in 1955, members of both factions
joined
to reject the appointment by the cabinet of a relatively
junior
officer to the position of army commander, an action that
led to
the resignation of the cabinet and eventually to the
reappointment of Nasution as army chief of staff, after a
three-
year period of inactivity.
After 1955 Nasution initiated a series of personnel
transfers
and instituted several reforms aimed at establishing the
army
commander as a real authority over local commanders. The
internal
military crisis that resulted as the military again broke
into
factions had profound effects on both the military and the
nation. Between 1950 and 1958, several opponents of
Nasution's
policies joined local rebellions in the Outer Islands
against the
central government, creating conditions that threatened
the
existence of the nation
(see Guided Democracy
, ch. 1).
These
disparate movements, such as the Universal Struggle
Charter
(Permesta) rebellion in central and western Sumatra and
Sulawesi,
the separatist movement in northern Sulawesi, the Darul
Islam
rebellion in Sulawesi, and the establishment of the
short-lived
Republic of South Maluku (RMS) based in Ambon, could have
fatally
splintered the young republic had they all not failed. As
a
result of these revolts, the army continued to maintain a
disproportionate troop presence in those regions well into
the
1980s.
The army's moves to restore order and to reestablish
government control in dissident areas thrust its
leadership into
successively higher levels of political influence. In
March 1957,
after the DPR, which had been seated a year earlier, and
the
cabinet proved unable to cope with the crisis, Sukarno
declared
martial law throughout the country, assigning the army
wide
powers over the national administrative apparatus. In
December
the army was given the additional task of managing newly
nationalized Dutch enterprises and agricultural estates,
propelling the military into a position of economic
influence.
In the period of Sukarno's Guided Democracy (1959-65),
the
army's position in the government was institutionalized.
Vowing
that it would neither be a "dead tool of the government"
nor
assume total control of the nation, the army took what
Nasution
referred to as the "middle way," working cooperatively
with the
civilian leadership through its representation in the
cabinet,
parliament, and the civil service. It became, along with
the PKI,
Sukarno's "junior partner" in ruling the nation. Its
uniformed
personnel held positions throughout the country down to
the
village level, both in the administration of martial law
and
management of economic enterprises (mostly nationalized
former
Dutch properties) and in regionally deployed cadre units
assigned
to mobilize local resistance in the event of a threat to
the
national security. During this period, Nasution became
minister
of defense (1959-66) and chief of staff of ABRI (1962-66).
To support the activist foreign policy of this period,
especially with regard to the 1962 campaign against Dutch
forces
in West New Guinea (also called West Irian or Irian Barat,
and
renamed Irian Jaya--Victorious Irian--in 1972 by Jakarta),
and
the 1963-66 policy of armed Confrontation
(Konfrontasi--see Glossary)
with Malaysia, Sukarno rapidly enlarged the
armed
forces. The buildup most affected the formerly negligible
air
force and navy, which were greatly expanded and given
advanced
arms and equipment acquired through military credits from
the
Soviet Union and allied East European countries. By the
mid-
1960s, Indonesia had one of the largest and best equipped
armed
forces in Southeast Asia.
In the early 1960s, as part of his policy to contain
the
army's expanding political influence, Sukarno encouraged
the air
force, navy, and police--the last was designated one of
the
nation's armed forces in 1960--to act independently of the
army.
The army leadership viewed the resulting divisions between
the
services, the growing influence of the PKI in all four,
and
Sukarno's increasing support for the PKI with considerable
alarm.
It was also less than sanguine concerning the ability of
the
country's armed forces to prevail in the Confrontation
with
Malaysia should Britain intervene on the side of Malaysia,
and
displayed a reluctance to commit troops to the campaign
when the
domestic situation appeared unstable. Tension among and
within
the armed forces increased following proposals by the PKI
in
early 1965 to place political advisers in each military
unit
(similar to the Chinese and Soviet systems) and to
establish a
"fifth force" of armed peasants and workers outside the
control
of the existing armed services.
The 1965 attempted coup d'état--the September 30
Movement
(Gestapu)--by so-called communist sympathizers in the
military
was the seminal event in the evolution of the modern
Indonesian
armed forces. The rise to power of General Suharto--to
whom
Sukarno was obliged to relinquish de facto authority in
March
1966 and who was appointed acting president one year
later--
completed the process of the unification of the armed
forces and
the centralization of command begun in 1950. Nasution, who
had
fostered these changes, unlike many of his senior ABRI
colleagues, escaped being murdered during the coup. Along
with
the unrestrained violence and wave of arrests that
followed the
coup attempt and led to the eradication of the PKI,
widespread
purges in all services produced an army leadership unified
in
purpose as never before. The expansionist military
doctrine of
the Sukarno era was ended, and national expenditures began
to be
focused exclusively on national economic development.
An army seminar was held in August 1966 to develop and
legitimize the role ABRI should play in Suharto's New
Order. Its
conclusions, which were disseminated throughout all four
services
in a second seminar held in November, implicitly rejected
Nasution's "middle way" concept of sharing national
decision
making with civilian authorities. ABRI saw itself as a
major
institution with a role far greater than that of a
military
organization. It claimed that it must function also as a
social
force. These two seminars were credited with
revitalization of
the military's political role in national development and
institutionalization of the dwifungsi concept. By
1969 the
armed forces had emerged as the nation's dominant
political
institution. With the end of confrontational actions
against the
Dutch and Malaysia that dominated the early 1960s, ABRI's
primary
mission and focus changed to ensuring internal security
and
political stability so that political and modern economic
development could proceed uninterrupted.
By the late 1970s, defense decision makers realized
that
emphasis on the civic and internal security missions of
the armed
forces had allowed the nation's defense capability to
deteriorate
to an unacceptable level. Serious weaknesses in training
and
discipline of personnel, in logistics and planning
capabilities,
and in the equipment inventory were reflected in a
mediocre
performance against Fretilin guerrillas in East Timor
(see The New Order under Suharto
, ch. 1).
Communist victories in South Vietnam and Cambodia
prompted
national authorities to reconsider both the external
threat the
nation faced and how best to meet it. Consequently, the
new
minister of defense and security, General Mohammad Jusuf,
directed a major upgrading of armed forces military
capabilities.
This upgrade included increased training and procurement
of
sufficient equipment and personnel to establish a core of
some
100 fully ready combat battalions. Successive ABRI
commanders
stressed military readiness and training even as economic
constraints reduced new equipment purchases. The last
major
acquisition for the ground forces as of 1992, for example,
was
the 1981 purchase, through the United States Foreign
Military
Sales program, of new 105mm towed howitzers. Other new
equipment
purchased during the late 1970s and early 1980s included
F-5 and
A-4 fighters for the air force and the purchase of used
but still
serviceable ships for the navy. The purchase of twelve
F-16
aircraft, not delivered until 1989, was designed primarily
to
keep up with rapidly developing defense technology until
the
armed forces acquired sufficient capital funds to purchase
a new
generation of fighter-bombers to replace its aging air
force
fleet.
Data as of November 1992
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