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Indonesia FOREIGN MILITARY RELATIONS
Consistent with its foreign policy of nonalignment,
Indonesia
maintained no defense pacts with foreign nations. It did,
however, have military aid agreements with the United
States and
various other nations and participated in combined
military
exercises with several other countries. Over the years,
Indonesia
also supplied troop contingents--some involving either
military
or police personnel or both--to United Nations (UN)
peacekeeping
forces sent to the Suez Canal-Sinai Peninsula area (1957
and
1973-79), Congo (the former name for Zaire, 1960-64), the
IranIraq border (1988-90), Namibia (1989-90), and the
Kuwait-Iraq
border (1991). In 1991 new UN support missions were sent
to
Cambodia and Somalia
(see Indonesia, ASEAN, and the Third Indochina War
, ch. 4).
Indonesia is a member of ASEAN, and although the
organization
is not a defense alliance, military cooperation existed
between
Indonesia and its ASEAN partners. This cooperation was
conducted
on a frequent and bilateral basis and included exchanges
of
military representatives at national defense institutions,
periodic security consultations, and a series of separate
bilateral combined military exercises. Following the
Vietnamese
invasion of Cambodia in 1979, ASEAN foreign ministers
meeting in
Bali pledged their nations' support for the security of
each of
the other ASEAN nations, but stopped short of discussing
the
creation of a military alliance. The Cambodian peace
accords of
1991 reduced tensions considerably. Moreover, there was a
feeling
of admiration for Vietnam's armed forces on the part of
senior
Indonesian military officers, particularly the powerful
General
Murdani. Murdani and others found much in common between
the
Vietnamese and Indonesian armed forces. They alone in
Southeast
Asia had fought against colonial powers for their
independence,
and both had based much of their military doctrine on the
tenets
of guerrilla warfare. It was this perceived relationship
between
Indonesian and Vietnamese military leaders that gave
Indonesia
the impetus to assume an influential role in the Cambodian
peace
settlement process. The Indonesian government continued to
stress
that defense cooperation among ASEAN nations was a
function of
each nation's right to protect itself and that bilateral
cooperation would not lead to any bilateral or ASEAN-wide
defense
pact. Indonesia continued to support normalization of
Vietnam's
relationship with Western nations, particularly the United
States.
Indonesia has also held combined military exercises
with nonASEAN nations, including Australia, Britain, France,
India, New
Zealand, and the United States. During the 1980s, defense
officials suggested that joint border patrols might be set
up
with Papua New Guinea, and the two countries signed a
status-of-
forces agreement in January 1992. Indonesian troops
sometimes
crossed the border from Irian Jaya Province into Papua New
Guinea
in pursuit of armed insurgents.
Indonesia has maintained military assistance agreements
with
several countries. It received funded security assistance
from
the United States every year since 1950 except 1965 and
1966 when
relations were at a low ebb. Grant aid of military
equipment,
which ended in 1978, averaged US$13 million per year and
was used
mainly for logistics equipment, communications systems,
and
combat matériel for internal security. The United States
also
provided grant aid training under the International
Military
Education and Training (IMET) program between 1950 and
1992, when
the United States Congress cut the aid as a reaction to
the human
rights situation in East Timor. In that forty-two-year
period,
more than 4,000 Indonesian military personnel received
IMET
training in the United States. United States Foreign
Military
Sales credits were made available periodically to
Indonesia
starting in 1974, and have helped defray the expenses of
purchases of United States-made military equipment. As of
the
early 1990s, Indonesia had also received military aid from
Australia, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and West
Germany,
among others. Indonesia also acquired equipment from the
Soviet
Union in the early 1960s and, although most of it was
inoperative
by the 1970s, Jakarta continued to make payments to Moscow
after
the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Data as of November 1992
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