"We hope that the military cooperation between Indonesia and the United States will finally reawaken," said Admiral Widodo Adisutjipto, the head of the Indonesian military, as the talks opened.

To date, the U.S. government has stopped short of attempting to officially repeal its embargo on military assistance to Jakarta. The ban was imposed almost three years ago as the U.S. rulers put some public distance between themselves and the Indonesian military, amid revelations of an army-organized reign of terror on East Timor by anti-independence militias in mid-1999. Later that year East Timor was occupied by a United Nations force, headed by the Australian armed forces, that included U.S. troops.

Washington maintained close ties with Jakarta for more than three decades before the ban, backing the dictator Suharto until his resignation in 1998. The period included Jakarta’s 1975 invasion and later annexation of East Timor.

Commenting on the talks, former Indonesian defense minister Juwono Sudharsono lamented the impact of three years of more limited relations. Of the 70 percent of Indonesia’s military equipment supplied by the United States, less than half is today operational, he said. The equipment includes a fleet of F-16 fighter jets.

The U.S. rulers’ concern over instability in Indonesia, a country of more than 210 million people on which the international capitalist economic crisis is having a deep impact, was reflected in Bush’s proposals for a new security force. The "domestic peacekeeping force [will] help Indonesia quell sectarian violence," claimed the New York Times.

"As Indonesia faces an increasing breakdown in law and order, and separatist movements persist in...Aceh and Irian Jaya," continued the big-business paper, "the Pentagon is not alone in seeking ways to work with the Indonesian military. Japan and Singapore...are urging the Bush administration to work with the army, historically the institution that has kept the sprawling archipelago together."  
 
 
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