Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The bloody ouster of General Suharto as president of Indonesia and as one of America’s favorite dictators in East Asia is a case study in the dangers of JCET programs. Between May 13 and May 15, 1998, nearly 1,200 people were killed in Jakarta in rioting that led to the resignation of General Suharto. It was subsequently revealed that during this “rioting” at least 168 women and girls, most of them of Chinese ancestry, had been raped by “organized groups of up to a dozen men” and that 20 had died during or after the assaults.¹⁰ It was also revealed that groups of men had traveled the city in vehicles inciting the crowds to violence. Many Indonesians accused the army and its clandestine security forces—the elite commando regiment Kopassus, known as the “red berets”—of committing these acts. (The army later did publicly acknowledge that members of its special forces had been involved in the “disappearances” of opposition activists in the weeks before the riots.)

In his years of rule, General Suharto had long had a reputation for using Kopassus, run from 1995 on by his son-in-law Lt. Gen. Prabowo Soemitro Subianto, to abduct, torture, and kill dissidents and political rivals. In 1990, for instance, he declared the western area of the island of Sumatra around Aceh a “military operational zone” in order to suppress an Islamic secessionist movement. He then sent in Kopassus units. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in the area “disappeared” and are presumed to have been executed by Kopassus. In August 1998, after Suharto’s ouster, General Wiranto (also just one name), commander in chief of the Indonesian armed forces, flew to Sumatra, inspected mass graves, apologized for “abuses committed by the military there,” and ordered all combat troops pulled out of the province. Under Suharto’s order, Kopassus had carried out similar campaigns in the past in East Timor and Irian Jaya (New Guinea).

In January 1998 some Kopassus battalions from western Sumatra and New Guinea were transferred to Jakarta, where during the following three months at least fourteen activists against Suharto also “disappeared.” After Suharto’s fall, the army high command itself concluded that Kopassus was responsible for at least nine kidnappings in the capital. Five of the kidnappees are still unaccounted for and presumed dead. Singled out for immediate responsibility was one of General Prabowo’s deputies, Colonel Chairawan, commander of the plainclothes Kopassus Group 4. Before his arrest, Chairawan, a figure well known to the American military, told Nation magazine correspondent Allan Nairn that his primary contact at the U.S. embassy was Colonel Charles McFetridge, the DIA attaché.¹¹ Nonetheless, the orders for these kidnappings and executions probably came from Suharto himself.

After the 1998 rioting and the mass exodus from Indonesia of those Chinese who could afford to emigrate, the elites of Indonesia, no longer as threatened by police-state methods as they were under Suharto, demanded an investigation. The successor government of President B. J. Habibie appointed an eighteen-member investigating team, including representatives of the government, private groups, the armed forces, and the Indonesian Commission on Human Rights. In its report of November 3, 1998, the team concluded that much of the violence had been organized and deliberately provoked by the armed forces, probably in order to create enough of the look of chaos to make a military coup seem a plausible and acceptable step. The Indonesian military had earlier claimed that it could find no evidence of any rapes at all during the disturbances, whereas the report confirmed that seventy-six women, virtually all of Chinese descent, had been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. The initial Chinese community’s claim of more than twice that number may actually be closer to the truth, since many women were understandably reluctant to reveal what had happened to them. The report also charged two generals, Lieutenant General Prabowo of Kopassus and Major General Syafrie Samsuddin, head of the Jakarta Military Command and a Prabowo aide, with responsibility for organizing the riots and killings. Officials of the Indonesian government, who had initially ordered the report, failed to show up for the meeting at which it was delivered.¹²