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  Early in his term, he showed some nervousness about possible intervention by disgruntled elements of the army. The WikiLeaks cables from the US embassy report that presidential aides sought urgent updates on the Thai military coup of September 2006, which overthrew the elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. Dadan Irawan, a member of Golkar’s central board who had good access to the palace, told the embassy that “the President was concerned that his enemies in the military, as well as the political elite, might find inspiration in the success of the bloodless coup.”

  Yudhoyono was also linking the Thai coup to another event. That June, an army officer visiting the house of a recently deceased general to collect his service pistol had been astonished to find a collection of 185 firearms, including assault rifles and ammunition. Yudhoyono’s advisers were saying that the president took “extremely seriously” rumors of destabilization plans, based on the dead general’s closeness to Riyamizard Ryacudu and other displaced generals. But this message could equally have been Yudhoyono’s gambit to discredit his opponents.

  But in general the military had a lot to thank Yudhoyono for. He dug in his heels against persistent American pressure to open up the records of Kopassus and remove individuals involved in abuses. Kopassus, backed by the airborne brigades of Kostrad, remained the spearhead of the Indonesian army’s fighting force. Although, like Wellington’s troops, it sometimes frightened its own commanders in chief, its mystique as the force that held the nation together at moments of extreme peril was something Yudhoyono and his family circle were evidently as keen to preserve as anyone else in the military.

  The WikiLeaks cables reveal him saying that a resumption of ties with Kopassus was the key to the “strategic partnership” sought by George W. Bush’s administration. With his brother-in-law Pramono Edhie Wibowo taking a turn as the force’s commander, Yudhoyono felt able to give assurances of its transformed institutional culture. For one thing, all orders now had to be given in writing, which created an evidence trail of command responsibility. Things had been different in the past: the writer of a Kopassus history, author Ken Conboy, records Prabowo Subianto telling him in 1997: “Indonesia is the best country for conducting covert operations because there are no written orders.”

  The transition to American acceptance, however, was slowed when news got out in mid-2007 that the Kopassus Group 2, based near Yogyakarta, had feted Tommy Suharto, newly free after serving just five years of his fifteen-year sentence for the contract killing of the judge who had convicted him of fraud, at their anniversary party. “Officers interviewed by journalists after the event casually dismissed Suharto’s checkered past as unimportant,” the embassy reported.

  As late as October 2009, when a visit by the new US president, Barack Obama, was being planned, the standoff between Indonesia and the United States was unresolved. “Yudhoyono takes the issue seriously to the extent that he wonders how he can proceed with a Comprehensive Partnership with the United States if the United States does not treat Indonesia as a true partner,” presidential aide Dino Djalal (who later became his country’s ambassador in Washington) was reported as telling the embassy. Joint activities with the Kopassus Unit 81 were eventually cleared during Obama’s visit the next year.

  Yudhoyono also stuck by his old academy classmate, Syafrie Syamsuddin, despite a UN investigation putting him near the top of its recommended list for war crimes prosecution over the 1999 violence in East Timor, over his presence in Dili at the time of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, over his command of the Jakarta garrison during the 1998 violence, and over his alleged role in the murky side of the Aceh conflict. Syafrie had remained the military chief of information while Yudhoyono was coordinating minister and then became the vice minister (or administrative head) of the defense ministry throughout Yudhoyono’s presidency. He remained persona non grata in the United States, which was something of a handicap for Jakarta as it tried to develop a strategic partnership with the Americans. Ultimately, however, he was passed over by Yudhoyono in 2007 when he might have been made army chief.

  A telling episode took place in August 2009, when an East Timorese man named Martenus Bere came across the border from Indonesia to attend a wedding in his hometown, Suai. Ten years earlier Bere had led a militia group that, along with Indonesian army and police, had massacred priests and civilians who had gathered for safety in the town’s cathedral after the independence referendum. He was spotted, arrested, and taken to Dili. Timor’s prime minister, José Xanana Gusmão, came under heavy pressure from Yudhoyono to return Bere to Indonesia. He was duly handed over to the Indonesian embassy and allowed to leave.

  In 2008 members of the DPR initiated a bill to put military personnel under the jurisdiction of civilian courts for offenses under civil law. Initially, Yudhoyono seemed to be in favor. Then the executive swung against it. Certainly, there were sound reasons to have misgivings. The law would have handed responsibility for investigating crimes by soldiers to the police. Ongoing interforce rivalries and suspected turf wars over protection rackets, which sparked frequent street brawls between soldiers and police, were one thing. But with the police still widely involved in case fixing with prosecutors and judges, the potential for soldiers to be drawn into corrupt settlements was very real.

  The decision to stay with military justice did, however, create a need for the armed forces to demonstrate that they were serious about punishing abuses. In 2008 a court-martial gave jail terms to thirteen marines who had fired toward a crowd resisting eviction from their unit’s land near Surabaya, killing four civilians. The military police opened cases against two generals for misappropriating state property. One of them, a retired officer who had become a film actor, saw the arresting party off with a firearm but then died before his case came to court-martial in 2010. In 2013 a military court gave a four-year jail sentence to a former Kostrad chief, Djaja Suparman, for selling military land in Surabaya to a toll-road company in 1998 and pocketing some of the proceeds; the case is now under appeal.

  In March 2013 Kopassus again blotted its copybook. A sergeant attached to the Yogyakarta garrison in intelligence duties got into a late-night argument in a city nightclub with four toughs from the southeastern Nusatenggara islands. The four killed the soldier and were soon arrested by police. Three days later, eleven of the victim’s Kopassus comrades, disguised in ski masks and armed with AK-47s, forced their way into the city’s Cebongan prison. They threatened and beat twelve prison guards, two of whom required hospitalization, and then went to the cells and executed the four suspects. On the way out, they seized the prison’s closed-circuit television recordings.

  The case resulted in much stiffer punishments than those given in the Tim Mawar and Theys Eluay cases a decade or more earlier, with jail terms ranging from four to eleven years. Yet the sentences were widely seen as lighter than what could be expected for premeditated murder in civil law. In addition, the court-martial atmospherics caused much concern. The three judges were outranked by the defense officers. Several witnesses declined to testify. At no point was it explained why the Kopassus sergeant had been at the nightclub or what had sparked the fatal fight. Was he moonlighting as a security guard? Was he collecting intelligence of some sort? Or was he dealing drugs?

  Inside and outside the court milled hundreds of former soldiers and other muscular civilians, dressed in camouflage, from a group called the Sekber Keistimewaan (roughly, the Secretariat of Special Autonomy), a coalition of Yogyakarta royalist and paramilitary groups. They disrupted hearings with shouts praising the accused as “heroes” and “warriors,” locked the gates of the court compound, threatened civilian monitors, and shouted racist remarks at attendees from the home province of the victims. On being sentenced, the convicted ringleader vowed to serve his jail term and then resume the fight against premanisme (gangsterism). Clearly, training about human rights and the rule of law still had some way to go with Kopassus.

  Pr
ogress on the divestment of military businesses lagged until March 2008, eighteen months out from the legally stipulated deadline. A Ministry of Defense team had identified 1,520 businesses, but only a dozen were of any size. Many of the others were bankrupt. The vast majority were small-scale cooperatives and charitable foundations aimed at helping out soldiers and their families with cut-price household supplies and education fees.

  A respected accountant and stock market official previously on the board of the anticorruption commission, Erry Riyana Hardjapamekas, was brought in to sell off the larger concerns and to set rules for the smaller ones. He found twenty-three TNI-related foundations, with fifty-three associated enterprises, plus 1,098 cooperatives with a gross value of about $320 million at the end of 2007. About 40 percent of the 8,493 staff running the cooperatives were active-duty soldiers. In addition, about 25,000 hectares of military land was being farmed out for commercial use as mines, golf courses, markets and stores, factories, offices, storage facilities, animal keeping, meeting halls, gas stations, car showrooms, restaurants, hotels, television relay stations, mosques, public roads, hospitals and clinics, primary, secondary, and tertiary schools, and residential complexes.

  Hardjapamekas recommended selling off the enterprises, putting the land under the control of the Ministry of Finance, and setting up a chain of civilian PX stores to provide goods for military families without active soldiers being employed. The divestment was reported to have been completed by the end of 2009, but few details were released. Anecdotally, it appeared that many prime military-owned assets, such as Jakarta’s Borobudur Hotel, had already been sold to businessmen close to army leaders, such as the property, hotel, and entertainment industry tycoon Tomy Winata, as had some landholdings of the Suharto family.

  The civilian defense minister during Yudhoyono’s first term, a respected political science professor named Juwono Sudarsono, had been steadily working on the military budget to compensate for the loss of irregular income. The defense allocation rose steadily from $2.2 billion in 2004 and by 2014 was around $8 billion. Sudarsono pulled more civilian talent into his ministry and gradually assumed more influence over force structure and equipment procurement. His ministry developed a doctrine of the “minimum essential force” necessary for Indonesia’s defense and gradually got it accepted by the uniformed services. The initial focuses were on improving airlift capability, so that forces and supplies could be quickly moved around the country, on reviving the navy’s maritime security capability, and on building the army’s ability to respond swiftly to the natural disasters that frequently hit the nation.

  By 2007, resources were being found, somehow, for new strike capability. The air force gained spare parts to refurbish its largely grounded F-16 fighter squadron and ordered a squadron of newer models. On a trip to Moscow, Yudhoyono accepted credits worth about $1 billion to order a small number of the Sukhoi-30 fighters. Other orders were to follow over coming years; in August 2013 the defense vice minister, Syafrie Syamsuddin, announced a five-year weaponry modernization program costing $13.2 billion. The reported components included twelve of a version of a German-designed submarine to be built with South Korea, Dutch frigates, trainer jets, new-model Hercules and C-395 transport aircraft, and a fleet of eight Apache attack helicopters, declared to be for use against piracy in areas like the Malacca Strait.

  Not to be outdone, the army spent $287 million to buy 104 used models of the German-made Leopard-2 main battle tank, as well as about fifty heavy armored cars, which Syamsuddin announced would be parked around Jakarta to “defend the capital,” including some in a new underground car park under Merdeka Square. Military analysts were baffled by the deal, since the 62-ton tank was too big to put on any existing air force or navy transport to take to the Indonesian peripheries or to cross most of the country’s bridges. Its most likely use would be to intimidate crowds in Jakarta, should riots on the scale of 1998 ever break out again. Prestige was also seen as a factor: Singapore had also bought the Leopard-2, and Malaysia, a similar tank from Poland.

  The US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the Indonesian air force was the most willing service to join supply-and-exercise arrangements with the United States; the “truculent” navy was the most wary. The diversity of sourcing reflected a lesson the Indonesian military had drawn from its experiences of the previous decades: it would try to minimize the risk of being immobilized by any further arms embargoes, particularly from the West.

  But what is the army for? Agus Widjojo’s question still haunts the 340,000-strong force. The legislated tasks “other than war” scarcely keep it busy, apart from after major natural disasters. Involvement in UN peacekeeping operations has been a valued activity, with about 1,000 personnel assigned to the UN force in Lebanon and contingents sent to the Congo and elsewhere. But rather than accepting a sharp cut in numbers, the army has turned back to its traditional doctrine of people’s warfare, embodied in its “territorial” arm.

  On being installed as the armed forces’ chief in December 2006, army general Djoko Santoso pledged to work on “professionalizing” the military but added that professionalism, in the Indonesian context, meant not only tactics and control but also its identity as a “people’s” and a national army. In November 2008 he declared that the territorial system, which had been undergoing dissolution, had been “reactivated” after the second Bali bombing, in order to help the police combat terrorism. Although the noncommissioned officers, or babinsa, at the lower levels of this system had only one role—intelligence collection—he claimed that they had proven effective in this role: in one case, they had tipped off the authorities to some non-Indonesian terrorists hiding in a mosque. Being permanently resident in local communities, these babinsa were able to detect in local residents’ daily behavior evidence pointing to nonlocal elements. This program had been so successful that terrorists were no longer staying in the villages, Santoso claimed. (The general was wrong on the latter point, as the police continued to find Jemaah Islamiyah elements hiding in villages across Java in subsequent years.)

  Widjojo sees little use for the babinsa. “If we go to the villages they are idle,” he says. “What mission or task can you give them? Counter-terrorism—what can they do? They note down how many bearded people pass the Kodim headquarters? There’s no legality of how a TNI soldier can act. And if we force them and give them expectations as though they can act, we will push them into problems. Just like we have pushed them in various instances before, including in East Timor.”

  But even the civilian defense minister at the time, Sudarsono, was sharing similar concerns with his uniformed counterpart, Santoso. He pointed out to American visitors the new threats from nonstate actors and the importance therefore of the Security Forces having the cooperation of the civilian population.

  One corollary was that the army, if it wanted to win support across the whole diverse nation, had to reduce the historical dominance of the Javanese in its officer corps. In this, Sudarsono’s efforts appear successful. In 1970 recruits to the armed forces academy comprised 58 percent Javanese (the Javanese proportion of the national population was then 51 percent) and 15 percent Sundanese (from West Java). A 2009 study by researcher Riefqi Muna found that 39 percent of the new recruits were Javanese (by then 42 percent of the population), while the Sundanese component had dropped back to 8 percent, even though they made up 15 percent of the population.

  The usefulness of the army in fighting terrorism and unrest is now a constant refrain of successive armed forces chiefs, while the police continue to demonstrate that, at least with terrorism, they are coping quite well. In cases of serious civil unrest, the police have been less adroit. Particularly where religious or sectarian clashes are involved, police have hesitated to intervene, have sometimes ended up charging the victims of attack, or have been overwhelmed by the scale of rioting. Their ground commanders are reluctant to admit losing control. Any requests to call
out the army would have to be passed to the police command, across to the president or his coordinating security minister, and back down the army’s chain of command.

  As the second decade of the century began, a series of attacks on the minority Ahmadiyah sect (regarded as heretical by many orthodox Muslims) and on Christian proselytizers for alleged blasphemy brought the issue to the fore. Colonels from both forces were sacked, and generals had their appointments to regional commands cut short, before Yudhoyono’s government set down rules allowing provincial governors to call out the army whether or not requested by the police. But in a democracy, the use of armed soldiers must surely be the very last resort. A better answer is a well-trained police force, which should be able to use graduated methods of nonlethal crowd control, and whose local commanders should feel confident enough to call early for reinforcements if they are needed.

  Still, the drumbeat behind the army’s territorial role has grown louder. In 2000, the army announced a new scheme called TNI Manunggal Membangun Desa (Army Focus on Village Development), a name that recalled the ABRI Masuk Desa (Armed Forces in the Villages) program during the New Order, a version of the civic-action doctrine that became intensely resented for the intimidation that came with it. Army engineers were volunteered for new road building in Papua. New kodam (regional commands) have been created, one in Aceh and two in Kalimantan, each with its own hierarchy of “organic” posts stationed down to the villages.

  The army has not eschewed the use of civilian militias to apply violence and collect intelligence at a remove. Of course, this is not unusual in counterinsurgency campaigns: it became a feature of American, Australian, and perhaps other allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Widjojo points out, it has spread to Indonesia’s political parties, which all deploy various satgas (taskforce) or pemuda (youth) wings dressed in camouflage uniforms for their members’ security.