With the rupiah plunging to 16,750 to the US dollar last week and prices jumping, sometimes twice a day, the political and social consequences of the currency crisis in Indonesia are starting to be felt. Green Left Weekly spoke to MAX LANE, coordinator of Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor and Democratic Socialist foreign affairs spokesperson about the impact of the IMF-imposed austerity package on ordinary Indonesians.
Most people in Jakarta report there is a kind of eerie quiet. Prices of most basic commodities have been going up from between 20-60%, depending on the commodity. Lay-offs have been more or less restricted to the construction industry. It is clear the regime is doing everything it can to ensure there is no price explosion and no move into hyper-inflation in the middle of the Moslem fasting month.
Question: How is the regime trying to do this?
A lot of pressure is being put onto businesses not to raise prices. This is being done by the regime talking to business directly, but also through the "I love rupiah" media campaign which is calling on people to rally behind the economy as a kind of patriotic duty. But it is more fear of being blamed for the next big drop in the rupiah that is influencing business to limit price rises.
Question: But surely with the rupiah losing 75% of its value, the cost of imported goods must be outrageously high for most businesses?
Absolutely. There are many reports that wholesalers of consumer goods are running out of stock and do not have the money to buy more. There are strong rumours that two of the three main supermarket chains have stopped paying their bills. When their stock runs out, they will probably have to close.
Factories are low on imported raw materials. Some factories can't even get locally produced raw materials, like palm oil, because the plantations are hoarding such things to sell on the international market later on. They want to sell it for dollars rather than for a free-falling rupiah. Under new IMF-enforced deregulation they will be able to do this, ignoring the needs of the local market. Inflationary pressure is building up under the lid the government has imposed during the fasting month. But the lid must come off some time.
Question: Can the government keep this up, even until January 30 when the Lebaran celebrations end?
Who knows? They are helped a bit by the fact that much of the retail sector is owned by Indonesians of Chinese descent. In a situation like this, Indonesian Chinese always fear agitation by right-wing Moslem groups who use the Chinese as scapegoats for problems. Many Indonesian Chinese won't raise prices or close their shops, especially in the fasting month, for fear they will become targets of right-wing Moslem agitation. But they cannot go on selling their stock at a loss for ever.
Question: What about unemployment? Have lay-offs started yet?
Lay-offs in the construction sector started almost immediately the rupiah started to fall last year. At least 2.5 million casual day labourers have been without work for several weeks now. The dictatorship is offering a 70% discount on one-way rail fares out of Jakarta to try to get these people back to their villages and out of the hothouse atmosphere of Jakarta.
There have also been some attempts to provide jobs in local government activities. Construction lay-offs have also been widely reported in the provincial city newspapers.
So far, lay-offs in manufacturing have been kept down. Employers are too scared of riots and attacks on the factories if they did this during the fasting month. There are usually many militant strikes, even in normal times, when employers are late paying the fasting month bonus of a month's wages. If lay-offs happened now, the whole of Jakarta would go up in flames.
But when raw materials run out, the factories will have to close. Then the lay-offs will not be able to be postponed.
Question: Surely the regime must be trying to do something about this?
It has appealed to Japan and Germany for help in bailing out private sector companies. Both the Japanese and German governments have said they will help with loans. But the several hundred million dollars on offer will not be enough.
The reality is that the Indonesian economy is going to shrink. Official growth rate estimates are now 0% and non-government economists are predicting a growth rate of minus 3%.
Contraction of the economy is the order of the day. This is the result of the international economic situation, of massive over-capacity in output compared to the available markets. Such is the madness of capitalism. Hundreds of millions of people are in want, in the First and Third worlds, and the international capitalist economic police, the IMF, say the economy must be contracted!
Question: So how are the people reacting?
>From all reports, there's an eerie feeling of being in the calm before the
storm. There is massive confusion as to what is happening. Nobody could
believe that the rupiah could fall to 16,750 per US dollar as it did on
January 22.
There have been quite a few protest actions, although still small scale. At least three protests took place at the parliament between January 20 and January 24, and there have been small actions outside a number of banks and some retailers in Jakarta. There have also been small riots in some east Javanese cities against price rises, and attacks on shops. But the full brunt of the economic crisis hasn't quite hit people yet. This is more likely after January 30.
Question: Because it is the end of the fasting month?
Yes, and shops will test out raising their prices. But also because some other new policies will be implemented. Electricity prices will rise 6% for a start. It has been announced that the first cut in the fuel subsidy will be in April, after the rubber-stamp parliament meets to appoint Suharto. But there will be an inflationary impact as merchants prepare themselves for the big increase in transport costs. By February or March, many shops and factories will be running out of stock.
Question: What about the presidential appointment. What is the situation now?
Suharto has accepted the ruling Golkar party's nomination. The puppet Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) has said it will support him and so has the Moslem United Development Party. It is clear that the military, currently dominated by officers loyal to Suharto who are also represented in the parliament, will support him.
There is still some uncertainty over who Suharto will indicate is his preferred vice-presidential candidate. This has become a sensitive issue as there is a common view that the vice-president may end up as Suharto's successor, although that is by no means certain.
Question: Will Jakarta remain calm in the lead up to the parliamentary session to appoint Suharto?
I don't know. There are an increasing number of groups either publicly calling for Suharto to be replaced or stating their support for people such in Megawati Sukarnoputri and Amine Rais from the Muhammidiyah, the middle-class Moslem welfare organisation. It is not yet clear whether this will galvanise into a larger mass showing of support on the streets.
In the meantime, the regime and the military are very concerned that the radical underground, mainly the People's Democratic Party (PRD), may try to organise mass actions and other protests.
The military have threatened to "cut to pieces" anybody trying to disturb the atmosphere in the run up to the election. They know the PRD has developed a strong base in the worker and urban poor areas, and more than 14,000 extra police have been mobilised into these areas.
Extra military personnel have been stationed in and around densely populated multi-story slum buildings, places suspected of being used as safe houses and organising centres.
And from about two weeks ago, the regime has begun a propaganda campaign against the National Democracy Struggle Committee (KNPD), accusing it of being a PRD front group. This campaign heightened after a KNPD press conference calling for a new, broad anti-dictatorship coalition was attended, not only by the KNPD chairperson, Nur Hikmah, but also by the more radical leaders from the Megawati PDI mass base.
2) SECRET US TRAINING FOR INDONESIA'S KILLERS
By Allan Nairn
JAKARTA -- Activists and observers here speculate that the country -- reeling from hunger and mass lay-offs promoted by the IMF -- is moving toward social upheaval and perhaps a change of regime. At the dumps in Bantar Gebang, the ranks of scavengers have soared as sacked day labourers pick through garbage to survive. In the midst of this, western reporters are casting Washington as a champion of reform because it is twisting Suharto's arm to implement a 50-point IMF plan that includes some popular clauses that cut against the Suharto family's vast corruption. Largely unknown is that the Clinton administration, against an understanding with Congress, is shoring up the Indonesian military against its own people.
The Suharto regime counts on its armed forces, ABRI, to survive, and is intensifying the grip of the police state with each week of crisis.
The US and the IMF are using the crisis to push Indonesia from protected capitalism, crony-style, to a harsher, multinational and corporate variety based on submission to global markets. The IMF plan means wage restraint, mass lay-offs, "more flexible" labour markets and the phased-in end of all existing food and fuel subsidies for the poor.
Stanley Roth, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and an IMF booster, says: "We're going to see tremendous hardship in the Indonesian countryside as millions of unemployed go back to their villages".
A senior US official here calls the IMF the "lance point" of US policy and says that if Suharto doesn't go along he will be "committing suicide". But regardless of what happens to the dictator, US policy is grounded on maintaining control inside Indonesia through backing and strengthening ABRI.
The current planning, according to officials familiar with Pentagon, White House and State Department discussions, envisions a post-Suharto regime perhaps headed by a civilian or civilians but under which ABRI keeps its vast apparatus and "dual function" security-political role. Sources here say that Washington has queried Megawati Sukarno -- the most popular opposition figure -- on whether she would accept an ABRI vice-president or a candidate approved by the army.
Indonesians know well that ABRI is the co-manager with Suharto of state repression and the author, under his command, of two of the most intensive slaughters of the postwar era (the massacre of a million Indonesians when Suharto and ABRI seized control starting in 1965, and the post-1975 extermination of one-third of the populace of occupied East Timor, some 200,000 people).
The US collaborated with the 1965 slaughter, providing a list of 5000 communists and dissidents, most of whom were then assassinated. The US approved the East Timor invasion, blocked the UN Security Council from enforcement action and, after the 1991 massacre in Dili (which I survived but at least 271 did not), helped the ABRI with damage control.
On December 10, 1991, according to a State Department cable, the US convened a secret meeting in Surabaya and assured ABRI that Washington did "not believe that friends should abandon friends in times of adversity". That same sentiment is now being reiterated in Jakarta.
Since the crisis began, senior Pentagon and service officials have flown here to meet top ABRI officers at least two or three times a month. When defence secretary William Cohen visited in January, he refused to call for ABRI restraint in dealing with demonstrations.
Noting that many weapons sales have been curtailed in the years since the Dili massacre, many foreign observers, the press and some in Congress have wrongly assumed the White House is distancing itself from ABRI. In reality, those cut-offs, which included fighter plane and small-arms sales, were imposed on two recalcitrant administrations by a bipartisan coalition in Congress responding to grassroots organising pressure.
The cut-off that most stunned Jakarta was the vote by Congress, in the [northern] autumn of 1992, to end the military training that Indonesian officers received in the US under the International Military Education and Training program (IMET).
After a fierce counterattack by Jakarta and US corporate partners of Suharto, the IMET was partially restored in 1994 and 1995, as a smaller program called E-IMET that purported to instruct ABRI in human rights. After 1995 Congress agreed in its foreign aid appropriations bills that the only training Indonesia could get would be E-IMET-style classroom instruction.
But newly obtained Pentagon documents and interviews with key US officials indicate that, unknown to Congress and unremarked by the US press, the US military has been training ABRI in a broad array of lethal tactics.
Known as the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET), it dwarfs IMET in size and scope, and is being intensified. Unlike the E-IMET stateside classroom lectures, this operation has involved at least 36 exercises with fully armed US combat troops flying or sailing into Indonesia.
The US participants have included Green Berets, Air Force commandos and Marines. The ABRI trainees have run the gamut from Suharto's presidential guard to KOSTRAD, the key Army Strategic Command that anchors the regime in central Jakarta.
By far the main recipient of the special US training has been a force legendary for specialising in torture, disappearances and night raids on civilian homes. Of the 28 Army/Air Force exercises known to have been conducted since 1992, Pentagon documents indicate that 20 have involved the dreaded KOPASSUS Red Berets.
Asked about KOPASSUS, a leading Indonesian human rights monitor called its work "spying, terror and counter-terror", meaning that it stages violent provocations. He said KOPASSUS battalions from Aceh and West Papua were relocated to Jakarta two months ago and have recently been deployed to contain street demonstrations along with units of ABRI's regional command.
His group believes that KOPASSUS has two clandestine jails (in Cibubur and Bogor) for detaining and questioning dissidents they have abducted and "disappeared". A knowledgeable US official confirms that KOPASSUS has been implicated in torture and civilian killings in West Papua, Aceh and occupied East Timor.
The US exercises for KOPASSUS in the period since the Dili massacre have included "sniper level II" (1993), "demolitions and air operations" (1993) and "close quarters combat" (1994).
The last of these was performed after the State Department, to stave off stronger action by Congress, had imposed the ban on the sale of small arms to Indonesia.
Ensuing KOPASSUS sessions covered special air operations, air assaults and advanced sniper techniques.
On July 27, 1996, Jakarta erupted in riots, after ABRI-backed paramilitaries raided Megawati Sukarno's headquarters, leaving at least 60 people listed as missing. In its wake, ABRI launched a crackdown and intimidation campaign against non-governmental organisations.
In the midst of this, KOPASSUS was given training in psy ops by a US team flown in from Special Operations Command-Pacific.
>From then until late 1997 there were seven more KOPASSUS exercises, one
(mortar training) focusing on the unit of Colonel Slamat Sidabutar, an East
Timor occupation commander whose troops have conducted torture sessions
that were photographed and later published abroad.
The US Marines have trained the Indonesian Denjaka Counter-terrorism Force in demolition and small weapons instruction as well, and also run a course for the Indonesian First Infantry Brigade on small boat operations, reconnaissance, surveillance and raids.
As the financial crisis hit and protest grew last fall, KODAM Jaya, one of the main anti-demonstration forces, and the Infantry Training Centre received 26 days of instruction from the US Army in military operations in urban terrain.
Reached by phone at the US embassy, Colonel Bob Humberson, who coordinates the training programs, said: "We want to make sure they know the right way to do it by minimising casualties and with proper treatment of the enemy or unidentified personnel".
Asked what enemy might be found on the urban streets of Indonesia, he said the training was designed to repel "an enemy from outside". He contended that since some Indonesian troops had served in Bosnia with the UN, this kind of urban training would make troops ready for action there.
Humberson said that none of the urban terrain schooling had to do with crowd control and that all the exercises fit the guidelines of the E-IMET program.
His aide, Major Rick Thomas, called the exercises "very tame" and said all were approved by the State Department. Thomas estimated that for the remainder of 1998 there would be 20 exercises, including smaller scale exchanges of experts.
The US focus on KOPASSUS seems to be part of a systematic effort to build it up. It has also cemented links with its recent commander, General Prabowo.
Prabowo is Suharto's son-in-law, the Indonesian business associate (through his wife) of Merrill Lynch and one of the key sponsors of the US-Indonesia Society, an influential pro-Suharto US front group launched in 1994 and backed by ABRI, US corporations and former Pentagon, State Department and CIA officials. Prabowo is also Indonesia's most notorious field commander.
When I first visited East Timor in 1990, he had recently chaired a meeting in which the army had openly debated whether to assassinate future Nobel Peace laureate Bishop Carlos Belo. Today, Prabowo is the KOSTRAD commander, an often-touted Suharto successor and the recipient of a steady stream of high-level US visitors.
Assistant secretary of state Stanley Roth has dined frequently with him recently. When Secretary Cohen visited, he raised eyebrows in Jakarta by going to KOPASSUS headquarters. Spending three hours by Prabowo's side, he watched as the US-trained killers executed manoeuvres for their sponsor from Washington.
[Veteran journalist Allan Nairn was banned from Indonesia as "a threat to national security" after he was injured while attempting to stop the 1991 East Timor massacre. He has since campaigned against US support for the Suharto military regime and is now organising Justice for All, a grassroots human rights group.]
[Reprinted by permission from the March 30 issue of the US Nation. To subscribe for one year (47 issues), send US$52 to: The Nation, PO Box 37074, Boone, IA 50037-2074, USA. Outside the US, add US$55 for air mail or US$18 for surface mail.]
3) HISTORIC CONFERENCE BEGINS NEW ERA IN LEFT COOPERATION
By Max Lane
SYDNEY -- More than 750 people participated in a historic event, the first Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference, held here April 10-13. The conference was characterised by an electric atmosphere of solidarity and struggle, with both in-depth discussions in workshops and plenary sessions and also packed-out evening cultural and solidarity events.
On the last day, more than half the conference also mobilised for a 7.00am solidarity rally with the waterside workers picketing outside Darling Harbour docks.
In addition to Australian activists, there were 67 representatives from Asian, Pacific, European and United States organisations.
A delegation of Aboriginal speakers came from the Capricornia Lands Council, the Sydney Metropolitan Lands Council, the Kumarangk coalition of South Australia and the Canberra Tent Embassy. A representative of the Torres Strait Islanders also read protest poems to the conference.
There were intense discussions among the international and local participants on a wide range of issues, including the nature of the economic crisis in Asia, the appropriate responses from popular movements, the developing negative role of many non-government organisations, struggles against the military dictatorships of Indonesia and Burma, self-determination struggles in East Timor, Tahiti, Kanaky, Burma, Aceh, West Papua and Bougainville and the role of the women's movement in the struggles of the region.
International participants came from the Japanese Communist Party; the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions; the Sanlakas national democratic federation, the Union for Socialist Ideas and Action (BISIG), the Women's Health organisation, the socialist youth Kamalayan, the Akbayan peoples party, Initiatives for International Dialogue, all from the Philippines; the Thai Assembly for the Poor; the Malaysian People's Party; the Singapore Workers Party; the Singapore Democratic Party; the Indonesian People's Democratic Party (PRD); the Free Aceh Movement; Fretilin; the All Burma Students Democratic Federation; the All Burma Students Democratic Organisation; Karen and Mon representatives; the Cambodian Documentation Centre; the Cambodian Women's Development Agency; the Pakistani Labour Party; the Sri Lankan New Socialist Party; the Communist Party of India-ML (Liberation); Melanesian Solidarity from Papua New Guinea; the Bougainville Interim Government; the New Zealand Alliance and NewLabour Party; Maori representatives from the New Zealand NGO Corso; the Polynesian Liberation Front from Tahiti; and the Free West Papua Movement.
The conference also received a special video message of solidarity from Jose Ramos Horta, Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The New Zealand East Timor Independence Committee also sent solidarity greetings.
>From outside the Asia Pacific region there were representatives from
Solidarity, a US socialist organisation; Indonesia Alert!, a support
magazine for the Indonesian democratic movement; the Party of Democratic
Socialism of Germany; the Revolutionary Communist League of France; the
United Left in Spain; and the Norwegian Indonesian and East Timor Committee.
A representative of the organisation of Indonesians in the Netherlands, the Coordinating Movement in Support of the Peoples Resistance, also attended. The conference also received solidarity messages from the Socialist Party of the Netherlands.
A conference highlight was the speech by Dorotea Wilson, a member of the National Directorate of the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua.
Academic researchers and commentators from Malaysia and Sri Lanka and journalists from Japan also attended the conference.
The conference was organised under the auspices of the Asia Pacific Institute for Democratisation and Development (API-DD) and hosted by the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia.
New beginning
The conference represented the first step in building a network of progressive organisations throughout the region.
There was an unprecedented exchange of information between organisations and individuals. Many major political organisations met for the first time or engaged in their first in-depth exchanges. Many new relationships were established.
At the end of the conference the Pakistani Labour Party, the CPI-ML and the New Socialist Party of Sri Lanka announced that a conference of all left parties in south Asia would be held at the end of 1998. No such gathering has ever taken place before, and the idea was directly facilitated by the Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference.
Also at the conference, a gathering formalised the composition of the API-DD.
The group's council began with a membership of representatives from the Malaysian People's Party, Sanlakas and BISIG, the People's Democratic Party of Indonesia, the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia, the New Zealand Alliance and the New Socialist Party of Sri Lanka.
It will now expand to include a representative of the Labour Party of Pakistan and the Indian Institute of Marxist Studies, which is under the umbrella of the CPI-ML, and Professor Suthy Pratasert, a radical political economist from Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.
The council decided that its first tasks were to further expand the institute's membership, to build the communications infrastructure to allow a better exchange of information between all progressive parties and movements in the region and to prepare for a gathering of party and movement representatives for more in-depth working discussions.
International solidarity
Important practical steps were taken in carrying out international solidarity with the Australian waterside workers under attack by the Howard government, the National Farmers Federation and Patrick Stevedores.
A representative of the PRD read a statement of support for the MUA, and the conference passed a strong motion condemning the Howard government for its anti-worker attacks. More than $1000 was collected and presented to the MUA picketers at Darling Harbour when conference participants rallied at site.
Speakers from the DSP, Sanlakas, the PRD, the Sandinistas, the Pakistani Labour Party, the New Zealand Alliance and US Solidarity addressed the rally. Jake Haub, secretary of the Darling Harbour MUA rank-and-file committee, responded to the solidarity speeches.
Later in the conference, a meeting between several Asian and Pacific leaders, industrial organisers from the DSP and Jim Donovan, secretary of the NSW branch of the MUA, confirmed that there would be solidarity actions around the region. The first of these actions took place on April 13 in Manila, in the form of a picket outside the Australian embassy. Other actions are already being planned in Pakistan.
April 24 Indonesia action
Solidarity with the PRD in Indonesia and the East Timorese resistance was a special feature of the conference. Several workshops and panels discussed the situation in both countries and worked out plans for campaigns in Australia and internationally.
The socialist youth organisation Resistance announced a national mobilisation of students outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra on April 24. The protest has already been supported by numerous students representative councils around Australia and the National Union of Students.
The conference was the venue for launching the Indonesian People's Power fund.
The fund, organised by Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor (ASIET), will provide financial assistance to the Indonesian democratic underground, mainly the PRD. Within the first 24 hours, $1500 was raised from conference participants.
Educational material has been produced, including leaflets and new protest postcards, to spread information about the situation in Indonesia, including the new phenomenon of disappearances of political activists. The first funds collected will be publicly handed over to the PRD outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra on April 24.
(From Green Weekly East Asia archives at: http://www.peg.apc.org/~asiet/articles.htm)
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)