By Slobodan Lekic The Associated Press
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri travels to Moscow this month to seek the Kremlin's help in modernizing the country's increasingly obsolete 300,000-member armed forces.
She is also likely to open the way for Russian companies to vie for lucrative deals in the oil and gas sector, long dominated by U.S. and British resource giants such as Exxon Mobil and BP.
Indonesia's Foreign Ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa said Megawati's meeting with President Vladimir Putin, slated for April 21, will touch on the Iraq crisis.
But other diplomats say that issue will serve primarily to bring the two closer together on bottom-line issues such as trade and arms sales.
Indonesia relied on Soviet military assistance in the 1950s under Megawati's father and founding President Sukarno, but these were severed after the anti-communist General Suharto seized power in 1965. The U.S. quickly became the Southeast Asian country's main weapons supplier, and annual arms sales peaked at $400 million in the 1980s.
In 1991, however, the U.S. Congress banned this after Indonesian troops killed hundreds of civilians in East Timor.
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