Election
2008
see also
TAKE
ACTION:
Question
Newly Elected Members of Congress on U.S. Policy toward East
Timor and Indonesia
Where the Presidential Candidates Stand
The East Timor and Indonesia Action
Network (ETAN) is non-partisan and does not and will not
support any political party or candidates. Below we
summarize the positions and history of a number of U.S.
presidential candidates on some issues of concern to ETAN as
they relate to Indonesia and East Timor (Timor-Leste). ETAN
welcomes additional information and any corrections. Write
us at etan@etan.org.
Senator Barack Obama (Democratic Party)
Obama lived in Indonesia for four
years during his childhood, arriving in 1967 as a six-year
old. He has emphasized the importance of his youth
experiences in Southeast Asia,
stating that they were “[p]robably the strongest
experience I have in foreign relations.” In his book The
Audacity of Hope, Obama points out that “for
the past sixty years the fate of [Indonesia] has been
directly tied to U.S. foreign policy.” This policy
has included “the tolerance and occasional encouragement of
tyranny, corruption, and environmental degradation when it
served our interests,” as well as “our tireless promotion of
American-style capitalism and multinational corporations.” In his earlier book, Dreams from My
Father, Obama describes Suharto’s
seizure of power: “Word was that the CIA had played a
part in the coup, although nobody knew for sure. More
certain was the fact that after the coup the military had
swept the countryside for supposed Communist sympathizers.
The death toll was anybody’s guess: a few hundred thousand,
maybe, half a million. Even the smart guys at the Agency had
lost count.”
Obama serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and
its sub-committee for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Susan
E. Rice, a top Obama foreign policy advisor
has said that in an Obama administration, “[y]ou will
see an understanding that Indonesia is one of the most
important countries in the world.”
Members of Obama’s
“senior working group on national security” have
mixed
records. Madeline Albright was Secretary of State during
the second Clinton administration and Tony Lake was National
Security Advisor, and during their tenures
activists continually struggled to move the U.S. policy to
restrict support to the Indonesian military. The U.S.
temporarily cutoff military assistance to Indonesia in 1999,
as its military and proxy militias destroyed East Timor, but
only after a massive outcry. By the middle of the next year,
some military contacts resumed. Former Senator David
Boren, another senior advisor,
sat on the board of Phillips
Petroleum – which was involved in drilling for oil in the
Timor Gap during the Indonesian occupation – during the
1990s and early 2000s. During an official visit to Indonesia
in 1992, Jakarta refused him permission to go to East Timor.
Other Obama advisors include Merrill Anthony (“Tony”) McPeak,
retired Air Force Chief of Staff, who
oversaw the transfer of fighter planes to Indonesia in
the early 1990s. Richard Holbrooke has a long history of
involvement with U.S./Indonesian relations. In his role as
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific
Affairs during the Carter administration,
Holbrooke was the
major architect of U.S. policy toward Indonesia and East
Timor during the late 1970s. At that time, U.S. military
assistance to the Suharto regime increased. In 1980
Holbrooke declared that Indonesia was “perhaps one of the
greatest nations in the world.”
Later, Holbrooke, as UN
ambassador under President Clinton, supported the
UN-organized referendum and argued for Indonesian
accountability for human rights violations in East Timor and
elsewhere, but when asked he has refused to acknowledge his
own role in the occupation of East Timor.
Obama
inserted language in the 2006 Foreign Affairs
Authorization bill calling for resolution to the conflict in
Aceh. He
has stated that as president he would create a “Shared
Security Partnership Program,” which would “provide $5
billion over three years for counter-terrorism cooperation
with countries around the world, including information
sharing, funding for training, operations, border security,
anti-corruption programs, technology, and targeting
terrorist financing.” While the program will “focus on
helping our partners succeed without repressive tactics,” it
is unclear how this will function with an unreformed and
corrupt Indonesian security apparatus that maintains a
deeply entrenched culture of impunity.
Obama has yet to speak to calls for an international
tribunal for crimes against humanity committed by Indonesia
against the East Timorese.
Senator John
McCain (Republican Party)
McCain was first elected
to the Senate in 1986. In 2006,
he argued that Indonesia “can be a
great force for peace and stability in the region, if they
develop along the lines that we want them to,” as well a
regional counter to China. He has recently
called for an “elevated partnership with Indonesia,”
though he has yet to clarify what that means.
McCain
receives advice from former Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger, who along with President Gerald Ford gave
Indonesian president Suharto the “green light” to invade
East Timor in 1975. McCain describes Kissinger
as one of his heroes.
McCain, in
a 2007 article in Foreign Policy wrote that
“[t]he United States should set the standard for trade
liberalization in Asia,” by “…institutionalizing economic
partnerships with…Indonesia” in building toward “an
ambitious Pacific-wide effort to liberalize trade.”
In November 1991, he
signed a letter with 51 other Senators expressing human
rights and humanitarian concerns about East Timor following
the Santa Cruz massacre. In June 1994, he voted to oppose
a provision that would require that any lethal military
equipment supplied to Indonesia “shall expressly state the
understanding that the equipment may not be used in East
Timor.” The motion to end consideration of the provision
passed 59-35.
McCain has yet to address calls for an international
tribunal for crimes against humanity committed by Indonesia
against the East Timorese.
A
September 23
op-ed in The Australian newspaper on U.S.-Australia
alliance does not mention by name Australia's neighbors East
Timor and Indonesia.
Cynthia
McKinney (Green Party)
McKinney served 12 years in the House of Representatives as
a Democrat from Georgia. She is running for the presidency
on the Green Party ticket. She has a long-history of
supporting human rights, and has been a supporter of justice
and human rights in East Timor. She circulated information
about Indonesia and East Timor to her colleagues and signed
letters and
co-sponsored resolutions and legislation in support of
human rights and opposing military assistance to Indonesia.
During the 1990s McKinney worked to pass the Arms Transfer
Code of Conduct, which would have restricted weapons sales
to regimes that regularly violate human rights. In May 1998,
she was the chief sponsor of the Indonesian Human Rights
Before Military Assistance Act, which would have barred
weapons and ammunition transfers to Indonesia pending
Presidential certification that “the Government of Indonesia
has been elected in free and fair elections, does not
repress civilian political expression, and has made
substantial improvement in human rights conditions in
Indonesia, East Timor, and Irian Jaya (West Papua).” In 2000
she co-sponsored the
East Timor Transition to Independence Act. In 2000 she
supported
resolution 395, which condemned the attack on UN aid
workers in West Timor, condemned the role of Indonesia in
organizing the systematic violence that took place against
the East Timorese in 1999, and called for restrictions on
U.S. military support until Indonesia met human rights
conditions. In 2002 she signed
an international letter from women’s rights activists
calling for an international criminal tribunal for East
Timor.
The Green Party
platform says that “our government to prohibit all arms
sales to foreign nations and likewise prohibit grants to
impoverished and undemocratic nations unless the money is
targeted on domestic, non-military needs.”
Ralph
Nader (Independent)
During his presidential campaign in 2000, Nader was asked
what is foreign policy would look like. He explained, “We
[would] basically engage in a lot of preventive diplomacy, a
lot of preventive defense. Preventive diplomacy would have
dealt with situations like Indonesia, instead of the
Kissinger diplomacy that led to East Timor and a lot of
other travails there. The same with Vietnam. We seem to
always side with the dictators and the oligarchs and never
with the peasants and the workers.” Nader’s campaign points
out that, if elected, he “would cut the military budget to a
level needed to protect the country.”
Bob
Barr (Libertarian Party)
Barr was a Republican representative from Georgia from 1995
until 2003. He is running for President for the Libertarian
Party. Barr’s position on foreign policy is that “[t]he
American purpose is to provide a strong national defense,
not to engage in nation building or to launch foreign
crusades, no matter how seemingly well-intentioned.” The
Libertarian Party is highly critical of foreign aid. Its
platform calls for
an “end [to] the
current U.S. government policy of foreign intervention,
including military and economic aid.” In a
May 2007 article, Barr wrote that President Bush
stretched this authority beyond reason in late 2004 when he
ordered it lowered in remembrance of the thousands killed by
the Indian Ocean tsunami in Indonesia and other countries.
Barr’s campaign states that they have “no specific position”
on either U.S. military assistance to Indonesia, nor
accountability for crimes committed against the East
Timorese by Indonesia.
Brian
Moore (Socialist Party)
Moore calls for
closing all U.S.
military facilities that train foreign military and
paramilitary personnel and an end U.S. arms sales in the
world.