Quotes of the Day

It's midnight at the top ten karaoke bar in Banda Aceh, and the portly drunkard everyone respectfully calls "Commander" is on the mike. "Indonesia," he wails between gulps of Guinness. "You are the red of my blood, the white of my bone." His bleary rendition wins huge applause from the bar's other customers, all Indonesian soldiers deployed in the capital of war-torn Aceh province. "I love that song," slurs the Commander, who is actually an army major. "It makes me feel so patriotic."

Outside the smoke-filled Top Ten, where the Indonesian armed forces, or TNI, are fighting a bloody war against Acehnese separatists, a different military performance is being appraised, and with much less applause. Since the Suharto dictatorship collapsed in 1998, the Aceh conflict is viewed as one indicator of just how much the TNI has changed—or, more often, hasn't. For 32 years, the Indonesian armed forces propped up Suharto's hard-line rule with killings, torture and kidnappings, while senior officers grew rich from corrupt business deals and helped thwart political reform. By 1998, no institution was as popularly despised as the 297,000-strong military—or in more desperate need of an overhaul.

Yet, almost four years later, what many hoped would be a march toward reform has slowed to a shuffle. While the TNI's 38-member faction is scheduled to withdraw from the national parliament by 2004, its political influence is growing again, partly due to the inability of President Megawati Sukarnoputri's government to fix Indonesia's many problems. Its vast business empire—the military owns or has interests in some 250 businesses, including Jakarta department stores, Bali resorts and massive land holdings nationwide, worth an estimated $3 billion—remains intact. And most importantly, say critics, the military has paid little more than lip service to improving its human rights record. In conflict zones like Aceh, its troops continue to commit atrocities at a rate humanitarian groups can barely track.

Indonesia's military, specifically the army, has long been more than just the defender of the flag. It fought the Japanese during World War II and the Dutch during the battle for independence, and soon established a nation-building role for itself as the only institution capable of holding the fractious archipelago together. Over the years, various leaders have dealt with the army differently—but always using the TNI as a means of staying in power. Sukarno, Megawati's father, played it off against the communists and Muslims. Suharto exploited it to enrich his family and cronies. After he fell, in keeping with the more liberal political winds prevailing at the time, civilian authorities tried to rein in the generals.

But since then the world has changed yet again, and Indonesia's military is now receiving mixed signals. Post-Sept. 11, Washington, while still demanding radical improvement in the TNI's human rights record (the U.S. cut military ties and banned hardware sales after Indonesia's violent withdrawal from East Timor in 1999), is clearly itching to patch up military relations with Indonesia, which it regards as a hotbed of Islamic extremism. As for Megawati, she won her presidency last year with military backing, and former TNI officers hold key posts in her Cabinet. Because she stresses the country's unity above all else (she has spoken of "the need for a force to protect our motherland from breaking up"), Megawati has placed on the back burner anything that might upset the TNI, the nation's guardian—like extracting it from politics and business and making it adhere strictly to human rights. "Reform is not solely the TNI's responsibility," says military analyst Kusnanto Anggoro. "Civilians, too, must decide what kind of changes it should undergo. The military says, 'OK, we'll obey your rules. But you have to decide what the rules are.'"

Nowhere are the two faces of the military—traditionally oppressive, potentially progressive—more evident than in Aceh, where the army is locked in a bloody battle for control of the province with the secessionist Free Aceh Movement, or GAM. Villagers living along Aceh's one main road welcome the TNI as an antidote to rampaging police units. But off the road, in benighted hamlets, little has changed. "Most TNI still behave the same way—brutally," says Fitri, a 22-year-old volunteer with Care Human Rights Forum, known locally as FP HAM. Fitri produces half a dozen photo albums—the kind with cutesy cartoon bunnies on the cover—filled with shots of dead civilians, many showing signs of torture or execution-style killing. Merely collecting such evidence is increasingly perilous. The New York City-based Human Rights Watch claims humanitarian workers are now deliberately targeted by Aceh's military and police. Two FP HAM volunteers were found dead last year, one with his hands and legs tied, and his body perforated with stab marks. Whenever Indonesia's unity is perceived to be under threat, humanitarian concerns are automatically overridden by the military imperative to crush the enemy at all costs—and by any method. As a slogan daubed on a military bunker in Aceh puts it: We love peace—but we love unity more. "As long as there is GAM to fight, TNI brutality will not end," says M. Yusef Puteh, director of FP HAM's East Aceh branch. "I'm beginning to think that what they're doing here has the blessing of the central government. It will forgive the soldiers anything."

The military says that atrocities are an exception, not the rule. "If I have a hundred soldiers in the field, two or three might commit abuses," says army spokesman Brigadier General Ratyono. "It's common. It's normal. But there is never any instruction to commit them." This distinction—let's call it the "few bad apples" defense—is depressingly familiar to rights activists. "Abuses by the military are too widespread for it to be just a question of individuals," says Aris Santoso, a military analyst with a Jakarta think tank. "The institution itself must take the blame." Four middle-ranking soldiers and one police officer are currently on trial in Jakarta for a 1999 mass killing in East Timor. It is Indonesia's first human-rights court, but many doubt it will throw any light on the role senior officers played in orchestrating the violence. Another case in point: the murder of Papuan independence leader Theys Eluay, found strangled to death in Papua's capital of Jayapura last November. A special inquiry pinned the murder on members of the notorious Elite army unit Kopassus, who, according to one senior military officer, "killed Theys without any order from their superiors"—those few bad apples again. But not many people outside military circles believe Theys' killers acted alone, or that any senior officers will ever come to trial for giving them orders. Says prominent human rights lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis: "Anyone above the rank of colonel is untouchable."

Yet its leaders insist the TNI is changing. It has introduced 140 hours of instruction in law and human rights at its army-officer academy, while soldiers dispatched to Aceh receive an extra three or four months' training to hone their military skills. One exercise gives them four seconds to decide whether they are facing an armed rebel or an innocent civilian—a distinction which, as Aceh's casualty figures suggest, has mattered little in the past. More than a thousand civilians perished in the conflict last year; this year's death toll looks set to surpass that. Combat troops have also been issued with booklets explaining the rules of engagement. One, called The Pocketbook of TNI Soldier Etiquette, shows a cartoon depicting a soldier about to rape a woman fleeing her burning home before a principled comrade arrives just in time to stop the assault. In another, a soldier prevents his buddy from battering a prisoner with a club. "Stop!" reads the bubble above the good soldier's head. "We are a civilized army that treats prisoners well!"

But winning trust is not easy in Aceh—especially when heavily armed units routinely patrol nearby villages in armored personnel carriers with heavy machine-guns mounted on the roof. "An attack can happen at any time, any place," warns army intelligence officer Captain Adrain Ade, an assault-rifle on his lap, as he scans passing villages for signs of rebel activity. His destination today is the distant village of Montasik, where another TNI platoon is camped out in a disused rice warehouse. Conditions are cramped and squalid, and the sense of siege is palpable. Platoon leader Captain Heri Sumitro says his men came under fire three weeks before, while patrolling the village. "We wanted to return fire but there were children in the way," he recalls. Contact with locals is minimal. "Most people want to talk to us," he believes, "but they're just too scared." Scared, he means, of reprisals by GAM, which rights activists have also accused of kidnapping and intimidation. Sumitro says an elderly village woman was stabbed by GAM operatives after she was seen talking to one of his soldiers.

To be sure, not all Acehnese hate the TNI. At the village of Sarah Tebe, near Peureulak, southeast of Banda Aceh, the people have welcomed them. Some 400 families used to live here but more than half moved away in the past 18 months as the conflict worsened. Recent clashes between soldiers and rebels have sent villagers fleeing in terror and, only days before, the corpses of two unknown men—slit from belly to throat and eviscerated—were fished from the nearby Kuala Bayan River. The military is now building a small post at Sarah Tebe. "I'm very glad the TNI has come," says M. Kasim, a 75-year-old former brickmaker living with his extended family. "They protect us day and night." Since the TNI arrived, many former residents are returning, while local fishermen are again venturing up the river to sell their catch. The village mosque, previously deserted after nightfall, is now bustling. A local TNI lieutenant proudly notes the contrast with East Timor, where he did many tours of duty. "They hated us in East Timor," he says. "Here, they love us."

Even if some Indonesians are starting to like their military better, the TNI still has plenty of room for improvement. Aceh is just one of many areas in which the TNI needs to show it is willing to change. Unless the country's political leaders take measures to kick start the stalled reform process, the only rules the military will obey will continue to be their own.

• ANDREW MARSHALL Banda Aceh
• Still no reform for Indonesia's military