Word: indonesian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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East Timor has strained the traditional U.S.-Indonesia alliance, although you wouldn't think so to hear Indonesian leaders talk about it. Defense Secretary Cohen on Thursday sternly warned the Indonesian military to clean up its act during a meeting in Jakarta with armed forces chief General Wiranto. But while Cohen?s statement after the talks accused the Indonesian military of abetting violence in East Timor and warned it to mend its ways, the official Indonesian account of the meeting claimed that the U.S. Defense Secretary had expressed "appreciation for the army?s commitment to human rights and democracy...
...military. Three people were killed and scores injured in two days of protest against the bill that began Thursday, and a military spokesman said Friday the law had been withdrawn because "half the people do not understand its contents." The climb-down is a second humiliation for the Indonesian military only five days after it was forced to accept foreign peacekeepers' taking control of its old stamping grounds in East Timor...
...island archipelago. "Secessionist rumblings are stretching the army pretty thin, and they may have come to the view that claiming martial law powers at this point was a mistake," says TIME correspondent William Dowell. "Cracking down too hard right now may actually trigger more secessionist activity, and the Indonesian military has a very sophisticated approach to dealing with these things. It?s also not a monolith ? it's generals who come together in competing coalitions. If there is a backlash against the recent humiliations suffered by the military, it may come in the form of a barely perceptible internal reorganization...
...problem with proxy armies is that they don't always pack up and go home when their sponsors do. The Indonesian military may have officially given up the ghost in East Timor, but their local militia allies on Thursday began menacing international peacekeepers, firing weapons into the air and massing for an attack in the capital, Dili. Australian troops, who make up the bulk of the United Nations force, came under sniper fire at a house where they were quartered, and even more worrying for the international soldiers were reports that Indonesian troops had fired their weapons near a peacekeeping...
...peacekeepers' grip on the island remains tenuous ? they control only Dili's port, its airport and the U.N. compound, and the airport at the second city of Baucau, and haven't yet landed significant armor ? and that increases the temptation of militiamen and any renegade Indonesian forces to strike now. While international pressure may have given Indonesia more to lose than to gain by holding on to East Timor, the same isn't true for the militiamen. The unearthing Wednesday of a grisly massacre site where up to 30 victims had been beheaded underscores the fact that some militia leaders...