The Indonesian Intelligence State
Characteristics and prospects

Richard Tanter

Draft only: Not to be quoted.

Paper prepared for the Australian Asian Studies Conference,
July 2 - 5, 2000,
University of Melbourne

To have suggested at the beginning of 1998 that by mid-2000 Indonesia would have faced defeat in East Timor, rejected the New Order, seen its leaders disgraced and faced with prison, and have a free and fairly elected president and legislature beginning to dismantle the most important institutions of the New Order - all this would have been to have invited derision. How and why these events happened will be told elsewhere, but the distance between what actually happened and what could reasonably have been expected by an informed observer of the time is a measure not so much of our collective lack of insight and imagination - though that is obviously something we must all face - as a measure of the weight and apparent solidity of the institutions of New Order politics. Cracked and weakening though they may have seemed towards the end, the long survival of the New Order and its core institutions - which changed remarkably little after its early years - must command our explanatory attention.

In this paper I want to talk about one core set of institutions of the New Order, which I argue characterized the regime as a whole: the apparatus of surveillance and terror formed around a congeries of intelligence agencies and a particular portion of the military's special forces. One way of understanding the survival of the New Order, despite the immense pain and suffering it inflicted on its own citizens and those of East Timor, is to understand the history and character of Indonesia during the New Order period as an intelligence state. I will first discuss the idea of an "intelligence state", and then review the characteristics of the Indonesian version under the New Order. I will then look at the key external preconditions of the existence of the intelligence state - both political and economic. This involves dialectic between the intelligence state, the conditions of its existence, its victims, and threats to its own survival, leading ultimately through East Timor, to the collapse of the New Order. I will conclude by reviewing the the crisis of the intelligence state under a democractically-elected government, and indicate a rationale for its future possible development.

1. What is an "intelligence state"?

There are two broad senses in which that term could be used. In the narrow sense the term "intelligence state" could refer to the state institutions of surveillance, together with the machinery of state terror: the particular state institutions functionally connected to the collection of political and military information and the application of terror as a technique of rule. Yet in a broader sense we might describe a state as an "intelligence state", in the same way that might speak of a "welfare state" or a "Keynsian state" or a "patriarchal state". In other words, such a term does not sensibly describe all of the activities of the state or anything like the bulk of them. But it does claim to characterize its defining or limiting qualities as flowing from a particular set of institutions or practices. Defining an "intelligence state" in this broad sense is not easy, and at present I do not have a definition I feel comfortable with. Elements that might go into a definition of an intelligence state include:

• There are a number of more or less well coordinated institutions and organizations carrying out domestic political surveillance.
• These intelligence organizations are unaccountable to the wider society, and not subject to effective legal controls.
• Terror may be used as an instrument of rule with relative impunity.
• Power within the military lies disproportionately with intelligence organizations.
• Power within the state lies disproportionately with intelligence organizations.
• Such organizations are directed at least as much at internal enemies of the state as external enemies.
• The state depends on comprehensive domestic political surveillance, with or without terror, to control society.

State elites understand that their otherwise unlegitimated power depends the effectiveness of intelligence organizations. Such a listing provides a beginning for a static definition of an intelligence state. However it does not really help in understanding its dynamic aspects, by which the existence of the intelligence state sets limits on what is possible for the rest of the state, and provides a guide to the state's basic operating principles. For the moment, we must be content with these admittedly inadequate guidelines.

Clearly it flows from this that the presence of state institutions of surveillance and terror is not in itself sufficient to sustain the broader usage: to speak of an intelligence state. Virtually all modern states have a number of intelligence agencies, with in almost cases some of these agencies carrying out domestic political surveillance to a greater or lesser degree. Most states that have a substantial domestic political surveillance capacity do not employ terror against their citizenry on an institutionalized basis. Or this quality may vary over time.

States employing surveillance and terror are often thought of as "strong states". We think of many different examples - (in shorthand) Suharto's Indonesia, Park Chung-hee's South Korea, Kim Il-sung's North Korea, Nazi Germany, Argentina under the junta, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and so on. These are clearly all cases of states which were "strong" in the sense of "repressive" or "tough". Yet common usage of the term "strong state" usually conflates this sense of toughness with at least three other important senses in which a state may be strong: robustness, administrative effectiveness, and autonomy. The differences between Park's South Korea and Suharto's Indonesia are then immediately apparent, and are extremely important in explaining the different fate of those two regimes.

If we look at domestic intelligence regimes we can see that they vary a great deal - in their predominant style of operation, in the mix of surveillance and violence, in the sophistication of the technical means of surveillance, in the number of target groups in the society, and in the degree of effective autonomy from other sections of the state. Table 1 shows in very simplified and summary form groupings of domestic regime types, classified crudely according to the severity of violence and the intensity of surveillance.

Clearly, Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were, for most of their existence, both extremely violent towards their citizens, and relied on intense political surveillance. Sierra Leone today or the Philippines under Marcos both show high levels of violence, mostly state-initiated, but not relying to a great extent on close surveillance of the population. Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s experienced intense British and RUC surveillance, but levels of violence were, in international terms, not high. At about the same time West German responses to left terrorist actions lead to an extremely sophisticated and intense surveillance of the population, but low levels of violence. Table 1. Domestic intelligence regime types (1): violence and surveillance Surveillance Level of violence High Low Intense USSR (Stalin period) Nazi Germany Kampuchea Indonesia (Suharto foundation period) Singapore (West) Germany Northern Ireland Suharto (middle and late period, East Timor apart) USSR (Brezhnev period) Low Philippines (Marcos period) Sierra Leone Most liberal democracies, most of the time Table 2: Domestic intelligence regime types (2): target groups and control Sophistication Of Control Number of target groups Few Many High Malaysia Singapore Northern Ireland Low ? Indonesia

A similar set of crude distinctions can be seen if we classify domestic intelligence regimes according to the number of groups targeted by the state, and the sophistication of the control apparatus (see Table 2). In Malaysia and Singapore, a relatively small number of groups come under close scrutiny by intelligence agencies, and are effectively marginalized. In Indonesia in the Suharto period, a complex apparatus of surveillance attempted to deal with a much wider range of perceived "obstructions" to state policy, though with an overall lower level of sophistication. Of course in Indonesia for much of the time, brutality was a more or less effective substitute for sophistication, and where necessary, surveillance resources could be mobilized and focussed closely on a small number of target groups with great effect - such as certain streams of radical or militant Islam in the 1970s.

One further set of types could usefully be distinguished here, varying according to the extent to which domestic political surveillance and terror is carried out by state organs alone, as opposed to non-state groups operating with de facto consent and cooperation. Indonesia shows just this sort of variation over time: following Moerdani's professionalization and centralization of intelligence in the 1980s, non-state groups had a very small role. However in 1965-66 at least, and possibly again in the near future, non-state groups cooperated closely with military intelligence bodies.

2. Surveillance and terror: the institutions of the Indonesian intelligence state [1]

The Indonesian intelligence state at its height in the middle and late New Order period had at its institutional core a congeries of state agencies functionally dedicated to the tasks of surveillance of the domestic population and the application of terror as a standard tool of rule. These agencies included overt intelligence agencies, both civilian [BAKIN [2] , LSN [3] ] and military [the organization variously known as Pusintelstrat [4] /Bais ABRI [5] /BIA [6] /Bais-TNI [7] and the intelligence bodies of the army, air force, navy and police]; intelligence divisions of government departments such as the Attorney-General's department, the Department of Labour Affairs, and the Ministry for the Reform of the State Apparatus; the Directorate of Social and Political Affairs in the Ministry of Home Affairs; coordination and command organs such as the Command for the Restoration of Stability and Order [Kopkamtib] and its successor the National Stability Coordination Board [Bakorstanas]; standing and ad hoc intelligence and combat sections of special military forces such as the Special Forces Command [Kopassandha/Kopassus]; and a varying cohort of looser and less bureaucratically standardized and legally authorized groupings of state officials, gangsters and hired goons, suborned or hired intellectuals, and other such informers and enforcers - for example in Opsus [Operasi Khusus - Special Operations]or the East Timor militia groupings [8]. Over the 33 years of the New Order, the number, function and inter-relations of these sets of agencies varied, but from 1966 onwards the institutionalized basis of the intelligence state was firmly in place. [9]

Through this apparatus, the entire population was comprehensively, if unevenly brought under surveillance. As needed surveillance and terror were focussed intensively on different parts of the population. The sheer brazenness of the East Timor killings in 1999 must have brought back to consciousness the great trauma that swept Indonesia in 1965-66. In fact, horrific and distinctive in execution though it was, the level of terror in East Timor in 1999 was not out of the ordinary in Suharto's New Order Indonesia. Three types of terror have been crucial to establishing and maintaining military control of Indonesia since 1965.

Firstly, Suharto's rule was founded on the great killings of 1965-66 -- the constitutive terror of the New Order. Army soldiers, and mainly Islamic anti-communist groups aided and encouraged by the Army killed between 500,000 and 800,000 (and possibly more) in a ten month period following the coup and counter-coup of September 30-October 1. With the aid, complicity, and congratulations of western governments, the Army led a systematic and largely unhidden campaign to kill hundreds of thousands of defenseless alleged communists and Chinese Indonesians. The Communist Party was destroyed, and Sukarno's power shattered. Suharto and his generals came to power; and they, together with their domestic and foreign commercial partners, became incredibly rich. Periodically reminding the population of the "events of 1965," or lamenting the "possibility of a repeat of 1965" has been an extremely effective terror tactic, particularly in combination with the repression of the trauma. Until the very last years of Suharto, public discussion of the killings was impossible -- the topic was literally unspeakable. It was as if citizens of Germany East and West had been unable to speak of the Holocaust from 1945 until the 1990s, and then only with great caution. [10]

Secondly, after the worst of the constitutive terror edged back from daily consciousness by the late 1960s, intermittent targeted terror operations in the center were important and effective tools of control by the military. After the complete liquidation of the left by 1968 the targets of terror shifted: at different times they became Islamic groups disenchanted with the earthly paradise produced by Islamic cooperation in 1965-66; radical students; criminal gang leaders out of favor with Army bosses (the petrus killings [11]); and, as industrialization progressed, labor activists organizing outside the stultifying framework of government-controlled unions. While the destruction of particular immediate targets was always the primary goal, an important secondary function was the revivifying of the underlying sense of generalized terror deriving from 1965-66. [12] For example, when military intelligence decided, with President Suharto's explicit support, to break the growing power of uncooperative gang bosses in the cities of Java by simply using military special forces and police to assassinate several thousand alleged criminals in 1983-85, the bodies of the bullet-ridden dead were laid out in public places, or near the homes and work-places of prominent opponents of the regime. [13]

Thirdly, the standard response to discontent with Jakarta's rule on the edges of the archipelago has been terror: peripheral terror. The final phase of the terror in East Timor differed from that of the preceding 24 years only in its intensity in a very short time frame, and in the attention given it by the rest of the world. In Aceh and Irian Jaya, militarized responses to local grievances for comparable periods have by and large gone unnoticed . Military control of the media until the last years of the New Order meant that these matters were unreportable in Indonesia. In addition, the very vagueness of people's awareness of "troubles" in the peripheries contributed to the general sense of low-level terror that characterized the population as a whole through most of the Suharto period. [14]

The key institutional apparatus in all of this was the large and well-funded network of military and nominally civilian intelligence organizations that make up the Indonesian intelligence state, which was very little affected by the mild and limited democratizing moves of 1998-1999, and which remained largely in place at the beginning of the Wahid presidency. [15] As head of military intelligence [Ka BIA] at the beginning of 1999, Major-General Zacky Anwar Makarim and his successor controlled a network of surveillance that reached down from TNI headquarters in Jakarta, through every layer of military administration to every village and city neighborhood in the country. The surveillance apparatus was geared to provide a fine-grained observation of the nation as a whole according to need.

Coupled to the surveillance capacities of Bais, every regional military command, and every layer beneath, has an intelligence section which not only coordinates surveillance requirements, but has a capacity and a mandate to take whatever actions are deemed necessary. Special forces such as the Kopassus red berets have their own teams and networks, and can co-opt regional military command resources. The intelligence task forces that have terrorized East Timorese have their parallels in every other area of Indonesia of concern to the military.

Beyond the military intelligence hierarchy under Bais control, and the intelligence bodies of the three armed forces, nominally civilian organizations such as Bakin or the Intelligence Division of the Attorney-General's department or the intelligence division of the highly militarized National Police all play a key part in the maintenance of the system of surveillance and repression. Three decades of a legal system under military direction and a cowed and coopted legislature provided the last elements of the picture. [16]

The evidence from many countries shows that military and intelligence bureaucracies by their nature are pre-occupied with internecine rivalries and turf fights, often leading to displacement of attention and effectiveness from their primary tasks. Needless to say, the baroque intelligence structure in New Order Indonesia resulted in less than optimal integration of activities, resulting in turn in a series of attempts at securing institutional coordination. [17] Reporting directly to the president, the head of Bakin (the State Intelligence Coordination Agency) was nominally the chair of the body dedicated to this integrative function. In fact, the degree to which Bakin operated as a coordinator of other agencies and the degree to which it operated as one of a set of independent agencies varied considerably over time. Kopkamtib was a military organ under the Armed Forces Headquarters. When it was disestablished in 1988, Kopkamtib was replaced by a national level body reporting directly to the president titled Bakorstanas: the National Stability Coordinating Board. After the fall of Suharto, President Habibie introduced the National Defence Stabilization Council [Dewan Pemantapan Ketahanan Nasional], a body that consisted of most of the important members of the cabinet in another guise, thus virtually abandoning any attempt at serious coordination. [18]

These repeated attempts to create effective coordination between intelligence agencies reflect at least three sets of pressures. Firstly, political relations between the competing heads and patrons of these changes fluctuate: for example, the growth of Moerdani's power and Suharto's response. Secondly, it is inherently difficult to control state agencies with access to out-of-budget funds, and it is even more difficult to control those out-of-budget funds applied to activities designed to be either unaccountable or at best, plausibly deniable. Thirdly, it is inherently difficult to control agencies which operate without effective restriction from the legislature, or which failing that, lack any permanent effective countervailing institutional pressure.

In the case of New Order Indonesia, all four of these pressures operated to lower levels of accountability and coordination even within the requirements of the New Order state itself - to say nothing of any other desirable forms of accountability under law. The effect was an ever swelling, ever more baroque, always opaque structure, which was seen from the outside as an amorphous "intel". This "image inflation" usefully added to the diffuse sense of omnipresence and omniscience often reported from below and outside the system, but at the cost of actual operating efficiency. In time the cumulative inefficiencies of this violent but crudely powerful system, coupled with the hubris of its managers, led to severe strategic misjudgments of its capacities in regard to both intelligence collection and the effective application of terror - as witness the last phases of the East Timor operation.

3. How was it possible? The political economy of the Indonesian intelligence state

Looking back at the horrors of Suharto's rule from 1966-1998, and the occupation of East Timor from 1975-1999, it may be hard to imagine how they endured so long. How was it possible for the Indonesian state to exercise such extraordinary violence towards the people of East Timor and their own people for such a long period of time? Analysts of Indonesian politics have usually looked inwards for their explanations, quite reasonably stressing domestic political, social and economic developments. Yet it is clear that external factors, long neglected in Indonesian area studies outside Indonesia, are at least an equal part of the answer.

It is clear, as Noam Chomsky and his colleague Edward Herman have argued consistently and cogently for two decades, that the Suharto regime was dependent upon the political, economic and military support of the United States. There is little point in repeating Chomsky's detailed accounts. [19] For the present purposes, it will be sufficient to recall the depth of US demonstrations of support for the most violent parts of the intelligence state as late as 1999.

Kopassus Group 4, which is known to have carried out the abductions and torture of at least nine activists in early 1998 had by that time had more than 24 Joint Combined Exchange and Training Program [JCET] exercises with US uniformed forces. According to some ABRI sources, Group 4 had received US intelligence training - though this was denied by the group's commander. At the beginning of that same year, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen praised "the very impressive ...discipline" of Kopassus, then headed by Lieutenant-General Prabowo Subianto. As a U.S. embassy official said, "Prabowo is our fair-haired boy; he's the one who can do no wrong". [20] As Cohen left Jakarta, he declined to comment on the performance of either the Indonesian president or his military officers, saying "I am not going to give him [Suharto] guidance in terms of what he should or should not do in terms [sic] of maintaining control of his own country". Suharto's intelligence and military advisers quite understandably say they took that as a "green light".

Within days of Cohen's visit, Zacky Anwar had warned high-level critics that they "if they wanted to stay alive they should not make his life difficult". On February 4 Pius Lustrilanang was abducted by plainclothes men now admitted to have been from Kopassus Group 4, working together in a joint operation of BIA and Kodam Jaya intelligence. Like at least 8 other dissents arrested in the same operation, Lustrilanang was taken to a specially-equipped secret detention centre, and interrogated and tortured for days on end. According to Alan Nairn, embassy officials admitted they knew about the abductions as they were happening, because of frequent and regular high level exchanges with BIA. [21]

U.S. political, diplomatic and military support for the intelligence state until the last moments of both the Suharto period and the post-ballot terror campaign in East Timor is not difficult to demonstrate, though it is frequently ignored. However the argument that the intelligence state depended crucially upon external sources of legitimation and support can be put at a more comprehensive structural level still.

The argument that follows here [22] focuses on one particular aspect of the New Order's political economy: the rentier-militarist state and its external preconditions. [23] In the case of Indonesian politics in the New Order period, external strategic and economic factors interacted to set the limits of possibility of domestic politics. This was true both in allowing Suharto and the armed forces to rule the country for more than thirty years, and in framing the manner in which Suharto lost power.

New Order Indonesia was essentially a rentier-economy in two quite distinct senses: one domestic and one externally-oriented. Firstly, its domestic political economy was dominated by the allocation of government-controlled economic resources largely on the basis of direct and indirect access to government officials -- who were mostly senior military officers. In this domestic sense of rentier economy, the dominant factor in capital accumulation came not from productive investment (manufactures, increased agricultural productivity, value-added processing of minerals and other natural resources, etc.), but from appropriation of a portion of the economic surplus by a group of rentiers. Army officers used military resources for private benefit; state officials "rented" the prerogatives of office to private partners; privileged individuals derived income from monopoly control over the imports of particular goods or services or from monopolistic licenses to exploit natural resources; and so on. [24] Of course, without the unprecedented mobilization of state violence available to the Suharto government, the domestic rentier economy would not have been sustainable.

The second rentier characteristic of New Order Indonesia, and the one which was the pre-requisite of Suharto's long power and decline, was Indonesia's location in the international division of labor. New Order Indonesia was a rentier state in this externally-oriented sense insofar as the great bulk of both national income and state revenue for all but the first few years of the New Order period was derived from oil tax revenues and foreign aid. Oil revenues and foreign aid function economically as a "rent" in much the same way: a rental payment to the recipient country for a political service based on its political or geo-strategic value to the donor country. [25]

This was the key to Suharto's political longevity and one of the prerequisites for the development of the Indonesian intelligence state. A government that can expand its activities without resorting to heavy taxation acquires an independence from the people seldom found in other countries. In political terms, the power of government to bribe pressure groups or coerce dissidents will be greater than otherwise. The peculiar quality of rentier-militarist regimes, understood in this externally-oriented sense, is their relative capacity to ignore, or at least postpone, cultivation of domestic support and the class compromises which that process requires. The legitimation that finally mattered in New Order Indonesia was that of the army as the dominant power center, and then the opinion of state-managers in Washington and Tokyo.

East Timor and the Undermining of Rentier-Militarization

However, these same considerations render rentier-militarization as a form of state power highly vulnerable. Not only does the stoppage of external rents severely damage finances, but it almost immediately provokes a systemic political crisis. By the early 1990s at least, very important elements of the external supports for the rentier-militarist state were in disarray. The interests of the United States had changed in two ways in relation to Indonesia. On the one hand, the end of the Cold War meant that the U.S. no longer felt preoccupied with a global struggle to contain communism in the shape of the Soviet Union and China, nor imperiled by popular movements elsewhere. Communism was a non-existent political force in Indonesia after the late 1960s. On the other hand, the U.S. strategic economic preoccupation from the Reagan administration onwards with establishing and expanding a framework for highly mobile U.S. capital and unrestricted investment rights lowered the U.S. tolerance for the baroque patronage structure which it had allowed to develop around President Suharto in Indonesia. [26]

Yet Indonesia's economic growth was built on institutional sand. The currency crises of 1998 and its fiscal consequences burst upon the New Order state like a tidal wave, taking Suharto with it. Foreign aid at levels unprecedented even under the New Order was required to maintain the Indonesian state in temporary solvency and to prevent complete social and political breakdown. More than $40 billion in foreign loans coordinated by the IMF through 1998-1999 brought direct, detailed, and stringent conditions on Indonesian budgetary and financial policy -- with devastating economic, social, and political effects.

Finally, it was precisely the dependence of the New Order on external legitimation and external sources of state revenue that ultimately undermined the autonomy of the intelligence state in East Timor. This applied both to the decision to allow self-determination in East Timor, and then crucially in ending the terror of September 1999. During the 1990s prolonged use of terror in East Timor led by Kopassus had turned Indonesia into something approaching a pariah state. The key institutional shift -- Habibie's announcement that he would consider a ballot for independence -- did not flow from personal fickleness or idiosyncratic motives. The United States had shifted its position on East Timor some time previously, viewing Indonesia's involvement in East Timor as an expensive mistake in which the United States had no strategic stake. [27] Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Ginanjar Kartasasmita attending an economic summit in Switzerland with key rich nations at the time of Habibie's "shock" announcement made clear the crucial background. East Timor, he said, had simply become too expensive for Indonesia. The major creditors of the New Order, led by the U.S. and Japan, simply were no longer prepared to support Indonesia over East Timor either financially or politically. The collapse in external pre-conditions for rentier-militarization did not determine the outcome of the issue, but it did set the limits of possibility.

This erosion of the external preconditions of rentier-militarization also determined the final ending of the militia terror in East Timor immediately following the August 30 ballot. There were, in practical terms, no domestic Indonesian political forces willing and able to bring the terror under control. Habibie was quite without authority vis-a-vis the military. The terror was only stopped in response to remarkably blunt public threats from President Clinton and Secretary of Defense William Cohen to suspend IMF and other loans to Indonesia immediately, unless Indonesia agreed to accept the admission of foreign peacekeeping forces. [28] To be sure, Clinton only acted after considerable and costly delay [29], in the face of unexpected global mass media attention and mobilization of public opinion in the United States. Yet it was the peculiar character of Indonesia's political economy that made the threat to the world's fourth largest country credible and effective, and opened the last door for East Timor's independence.

This dialectic between the intelligence state, the conditions of its existence, its victims, and the threat to its own survival is extremely important to understand. The intelligence state was Soeharto's creation and the foundation of his rule and political longevity, but it was also part of the cause of his demise. When the key external supports were eroded away, the intelligence state was, to a very substantial degree, no longer effective or viable. And in turn one of the several reasons for the erosion of external legitimation was that the actions of the intelligence state could no longer be shielded from global public scrutiny.

4. Wahid and after: Prospects for the Indonesian intelligence state

What then for the intelligence state after the New Order? Does the end of the New Order mean the end of the intelligence state? Were the institutions of the Indonesian intelligence state tied to a particular set of circumstances and pre-conditions, without which, it cannot survive? Before answering these questions, let us briefly review the important institutional changes that have taken place in the last two years.

• In March it was announced that Bakorstanas was to be liquidated. The intelligence functions of Bakorstanas were transferred to Bakin. Many of Bakorstanas' staff were re-allocated to other military positions, but a large number of senior officers of the rank of colonel and above who formerly worked for Bakorstanas in the centre and the regions were declared to be in excess of current requirements. [30]
• At the same time, it was announced that the procedure of "Special Investigation" [Litsus - Penelitian Khusus] that allowed effective extra-judicial action by Bakorstanas was to be liquidated. [31]
• The fate of the relatively new and weak system of the Pos Komando Kewaspadaan Nasional is not completely clear, but is under threat. [32]
• The bottom layer of the army's territorial system is to be liquidated. In May of this year it was announced that the position of Village Guidance NCO [Babinsa - Bintara Pembina Desa] would be abolished, and that the Koramil [Komando Rayon Militer - Military Sub-district Command] structure would also be abolished. [33]
• The 1963 Anti-Subversion Law [Undang-Undang No. 11/PNPS/1963] was repealed by the Habibie administration in April 1999. Though there was much (and continuing) dissatisfaction and debate with a proposed new National Security Law, the removal of the 1963 Anti-Subversion Law, together with the absence of the powers of Bakorstanas, considerably weakened the legal basis of the intervention capacities of intelligence apparatus. [34]
• The present leadership of the armed forces has acknowledged that its social and political role has become overly large in comparison with its overall defence responsibilities, and has agreed to limits its parliamentary representation immediately and eliminate its parliamentary presence by 2004.
• The prosecution and conviction of Kopassus officers with crimes connected to the abduction and torture of political activists in 1999 was a major step in reducing the use of terror with impunity by state agents. The prosecution in military courts and tribunals of junior officers for crimes committed by in Aceh, and the slow and limited moves to prosecution of senior officers responsible for the East Timor terror campaign of 1999 will consolidate this achievement. To be sure, there is good reason for anger and scepticism over the prosecution of crimes against humanity in East Timor. Equally, the senior Kopassus officers responsible who ordered the abductions, most notably Lt-General Prabowo Subianto, did not receive criminal convictions, and were only forced to resign from the military. However, for junior officers, there is now an accumulating threat that illegal acts of kidnapping, torture and extra-judicial killing may well lead to official censure at a minimum, and quite possibly disgrace and imprisonment. While this threat is still weak, and there are many reported illegal actions by the security forces (and an unknown number unreported), this erosion of the sense of impunity is a very considerable change in the organizational climate of violence. [35]
• The Minister for Defence and Security has agreed to a request from the IMF and the World Bank for an auditing of extra-budgetary funds of the military. This will be the first occasion on which the once vast and still very substantial system of extra-budgetary assets and funding will come under any kind of non-military scrutiny. It is unlikely to result in a direct and immediate threat to the extra-budgetary resources available to intelligence agencies, but it will, if sustained, reinforce long-standing pressures from within the military to regularize funding of military operations. It may well also provide resources for parliamentarians and other critics who calling for accountability of all military spending, including undeclared sources of revenue available for intelligence purposes. [36]

Not all changes have been negative for the intelligence world. For example, Bakin has inherited the intelligence responsibilities of Bakorstanas, and has expanded its responsibilities in the field of economic security. [37] While a TNI spokesman assured the world that with the abolition of Bakorstanas, the information it had collected on persons and groups "will be annihilated because it is no longer needed", [38] there are few precedents in the world for such an unnatural act as an intelligence agency genuinely destroying data on possible targets. In another positive development for the intelligence apparatus, the Armed Forces Strategic Intelligence Agency [BAIS TNI - Badan Intelijen Stratejis (formerly BIA)] was restructured in mid-1999, with the number of directorates increased from five to eight. At the same time, the rank of the head of Bais was increased from Major-General to Lieutenant-General. [39] The restructuring was explained in terms of the need to deal with an expanded range of social and political threats. [40]

Yet even this brief review makes it clear that in a short time a great deal has changed at an institutional level in the world of intelligence and terror in Indonesia. Most of the changes listed in ways large or small limit the freedom of action and capacities of the apparatus of intelligence and terror. The intelligence agencies have been subjected to a previously unimaginable public chorus of condemnation for their illegal terrorist actions, and equally for their apparent incompetence in the face of genuine threats to security in Maluku and elsewhere. Explanations by intelligence agencies heads and their supporters that the agencies lack the human and financial and legal resources to do their job properly have not found a great deal of public sympathy. [41]

Many of the announced reforms listed above have not yet been put into effect, and even when that does occur, the reconstitution of the abolished structures would be in many cases straightforward, given the political will. Other reforms are at present only half-hearted - or in the case of prosecution of senior officers accused of crimes against humanity in East Timor and Aceh, derisory to date. Kopassus is untouched; Bakin and Bais have expanded responsibilities and possibly expanded resources; accusations of torture and killing continue; and linkages formed between the intelligence services and the criminal underworld during the Suharto period now seem to be being expanded to include fascist or extreme nationalist groups operating with the blessing of intelligence organizations.

Much more remains to be done to achieve minimal controls over the intelligence apparatus, and to prevent the full resurgence of the intelligence state, including at least the following organizational and legal steps:

1. Organizational requirements
   • abolition of the military's role in supervision of civil administration at all levels, in practice as well as in theory;
   • abolition of the army's territorial commands, and withdrawal of territorial forces from policing activities and surveillance of local populations;
   • abolition of the Armed Forces and Army Territorial Affairs staff;
   • complete separation of the National Police from the Ministry of Defense and Security;
2. Legal changes
   • constitutional revision to ensure permanent subordination of the armed forces to elected civilian leadership;
   • reevaluation of the military legal code, and strict application of provisions bearing on illegal activities involving violence towards civilians, including prosecution under military law of officers failing to control subordinates;
   • increasing the powers and resources of the National Human Rights Commission;
   • upgrading of the autonomy and capacities of the judicial system to implement the law;
   • severing of non-formal links between the Attorney-General's Department from the military (e.g. military intelligence training of civil servants in intelligence affairs);
   • complete revision of national security legislation; and
   • legislation to ensure parliamentary oversight of military activities and budgetary procedures in general, and the activities of military and civilian intelligence agencies in particular.

The third reshuffle of the upper echelons of the military under President Wahid in June of this year was preceded by a number of anxious rumours and predictions that military officers antagonistic to reform and close to either former President Suharto, former Armed Forces Commander and Coordinating Minister for Security Wiranto, or disgraced Kopassus and Kostrad Commander Prabowo would be promoted. [42] As it turned out, these fears were not realized in the pattern of promotions announced in June. [43] But the anxieties are indicative of a realization of just how fragile the achievements in limiting the freedom of the intelligence state I have spelled out above actually are. Of course, there is a complex political struggle being played out in Indonesia at present, the flow of which at present changes constantly. But how might we think about the forces influencing the prospects of the Indonesian intelligence now?

Five internal political factors are undoubtedly important. The general economic crisis has had profound effects on the military, even allowing for the unseen funds, which must themselves have suffered along with the rest of the economy. Longstanding efforts from within the military to bring military off-budget funding sources that had been effectively privatized by serving and former officers back under central military control will be renewed. Intelligence organizations in particular rely on unaudited and unsupervised funds. At a time of severe competition for funds from all parts of the military [44], the past freedom of the intelligence agencies will be severely limited.

Secondly, a key resource for effective terror is public belief in the omnipresence and omniscience of the intelligence organizations. Powerful as they may be, this is not the case in Indonesia today. In the parliament and the media alike, the intelligence agencies are condemned for their past terrors and ridiculed for their present failings. This says nothing about their actual capacities, but it does mark a significant shift, not just in the confidence of opponents and critics, but in sense that an unknown but sensed and feared "intel" knows all and sees all. The panopticon works in part because its would-be victims believe it does.

A third and closely related shift that will limit the dominance of the intelligence state is the breaching of silence over the events of 1965 and 1966. Perhaps the intelligence state's greatest and most vile achievement was to suppress the very mention of the great killings of 1965-66 for thirty years, unless it be in the very limited approved terms of "G30S". What was repressed has returned, with enormous power to transform. The granting of voice to millions and the re-writing of history - or we should perhaps say, the re-writing of the re-writing of history - will have an enormous impact on the powers of the present, especially on those who guilty of both the genocide and its repression in thought and word.

A fourth domestic factor weakening the intelligence state is the dramatic shift - albeit still in flux - of its former domestic allies. The military -- and intelligence organizations in particular -- rarely acted alone in their political interventions. Often they worked with or through various political organizations and community groups, many of whom later came to resent the way they had been used. The allied or manipulated groups varied over time and according to need. For example, in the early New Order period anti-Sukarno student groups, and Chinese and Catholic groups in addition to the huge Islamic organizations played a key role in breaking the power of Sukarno and the left. These groups provided considerable resources -- material, moral, and political -- to sustain and cloak black operations. None of these groupings is willing or able to provide such resources now. Indonesian society today, after more than thirty years of rapid capitalist transformation, is of course very different from what it was in 1965, but the slow decline of the New Order was characterized by an ebbing in the political resources available to President Suharto, and in a comparable though lesser fashion, those resources available to the intelligence organizations.

However, against this it must also be said that the intelligence agencies may either discover or create new allies amongst established or emerging social groups. This is difficult to discuss precisely, but we should be looking for signs of linkages between groupings within and across intelligence agencies and anti-regime political groupings. The most obvious possible examples that come to mind here are the possible intelligence and special forces links of the "Soeharto" and "Prabowo" groups. [45] If the model of post-Soviet Union Russia is considered then a more serious possibility still comes to mind: mobilizations of nationalist-fascist groupings that develop links with parts of the weakened and resentful military, and intelligence and special forces in particular. Of course, the "Prabowo" scenario fits here as well.

There is nothing new, as researchers of different periods such as Robert Cribb [46], Joshua Barker, Loren Ryter, John Pemberton, James Siegel, Peter Bartu and Max Mason [47] have shown, about linkages between intelligence agencies and the criminal underworld. Indeed one of the clear limitations of the view of the intelligence state I have presented here and elsewhere is that it concentrates too much on formal institutions. This is to the detriment of our understanding of the less clearly visible, but extremely important informal and shifting alliances between personnel of the formal institutions and less formally structured social groupings such as criminals, the unemployed, and the politically resentful. The experience of Russia is highly relevant here. And if the degree of social and political breakdown evident in Maluku in the past two years is added to the equation, then some extremely disturbing possibilities come to mind.

Intelligence agencies of an activist, interventionist type - dare one say, those of a conspiratorial bent [48] - thrive in times of flux, when institutionalized arrangements are being re-negotiated, when loyalties and capacities are unclear. Think, not of Benny Moerdani, but Ali Moertopo. In such a climate, a barely stable democratically elected government has a lot to fear.

The final domestic factor that will have a considerable bearing on the future of the intelligence state is rivalry within the armed forces. In the period immediately prior to the June reshuffle of military positions the intensity of rivalry between different factions of the military surfaced in public over the so-called Bulak Rantai document, allegedly setting out the plans of one group to remove the representatives of another group from key senior positions. The details of this affair are unimportant here. What is important is to realize how little we really know of the politics of the current military elites, beyond the views of a very few well known individuals (such as Kostrad commander Lt-Gen. Agus Wirahadikusumah), and that hoary perennial of Indonesian military studies, military academy graduate cohorts. [49]

Clearly, one set of considerations about the future of the intelligence state would centre on calculations about the perceived interests and advantages of given groupings of officers, as they maneuvre and jockey for personal power. However another set of considerations that is equally important derives from these same officers' professional [in the sense of "occupational'] thinking about the mission of the military as the locus of organized force in the society. And here the present situation of Indonesia indicates two quite different professional concerns for the intelligence organizations of Indonesia. Intelligence agencies, like other state agencies, are linked to a set of perceptions of system needs. When those needs are seen to change, at least by some significant players, then there is pressure for either a reorientation in the role of existing agencies, or the establishment of yet more bodies dedicated to newly understood needs. All of the vast apparatus of the domestically oriented intelligence structure sat uncomfortably beside the much smaller externally-oriented and strategic intelligence organs. From 1966 to 1990, Indonesia's position in U.S. Cold War strategy required it to be primarily domestically-oriented in its military concerns.

In the post-Cold war period, Southeast Asian strategic politics changed considerably, becoming unstable for the first time since the Vietnam War period, and in reality, becoming potentially much more unstable, especially in the South China Sea. All Southeast Asian and East Asian militaries have been committed increasing resources to advanced weapons platforms (fighter aircraft, avionics, and C3I [communications, command, control and intelligence] systems. In the case of Indonesia this meant plans for an upgrading of both naval and air equipment and facilities, and a re-orientation of air force operations planning. Not entirely surprisingly, this is reflected by the current appointments of a naval officer as head of the armed forces and by a senior air force general as head of the Armed Forces Intelligence Agency [Bais]. [50] The East Timor confrontation with Australia in 1999 provided a sharp and very concrete demonstration of the intelligence gap between Indonesia and Australia. The unstable and rapidly changing external environment in East and Southeast Asia will create great pressure for further development of air force and naval capacities and for signals and communications intelligence in particular. [51] To that extent, the domestic political preoccupations of the earlier incarnation of the intelligence state will come under systematic challenge. [52]

Unfortunately, there is a contrary impulse of at least equal weight. The economic effects of the collapse of the militarist-rentier economy are still being felt, and the full social effects are still not evident. Given the massive effects to date, with millions of workers rendered unemployed (however we may want to think about "unemployment in Indonesia"), what is striking is how little economically-rooted protest there has been. One explanation for this is surely hope - hope that in the new era, a democratic government will be able to solve the mess. Yet, even if the economic performance of the Wahid government improves, under the eye of the IMF as the auditor-general on behalf of internationally mobile capital, there is very little room for maneuvre. It is more than likely that at some point soon, the voices of the dispossessed and the voices calling for more patience will clash - in strikes, demonstrations or riots. Given that a preoccupation of the intelligence agencies for the past decade and a half has been maintaining control of a burgeoning industrial labour force as a prerequisite for "economic stability", it is very likely that the intelligence agencies will be called on to develop strategies for containing labour at a level they have not previously attempted. And this in turn will strengthen the case for the proponents of a new version of the Indonesian intelligence state.