Indonesia says it ‘never’ sold arms to Myanmar’s junta. But was there a go-between?
- Activists have accused Indonesian state-backed weapons makers of dealing with Myanmar’s generals in defiance of a UN resolution that Jakarta backed
- Observers say it could hurt Indonesia’s reputation as a peace broker, its credibility with Myanmar people – and Prabowo Subianto’s electoral prospects
Defend ID, Indonesia’s state-owned defence holding company set up in 2022 to reduce dependency on military imports, said in a statement last week that it was “fully supporting” the UN resolution and had “never exported” to Myanmar since the coup.
The only “export activities to Myanmar” it mentioned in its October 4 statement were for “sports specification ammunition products” ahead of the Asean Armies Rifle Meet shooting competition in 2016.
“We always comply with and adhere to applicable regulations, including Indonesia’s foreign policies,” the Defend ID statement said.
Indonesia agreed not to sell arms to Myanmar. So what are its state firms up to?
But according to Kevin O’Rourke, producer of the Reformasi Weekly newsletter that’s analysed politics and policymaking in Indonesia for the past two decades, “a commonplace arrangement in defence contracting is to carry out transactions via third-party intermediaries offshore, in jurisdictions such as Singapore”.
“If the alleged sales did take place, it seems unlikely that they would have occurred directly with official counterparts domiciled in Myanmar, and more likely that they would have flowed through intermediaries,” he wrote in an October 6 newsletter.
The men admitted violating a law regulating the sale of strategic goods, including weapons, and lying to the distributor that an Indonesian company would be the end-user of the equipment, which was instead sold to Myanmar for S$2 million (US$1.5 million).
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That petition’s denial “was based on diplomatic and socio-economic reasons”, said Ibnu Syamsu, a lawyer with the Themis Indonesia firm that filed the October 2 complaint to Indonesia’s human rights commission.
“So we thought, what did [the court] mean by economic diplomacy? We then reviewed some open-source evidence on how Indonesia collaborated with Myanmar.”
Among the data was a July press release from munitions firm Pindad, mentioning Myanmar as an export destination for some of its ammunition, which “shows something contradictory is happening”, Ibnu said.
Myanmar exists within the scope of Indonesia’s defence business, but not in the scope of foreign policies
The Constitutional Court, in its 2022 decision denying the petition to amend Indonesia’s human rights law, said it needed “solid Indonesian connections if the courts in Jakarta are to hear cases against the Myanmar military”, according to Chris Gunness, a former UN employee who founded the Myanmar Accountability Project in 2021 to work with civil society and build criminal cases against members of the security forces.
With the October 2 complaint, which the Myanmar Accountability Project helped file, “we are answering [that demand]”, Gunness said.
Indonesian rights group pushes for law change to prosecute Myanmar junta
Human-rights activist Marzuki Darusman, a former Indonesian attorney general who was another of the parties to the October 2 complaint, said the arms-sales allegations “cast doubt on the Indonesian government’s willingness to comply with its obligations under international human-rights law and humanitarian law”.
“The fact that defence equipment has been actively promoted after the genocidal campaign against the Rohingya and the 2021 coup is cause for serious concern,” Marzuki said in a statement on October 2.
More than 4,000 people have been killed in Myanmar since the junta seized power in February 2021, according to the non-profit Assistance Association for Political Prisoners monitoring group, and over 25,000 have been arrested.
In an editorial on October 5, The Jakarta Post said Indonesia “would lose its credibility with the people of Myanmar” if the arms-sales allegations were true.
The allegations could also hurt Indonesian Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto’s prospects of winning next year’s presidential election on his third attempt, according to O’Rourke of Reformasi Weekly.
If Indonesia’s human rights commission “moves in an assertive and timely fashion, and if it affirms any of [Marzuki’s] assertions, the consequences could deliver a significant reputational blow to Indonesia’s defence industry”, which could “conceivably reflect upon Prabowo and State Enterprise Minister Erick Thohir”, he said.
The commission said on October 5 it was still “conducting a review … to ascertain whether there are allegations of human rights violations”.
A spokesman for Indonesia’s foreign ministry said on October 3 that it “is still studying the report” and needed time to respond as “it involves a verification process with many sides”.
