Indonesia:
US secretly trained Kopassus

Indonesia's Kopassus special forces unit, which organised and 
oversaw the massacres and terror campaign in East Timor, was 
trained in the United States under a covert program designed to 
circumvent a Congressional ban on training Indonesian military.

Britain's Observer newspaper has reported that the 
undercover training program was set up after the US Congress 
reacted to the 1991 Dili massacre by severely cutting back on US 
training programs for the Indonesian military then in place.

The covert scheme to continue the training was code-named Iron 
Balance, and kept under wraps, hidden from the public and members 
of Congress. According to the Observer, it continued until 
last year.

The "counter insurgency" tactics pursued by Kopassus are typical 
of the repressive tactics taught to military officers from 
numerous dictatorships and anti-democratic regimes in the US 
military's infamous School of the Americas (SOA), popularly known 
as the "school of assassins".

The paramilitary units set up by Kopassus using local recruits 
from East and West Timor, which formed the nuclei of the 
"militias" that sprang up so "spontaneously", are also typical of 
the tactical approach taught by the US military and intelligence 
services, which advised right-wing regimes on the setting up of 
death squads all over south and central America and in other 
countries.

The British newspaper said the Kopassus force was built up with 
US expertise despite the US authorities being fully aware of its 
role in the genocide of hundreds of thousands of East Timorese in 
the period following Indonesia's 1975 invasion of the former 
Portuguese colony.

Amnesty International says Kopassus has been "responsible for 
some of the worst human rights violations in Indonesia's 
history".

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