Experts Back Neutral Role by U.S. in Indonesia

As the White House resists demands from Congress to take an active role in bringing down Indonesia’s President Suharto and selecting a successor, Asia specialists say history bolsters that position.

Forty years ago, the CIA took sides in the Indonesian civil war and succeeded only in strengthening then-President Sukarno, the leftist leader whom the United States wanted deposed. It was another eight years before Sukarno finally fell in a 1966 coup that saw Suharto emerge as his successor. The CIA had no role in this upheaval, during which thousands of Indonesians were killed.

Given this background, U.S. officials insist that they are taking no sides this time and are seeking only to encourage a dialogue among the political forces now at work in Indonesia.

This stance has been belittled by Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), who believe that the U.S. must publicly denounce Suharto and back a successor.

But the U.S. position won support Tuesday from one of the most prominent American specialists on Indonesia, Donald K. Emmerson, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin.

“The United States should resist the temptation to interfere in the succession,” Emmerson said in an interview. “It would backfire. . . . It would be extraordinarily maladroit and morally wrong.”

In any case, Emmerson said, U.S. leverage in the chaotic Indonesian crisis now is “close to zero.”

This view was echoed at the White House, where officials maintained that the United States has had little influence over the fast-moving events inside Indonesia and that their goal is to encourage the varied parties to talk to one another.

Despite friendly relations, the United States has had few military ties with Indonesia during the 1990s because of congressional restrictions prompted by Suharto’s poor human rights record.

And while trade links between the two countries have grown in recent years, U.S. officials have traditionally paid far more attention to Western Europe and to other parts of Asia than to the sprawling archipelago.

Several senators have suggested that the United States emulate its activist role in the Philippines in 1986, when President Ferdinand E. Marcos, faced with thunderous demonstrations, accepted American entreaties to step down in favor of Corazon Aquino, the widow of an assassinated opposition leader.

U.S. officials insist, however, that they have far less influence in Indonesia. The situation there may be more like those that prevailed in 1974 and 1979, when two well-coddled rulers--Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the shah of Iran--were overthrown and the United States failed to control the successions. In both cases, the despotic rulers were succeeded by anti-American regimes.

In Indonesia, one U.S. official said, “our influence is limited. Our role is limited. This is not the Philippines.”

For now, the official added, “we’re still trying to figure out what our leverage might be.”

State Department spokesman James P. Rubin made it clear that the administration was not embracing Suharto’s promise in his televised address Tuesday to Indonesians to lead a process of political reform and then step aside.

“We are not going to be tied to a Suharto political reform program in the absence of the dialogue between the people and the government that we have called for--and that will not simply happen by the delivery of a speech,” Rubin said.

The administration’s relatively passive policy contrasts sharply with the interference in Indonesia by the Eisenhower administration in the late 1950s.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles described Sukarno then as “dangerous, untrustworthy and by character susceptible to the Communist way of thinking.” The CIA, directed by his brother, Allen W. Dulles, supplied and supported Indonesian rebels.

The CIA escapade was exposed in May 1958 when the Indonesian military shot down an American-built B-26 bomber and captured its American pilot, Allen Pope.

“It was like a gift from heaven,” Emmerson said. “It strengthened Sukarno’s position.”