Kopassus: Inside Indonesia’s Special Forces by Ken Conboy
These guys don’t fool around. KOPASSUS (Komando Pasukan Khusus), the elite red-beret force, is the most dedicated, ruthless and professional military unit in Indonesia.
They do stuff like aircraft assaults, parachuting onto the decks of moving ships and covert exits out of submarine torpedo tubes. One initiation rite is sending teams across Java in civilian clothes without money or maps, armed only with a knife.
Although their survival training is modeled on SAS in the UK and the Green Berets in the American armed forces, KOPASSUS is more than just a "Special Forces." They can also play the role of agent provocateurs, a Fifth Column, a secret army and sometimes even act like a shadow government.
KOPASSUS is often a tool used by senior officers to do political dirty work or to serve as means of realizing their own self-serving agendas or nationalistic ideology. For all its faults and failures, KOPASSUS has also served its country with distinction on a number of occasions. Its romanticized image somehow persists through 50 years of bad press and unending controversy.Led initially by impossibly young Indonesian commanders (Sudirman 28, Slamet Riyadi 23, Kawilarang 30), their first professional instructor was a gentleman tulip farmer and former World War II Dutch jungle fighter and special operations expert who defected, converted to Islam and married an Indonesian woman.
In this dense and unremitting history you’ll find all the painstaking military scholarship you’ll ever need. If you want to know who the 2nd lieutenant was who led the assault in the Lubis Affair (1956) or the adjutant who was the supply officer during the Ben Hur Mission near Kuching in 1965, look no further. The index, though serviceable, is not up to the task of detailing the voluminous amount of detail in the text.
This taut and dramatic book is not just a chronicle of the evolution and development of Indonesia’s elite forces. It is also a blow-by-blow account of the events and separatist movements which shaped the new republic. The campaigns against and the scourge of Indonesia - Islamic fundamentalist extremists - are particularly well-documented.
Descriptions of coup attempts abound: an army putsch against the mercurialPresident Sukarno in the 1950s, the war of words and nerve between Sumatran Permesta rebels and the central government, the bloody civil war between Jakarta and breakaway rebels of northern Sulawesi. Also well told is the military’s role during Sukarno’s Guided Democracy period (1959) when the legislative assembly was dissolved.
In the 1960s, Indonesia began a tenacious and determined campaign to wrest West Irian away from Holland. With the Soviet Union under Kruschchev providing material support and weaponry, the purpose of the initial submarine infiltrations, airborne insertions and assaults by speedboats was to establish guerilla pockets. Detected and hunted down by Dutch marines, the commandos were shot, captured or eaten by crocodiles and sharks, their torpedo boats blown out of the Aru Sea by Dutch destroyers.
The intensive Irian Jaya campaign was finally terminated by a ceasefire negotiated under intense American diplomatic pressure exerted on the Dutch. In effect, the Indonesians had lost all the battles but won the war.
As a means of drawing attention away from his catastrophic economic policies, by the mid-1960’s Sukarno’s fiery rhetoric was preparing the nation for war, culminating in the disastrous Konfrontasi campaign in East Malaysia in which Indonesia dropped paratroopers into northern Malaysian-held Borneo in support of Chinese-communist guerillas who were fighting British troops. Most of these forays ended in their death or capture and little was accomplished. Suharto finally called off Konfrontasi in 1966.
The history also records the birth of OPM (Free Papua Movement) with a bloody revolt by Arfak tribesmen of Manowari. KOPASSUS has led many decisive and daredevil operations against this ragtag guerilla band. While all this military adventurism was taking place, a drama of historic proportions was taking place in Jakarta which the author called "the hottest Cold War battlefield in Indonesia."
In a chapter entitled "Black September," KOPASSUS gives excellent background on how the PKI made such deep inroads into Java’s heartland leading up to the 1965 so-called coup attempt. The whole sordid affair and its chaotic aftermath is described in riveting detail. The writer brooks no conspiracy theories and narrates the official New Order version of events. He is almost matter-of-fact when describing the mechanisms by which hundreds of thousands of communists, sympathizers and innocent people were slaughtered.
Indonesia’s blatant full-blown invasion of East Timor was launched just one day after President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger departed Jakarta for Tokyo on 6 December 1975. Inspired by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Sunday morning would find most of the Timorese population attending Catholic religious services. Waves of jumpers from nine C-130 Hercules, descending in complete darkness over the capital of Dili, ended in the bloodiest single day of fighting in the history of Indonesia’s Special Forces.
The rescue of hostages hijacked on the Wyola by Islamic fanatics in March 1981, the most brilliantly executed and daring operation ever carried out by KOPASSUS, is an extremely fast-paced and thrill-packed telling. Though the commandos who took part in this mission trained for only three days with totally unfamiliar weapons, not a single hostage was lost. It was KOPASSUS’ defining moment.
By the late 1990s, it had became more and more difficult to distinguish between bona fide operations sanctioned by the army chain of command and those missions - the 1998 riots in Jakarta, the 1999 upheavals in East Timor, human rights abuses in Aceh and Papua - in which KOPASSUS personnel were moonlighting on behalf of political interests. At worst its members can sink to murder, assault, kidnapping and torture, actions for which written orders were never issued.
As evidenced by their 2001 murder of Papuan independence movement leader Theys Eluay, in which four convicted KOPASSUS members were called "heroes" and given ludicrous sentences of two and three years, they are still a protected and coddled force.
Data is backed up by ponderous detail on the background and training of commanders, number of battle casualties, military acronyms, battalion, regiment and detachment, with documents, publications and archives cited. It’s a wonder how Conway ever finessed the hundreds of interviews from members of Indonesia’s usually secretive and paranoid armed services.
Some of the most amazing detail and odd facts turn up in the supporting footnotes at the end of each chapter - anecdotes, eye witness accounts, corrections of historical documents, bizarre explanations of mishaps and misjudgments, character sketches.
Keep in mind that this is unadulterated military history, rife with such arcane terms as "walking point," "outflanking," "order-of-battle," "subordinate units," "night drop," abesiling device," "assault harness," and the mysterious technique of "exfiltration."
The whole is a meticulously researched tale by a learned military historian who obviously relishes the heat of battle, and the ironies, coincidences and unexpected surprises of war. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in unconventional warfare, contemporary Indonesian history and the innumerable bushfire wars that have swept the republic since its inception in 1950.
KOPASSUS: Inside Indonesia’s Special Forces by Ken Conboy, Equinox Publishing, Jakarta 2003, ISBN 979-95898-8-6.
Available for Rp139,000 at Periplus Bookshops in the Bali Galeria in Kuta, Warung Made in Seminyak, Ngurah Rai Airport, in Gramedia bookstores and in the Matahari in Kuta Square.
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