The Dutch refuse to sell tanks to Indonesia: losing €200 million to give a good example
Damen Shipyards and the Indonesian navy sign the contract for a new submarine, on June 5th
Has anyone scolded Tjeerd de Zwaan yet? Earlier this month, the Dutch ambassador to Indonesia was one of the guests of honor at a ceremony
celebrating the sale of a military submarine to the Indonesian navy. Dutch company Damen will build the submarine (not their first for Indonesia) partially in the Netherlands and partially in Indonesia. Nice touch: the submarine is officially called a ‘destroyer’.
This sale (and the presence of the ambassador) is ironic, since Dutch parliament decided last week to
halt the sale of 80 superfluous Leopard army tanks to Indonesia (worth 200 million euros), effectively deciding on a weapons embargo.
A
majority considers the human rights situation in Indonesia in too much danger to justify selling tanks to the country, and continuous reports about
the violence in Papua, for instance, seem to back that up. Arjen El-Fassed, MP for the Green Party, said:
So far I haven’t heard one single human rights expert say that the sale of weapons [to Indonesia] is responsible.
The often-heard counterclaim (from
Dutch party CDA, for instance) is that tanks in Indonesia will likely not be deployed against civilians, at least not in remote places like Papua. Most likely they’ll gather dust on Java for the coming decades. In other words: the danger of these tanks to human rights is almost non-existent. Just sell the darn things and cash the €200 million check!
I decided to ask Andreas Harsono, researcher for
Human Rights Watch in Indonesia, what he thinks. He tells me over the phone:
Halting the sale of these tanks is the good thing to do, I praise the Dutch parliament in taking this decision. It’s true that these tanks are probably too heavy to be moved to, and deployed in, Papua – they won’t be a direct threat to human rights.
But the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom pay attention to what the Netherlands is doing, and those other countries want to sell arms to Indonesia as well. The US government, for instance,
wants to sell Apache helicopters to Indonesia – those machines can very easily be deployed against civilions and supposed ‘insurgents’ in remote areas. The US says that this will not happen, but they have no guarantee.
So, basically: halting the sale of tanks to Indonesia is a symbolic gesture, but not a worthless one, according to HRW. It gives a good example to other countries: don’t sell your weapons to this human-rights-violating country! Now the only question is whether the US will follow suit. If not, the Netherlands will have made an empty gesture, at the cost of 200 million euros.
An ironic sidenote, in conclusion: Henk Schulte Nordholt
notes that during the reign of president Suharto, the Indonesian army became bloated with money and personnel (they were loyal to Suharto), whereas the navy was consistently under-funded (the ‘leftist’, critical elements were to be found there). In a way, what the Dutch parliament is doing now can be seen as a form of development aid: by denying Indonesia tanks, but granting them submarines, they’re helping Indonesia getting their armed forces more in balance.
I kid, of course.
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