Indonesia seeks to “become an appropriate medium power” and it wants to “learn from India” on how to attain “stand-alone defence capabilities.”
Spelling out such an agenda, Indonesian Defence Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro told TheHindu that Jakarta would also focus on cooperation with India in “human resource development” in the defence sector.
Speaking on the sidelines of the recent Asia Security Summit here, the Minister said Jakarta would raise this issue during the Joint Defence Coordinating Committee meeting in New Delhi on Friday.
On Jakarta's priorities for new links with India, he said, the objective now was to explore the full range of possibilities for cooperation.
He cited, in particular, India's expertise in the training of Su-class combat pilots, counter-insurgency operations and network-centric warfare. Training for United Nations peace-keeping operations and military-organised humanitarian disaster relief was also of interest to Jakarta. “If India can be our counterpart, we are pleased.”
Indonesia would look at India's indigenous defence industry as well, he said, without spelling out any specific area of Jakarta's interest in procurement or joint production.
“We really admire what India is doing” in this domain. New ties with India would be possible under the framework of the existing defence cooperation pact between the two countries. At the same time, Indonesia was favourably disposed to raising the current bilateral dialogue to the level of defence ministers on a regular basis as suggested by India.
On why India was not being co-opted for maintaining security along the Malacca Strait, he said Indonesia had no reservations at all. However, Jakarta was simply “obeying the international regulations” under the Law of the Sea. So, the three littoral states of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore were alone protecting the Malacca Strait.
Asked whether India was, in fact, one of several countries that Indonesia might want to tap for its own defence capabilities, he said ‘yes.' In 2001, the United States lifted its embargo on military cooperation with Indonesia after having slapped it in 1999 over the East Timor issue.
“Every year now, there is the Indonesia-U.S. bilateral security dialogue. Cooperation for our defence industry depends on our need and on what is really available from the U.S. We talk about that. Our Su [combat aircraft] are coming from Russia. And, before that, our battleship [was] from Europe. We really do not want to depend on only one country for our defence equipment,” he said.
