Indonesia is a constitutional republic with a parliamentary system of government. It is the world’s 27th biggest military spender, spending US$ 11 billion in 2024. It is the world’s 28th largest arms importer in 2024, and has a sizeable domestic defence technology industry.
As the world’s fourth most populous country and largest majority-Muslim population, Indonesia is very ethnically and linguistically diverse. It has the world’s third largest coastline, which in part explains its heavy investment in naval defence. The Indonesian military also contributes troops to overseas UN peacekeeping missions, notably UNIFIL in Lebanon, and in 2015, the President signalled that up to 20,000 troops were prepared to deploy to Gaza “to help secure peace.” Indonesia also maintains a naval presence in the South China Sea, among other locations. In 2025, the Indonesian parliament passed a law to allow serving military officers to take a wider range of roles including peacekeeping, disaster response, infrastructure, counterterrorism, and even economic coordination. A further 100 battalions will be created, in what critics worry is a creeping militarisation of civilian life.
Indonesia’s military expansion does little to quell concerns over its role in significant human rights abuses. Given the presence of militant Islamist groups, Indonesia’s security services and military have engaged in extrajudicial killings and disappearances, particularly in West Papua region, which remains effectively a military-run zone to which outside observers have very limited access.
Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor 1975-99
Under the Suharto dictatorship, Indonesia invaded and occupied East Timor in 1975, as the small nation was moving toward independence from Portugal. Indonesia’s occupying forces were responsible for a genocide which killed an estimated 200,000 people, almost a third of the pre-invasion population, through mass killings and associated starvation and disease. Indonesia’s occupation, though formally condemned by the UN Security Council, was tacitly supported by western powers, including the US, UK, and Australia, and received substantial western arms supplies, including from the UK.
During the 1990s, the sale of UK arms to Indonesia – in particular Hawk trainer/light combat aircraft, whose sale was agreed in 1993 – was a major source of controversy, and a major focus of CAAT’s campaigning. In fact, the UK first supplied Hawks to Indonesia in 1978, at the height of the Indonesian military effort to quell East Timorese resistance, and it is alleged that these aircraft were used in the war. The UK also supplied armoured vehicles to Indonesia, which were used for internal repression in Indonesia during the protests that led to the fall of Suharto in 1998.
In 1996, four women anti-arms trade campaigners, part of the Seeds of Hope Ploughshares group – Andrea Needham, Lotta Kronlid, Jo Wilson, and Angie Zelter – broke into the British Aerospace airbase at Warton in Lancashire and disarmed a Hawk aircraft bound for Indonesia with hammers. They were subsequently acquitted by a Liverpool jury, having mounted a defence that they were acting to prevent a greater crime.
UK arms sales to Indonesia continued, but following the fall of Suharto, East Timor was allowed to hold a UN-supervised referendum on independence in 1999. Despite massive violence by Indonesian forces and local militia they sponsored, the East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence. Indonesian forces and militia then went on a bloody rampage that displaced much of the population, leading finally to an arms embargo by the European Union (including the UK). With this and other threatened international sanctions, Indonesia withdrew its forces, replaced by a UN peacekeeping force. East Timor finally became independent and joined the UN as a member state as Timor Leste in 2002.
West Papua
Indonesia assumed full control of West Papua, the western half of the Papua island shared with Papua New Guinea, in 1963, following the withdrawal of Dutch colonial forces. Ever since, west Papuans have been engaged in a protracted struggle against central Indonesian control, a conflict characterised by constant surveillance and repression by Indonesia security services, and occasional peaks of violence and armed skirmishes.
Atrocities against civilians have been widespread, leading some human rights groups and activists to characterise the situation as a genocide against ethnic Papuans. Indonesian forces brutally repressed widespread protests led by Papuan students in 2019, highlighting racism and discrimination against Papuan Indonesians. Foreign journalists are essentially banned from the region. Some, including BBC’s Indonesia correspondent, have previosly been detained for their Papua coverage. Foreign tourists have been arrested and convicted of treason.
