Despite his Indonesian experience Obama views the country as a pawn to be exploited on the world stage
WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
By Wayne Madsen
06/21/2016
The third armed clash between Indonesian maritime patrol craft and a Chinese fishing vessel has been reported in the extreme southern part of the South China Sea.
Although China has had maritime territorial disputes with other countries in the region, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam, Sino-Indonesian relations have been spared from the tensions elsewhere in the region, particularly around hotly-contested islands in the Paracel and Spratly groups. However, that has now changed with yet another clash between the Indonesian Navy and Chinese fishing boats in the Natuna Islands area. Although the Chinese "Nine-Dash Line" map does not include Indonesia's Natuna islands, the territory claimed by China does reach into what Indonesia claims as its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
China says the waters are in China's traditional fishing area.
In March, a Chinese Coast Guard vessel tried to prevent the Indonesian Navy from towing away a Chinese fishing boat. In May, the Indonesian Navy opened fire on a Chinese fishing boat as it was fleeing the area. The boat was captured and its crew continues to be detained in Ranai, the capital of the Natuna islands. On June 17, the Indonesian Navy opened fire on another Chinese fishing boat, injuring one crewman.
The recent open warfare between Indonesia and China is music to the ears of those in the Obama White House and Pentagon who are itching for a dual military conflict between the United States on one side and China and Russia on the other.
In 2015, China officially recognized Indonesia's sovereignty over the Natuna islands. More significantly, China also recognized Indonesia's EEZ right, which also happen to extend into China's "Nine-Dash Line" boundary.
However, there are now full-blown naval clashes between China and Indonesian vessels on the high seas. Who is responsible for this sudden breakdown in relations between Beijing and Jakarta?
The answer lies in an Oval Office occupied by a president with deep familial roots in Indonesia and someone whose past few trips to Asia have been designed to ratchet up tensions with China. Some outside influence has prompted Indonesian president Joko "Jokowi" Widodo to lay down the gauntlet to China. President Obama is the likely behind-the-scenes villain since he is someone who has shown through his military "pivot to Asia" that he will take advantage of any potential hot spot in Asia to rattle American sabers against China. Since announcing his pivot to Asia in 2011, Obama has undertaken a series of provocative moves against China.
These have included:
- Visiting Vietnam and announcing that the U.S. would sell weapons to the country that continues to be plagued by un-exploded U.S. ordnance, including land mines, from the Vietnam War.
- Ordering the return of U.S. troops and bases to the Philippines, including the reactivation of the U.S. Navy presence in Subic Bay.
- Negotiating with Vietnam the return of the U.S. Navy to Cam Ranh Bay, a major U.S. base during the Vietnam War.
- Basing U.S. P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft and four littoral combat ships in Singapore.
- Basing U.S. Marines and U.S. air assets in Darwin, Australia.
-Quietly pressuring Japan to eliminate the constitutional clause, inserted at the insistence of General Douglas MacArthur, prohibiting Japan from maintaining an offensive military structure.
- Increasing the number of joint naval exercises with South Korea.
- Inviting the Indian Navy, for the first time, to take part in naval exercises with the U.S. and Japanese navies in waters off of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, claimed by Japan and China, in the East China Sea. The annual U.S.-Indian Malabar exercise was moved from Indian waters to those close to China for the sole purpose of ratcheting up tensions with China.
- Assisting the Philippines in creating a National Coast Watch Center in Manila.
- Authorizing a $1,83 billion arms deal with Taiwan that includes missiles and naval frigates.
- Establising a U.S. Marine Corps presence in the Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo.
- Deploying Global Hawk and Triton unmanned aerial vehicles to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.
- Permanently linking the Brunei military with a U.S. state Army National Guard unit for joint training and operations.
- Increasing the number of Chinese-speaking agents at the CIA station co-located with the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong.
- Detailing a greater number of naval vessels from the U.S. Navy's Third Fleet in San Diego to East Asian waters.
Throughout Obama's military build-up in Asia, Indonesia has remained relatively quiet. Without any Chinese claims to Indonesian islands, Jakarta was happy to just observe the increased tensions in the South China Sea without getting involved militarily. That all changed with the incidents between the Indonesian Navy and Chinese fishing and Coast Guard boats.
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Hatta, Sukarno, Suharto |
There has recently been a debate in Indonesia about opening up an investigation of the 1965 coup that toppled President Sukarno and resulted in a genocide against actual and perceived members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and ethnic Chinese Indonesian citizens. As many as one million may have been killed as a result of the Central Intelligence Agency-backed coup and the resulting massacre of leftists and Chinese. The General Suharto regime that took power had two willing accomplices. One was Lieutenant Colonel Lolo Soetoro of the Indonesian Army, the stepfather of Obama, who enrolled his young stepson in a state school after declaring him an Indonesian citizen.
The other accomplice to genocide was Ann Dunham Soetoro, Obama's mother whose covert CIA work for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) resulted in her identifying all the leftists in central Javanese villages and the turning over lists of Indonesian "Reds" to her husband who passed them to Suharto's execution teams.
Although many Indonesians favor an investigation of the 1965 coup, which could result in the roles of Obama's stepfather and mother being revealed, the secrets of the Obama family and the coup and the systematic genocide of the Communists and ethnic Chinese may remain as just that, secret. Protests against any investigation of the coup by Saudi-influenced Islamists in Indonesia have broken out in Indonesia.
Just as right-wing Muslims assisted Suharto, Lolo Soetoro, Ann Dunham Soetoro, and the CIA in helping to stamp out the PKI and target the ethnic Chinese, they have come to the assistance of the CIA, now run by pro-Wahhabist John Brennan, in opposing an investigation of the events of 1965 and succeeding years.
Indonesian police have dealt harshly with Indonesian shopkeepers who have found themselves being arrested for selling items in violation of Indonesian laws against communist imagery. Any item bearing a hammer and sickle emblem is strictly forbidden. However, this ban has also been extended to bookstores selling books authored by leftists. Even films on issues like labor rights have been banned by the Indonesian authorities. All this, of course, is music to the ears of Obama, the CIA creation whose own parents avidly participated in the brutal repression of Communists during the post-1965 coup genocide.
Some of Obama's childhood friends in Jakarta, whose military fathers worked with Lolo Soetoro in suppressing the PKI and Chinese in the 1960s, are now active with the Islamists in protesting against an investigation of the coup and its aftermath. These sons and daughters of the coup plotters and enforcers, operating under the banner of the Communication Forum on Indonesian Veterans’ Children (FKPPI), have joined the Islamists in rejecting the investigation.
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Soetoro with Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama |
It is more than certain that Obama told Jokowi exactly what he thought about the Indonesian president's plans to investigate the events of 1965 at their meeting at the U.S.-ASEAN Summit in February of this year in Sunnylands, California.
WMR has been informed that U.S. special operations teams have deployed with Indonesian naval forces in patrolling the waters of the South China Sea and assisting in the interdiction of Chinese fishing vessels and Coast Guard patrol boats. This comes on the heels of first-ever joint U.S. and Indonesian submarine exercises in Indonesia waters.
For years, CIA personnel have worked with Indonesian fishermen, some who supplement their incomes by also engaging in piracy, in interdicting and boarding vessels of interest transiting the seas around the Natuna islands. More than one North Korean-flagged, as well as "flag of convenience" merchant ships have been boarded by joint teams of Indonesian fishermen/pirates and U.S. special operations personnel.
The U.S. teams locate and seize military items from North Korea, including missiles and their components, and nuclear components heading to North Korea, while the moonlighting Indonesian fishermen are welcome to take all the Chinese-made televisions, laptop computers, and other consumer goods they can haul away.
When WMR's editor first came across this U.S.-Indonesian operation in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, the CIA asked that the details not be published. This editor agreed at the time but now it is obvious that the U.S. dalliance with piracy on the open seas is no longer confined to interdicting North Korean materials for North Korea's nuclear program but is aimed at starting a war with China.
With the same type of teams now working together to target Chinese fishing boats, the Obama administration has crossed a dangerous line. The framers of the U.S. Constitution, who were emphatic about requiring a U.S. president to be "natural born," intended to bar from office foreign-born individuals whose biases and connections to foreign countries could result in a dual-loyalty problem. Obama's Indonesian connections have not only helped to bring Indonesia on to America's side in a looming conflict with China but have also disrupted Indonesia's desire to pursue the whole truth about the coup of 1965.
Wayne Madsen
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Wayne Madsen |
Investigative journalist,
author and syndicated columnist, Madsen has over twenty years experience in
security issues.
As a U.S. Naval Officer,
he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy.
Madsen has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox
News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC and MS-NBC. He has
been invited to testify as a witness before the US House of Representatives,
the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of
the French government. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists
(SPJ) and the National Press Club, Madsen is based and reports from Washington,
D.C.