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Should Indonesia Be Worried About the WikiLeaks Cables From Jakarta?
Kinanti Pinta Karana | November 29, 2010

A file photo showing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during a press conference in London in October. The whistle-blowing Web site on Sunday began releasing 250,000 secret messages sent by US embassies from all over the world, more than 3,000 of which came from Indonesia. (EPA Photo) A file photo showing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during a press conference in London in October. The whistle-blowing Web site on Sunday began releasing 250,000 secret messages sent by US embassies from all over the world, more than 3,000 of which came from Indonesia. (EPA Photo)
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Comments

Jakartass
5:57pm Dec 1, 2010

"Should Indonesia be worried by the leaks?"

Hopefully, yes.

For starters, the human rights abuses in Papua by troops under the supervision of officers trained in the US should make interesting reading.


mauriceg
10:06pm Nov 30, 2010

Indonesian government; human rights, in same sentence. Surely some mistake.

Valkyrie
1:28pm Nov 30, 2010

@foto4mike - hmmmmm, let me guess. You're kidding.

BilboBaggins
11:31am Nov 30, 2010

Can't wait to read these ones, ha ha.

kales
6:43am Nov 30, 2010

foto4mike - haha. The Wikileaks that I have seen in relation to other world leaders were of no surprise, just the truth. I anticipate there will be lots of U.S. Flag burning and demonstrations with lost of pooh in Indonesia!

Jakarta. Should Indonesia be worried about what the over 3,000 cables sent out by its diplomats here contain? It depends on how you look at it, according to experts.

Of the 251,287 documents WikiLeaks began releasing early on Sunday, the UK’s The Guardian newspaper, which received advanced copies, said that 3,059 came from the US Embassy in Jakarta and 167 from the US Consulate in Surabaya.

The latest document among the Jakarta files was dated Feb. 27, 2010, while the earliest was sent out on Nov. 19, 1990. Only 14 of the files were sent out during the 1990s, and another 20 from 2000 to 2005. The vast majority were sent out from 2006 to February this year.

The embassy cables, which are just a selection of all cables sent out, would be released in stages over the next few months.

But the few hundred ones already released, which tackle a wide variety of subjects ranging from the “voluptuous blond” nurse who always accompanies Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi to how Arab leaders have urged the United States to attack Iran, have already rattled the diplomatic world.

There are reasons to worry, according to Indonesian security expert Noor Huda Ismail.

“The fact that some of the cables are about security, they could be used by jihadists to preach to their followers that America is the master of puppets in the war against terrorism in Indonesia,” he said.

Noor Huda was also concerned about the fate of subcontractors or security consultants supplying information to foreign embassies in Indonesia.

“The field operators who work for embassies could also get into trouble because there is no way embassies could obtain security information without them,” Noor Huda said.

According to him, the field operators work under CIA’s Open Source Community policy.

“CIA has an agency inside each embassy all over the world to collect open source information of any kind, for example the text of a Friday prayers sermon to be sent to their headquarters and analyzed,” he said.

However, Teuku Rezasyah, an international relations expert from Bandung’s Padjajaran University, said there was another way of looking at the leaks.

As there is no way now to prevent the release of the Jakarta cables, Teuku said the government should not panic and instead learn from what the files contain.

“When the cables are revealed, the Indonesian government must not panic. It should be a time for the government to do some introspection and see if they have done enough to uphold human rights, for example,” he said.

“The number of cables, more than 3000, shows that Indonesia is important to the US,” he added.

“I think the public should thank Wikileaks for the data. It is very hard to hack let alone decode diplomatic cables because they use complicated mathematics formulas.”