AIDING AND ABETTING: FOREIGN AID AND STATE COERCION
JESSICA NICOLE TRISKO DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE MCGILL UNIVERSITY AUGUST 2012
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) © Jessica Nicole Trisko, 2012
Abstract
This study examines the effects of US bilateral foreign aid policy on the internal security dynamics of aid recipient states. I draw upon the international security and contentious politics literatures to develop a theory of the coercive effect of foreign aid. I analyze how US foreign assistance affects the state capacity of recipient countries and, as a consequence, the government’s ability to employ violence as a tool for ensuring its continued tenure. I argue that as a consequence of fungibility—the ability to use foreign aid as a general government resource— foreign aid may increase the likelihood of state coercion by funding increases in the state’s coercive capacity, including changes in military expenditure, force structure and arms acquisitions.
I test this argument through a statistical analysis of a cross-sectional time- series dataset of annual US bilateral foreign aid for 132 developing countries during the period of 1976 to 2005. This analysis is complemented by an in-depth case study of Indonesia and shorter analyses of El Salvador and South Korea. I find that the coercive effect of foreign aid is conditioned by the recipient country’s political institutions and conflict history. This research links the study of political violence with the changing nature of international relations and provides considerable insight into international influences on intrastate conflict.
The research further suggests that foreign aid undermines aid donor goals by creating conditions propitious to increased political violence in recipient countries.
ii Résumé
Cette étude analyse les impacts de la politique d’aide étrangère des États-Unis sur la sécurité interne des États bénéficiaires. La documentation sur la sécurité internationale et les politiques conflictuelles m’a servi à développer une théorie sur l’effet coercitif de l’aide internationale. J’analyserai la manière dont l’aide
étrangère des États-Unis affecte la capacité de gouverner des États bénéficiaires.
J’analyserai particulièrement la capacité du gouvernement de l’État bénéficiaire d’employer la violence pour assurer la poursuite de son mandat. J’argumenterai qu’une des conséquences de la fongibilité – la capacité d’utiliser l’aide internationale comme une ressource gouvernementale – serait la possibilité d’augmentation de coercibilité de l’État en augmentant les dépenses dans les capacités coercitives de l’État, incluant les dépenses militaires, les forces de l’ordre et l’acquisition d’armes.
Cet argumentaire sera démontré avec une analyse statistique d’un ensemble de données de l’aide bilatérale des États-Unis pour 132 pays en développement entre 1976 à 2005. Cette analyse est additionnée d’un regard en profondeur sur une étude de cas en l’Indonésie et d’analyses plus courtes de l’El
Salvador, la Russie et la Corée du Sud. Je démontre que l’effet coercitif de l’aide
étrangère est conditionné par les institutions politiques et l’histoire militaire du pays bénéficiaire. Cette recherche fait un lien entre l’étude de la violence politique et la nature changeante des relations internationales, et expose un aperçu fascinant des influences internationales et des conflits interétatiques. La recherche
iii suggère aussi que l’aide internationale va à l’encontre des buts du donateur de subvention en créant des conditions propices à l’augmentation de la violence politique dans les pays bénéficiaires.
iv Table of Contents Abstract ...... ii Résumé ...... iii Acknowledgements ...... vii Figures, Tables, and Maps ...... xi Acronyms and Initializations ...... xiii Chapter I. International Influences on Human Rights and State Coercion ...... 1 Introduction ...... 1 Mechanisms of International Human Rights Influence ...... 10 Structure of the Study ...... 21 Chapter II. Aiding Violence or Peace? A Theory of the Coercive Effects of Foreign Aid ...... 26 Introduction ...... 26 Why States Repress: Coercion, Violence and the Modern State ...... 29 Opposition and Rebellion ...... 31 Defining State Coercion ...... 35 The International Dimensions of State Coercion ...... 39 The Implications of Aid Fungibility ...... 40 The Coercive Effect of Foreign Aid ...... 43 Domestic Influences on the Coercive Effect of Aid ...... 49 Regime Type and Political Institutions ...... 50 State Strength and the Capacity for Coercion ...... 53 Conflict History ...... 56 Conclusion ...... 59 Chapter III. Counting the Costs of Foreign Aid ...... 62 Introduction ...... 62 State Repression, Violence and Mass Killings: Concepts and Definitions ...... 66 Mass Killings ...... 68 State Violence ...... 74 Repression ...... 76 Biases in State Coercion Measures ...... 79 The International Determinants of State Coercion ...... 82 United States Bilateral Foreign Aid: Economic and Military ...... 84 Other International Influences ...... 86 The Domestic Determinants of State Coercion ...... 88 Regime Type and Political Institutions ...... 88 State Strength and Reach ...... 90 Internal Conflict History ...... 92 Control Variables ...... 93 Empirical Strategy ...... 96 Case Study Structure ...... 98 Conclusion ...... 99 Appendix ...... 101 Chapter IV. A Cross-Country Analysis of the Coercive Effects of Foreign Aid, 1976- 2005 ...... 104 Introduction ...... 104
v Does Foreign Aid Facilitate State Coercion? ...... 106 Does Foreign Aid Facilitate Torture? ...... 119 Is All Foreign Aid Coercive? ...... 122 Robustness Tests ...... 127 Conclusion ...... 128 Appendix ...... 131 Chapter V. The Dynamics of the Coercive Effect of Foreign Aid ...... 135 Introduction ...... 135 Temporal and Regional Dynamics ...... 139 Changes in the International System ...... 145 The Post-9/11 Period ...... 151 Changes in American Foreign Policy ...... 155 Conclusion ...... 159 Appendix ...... 161 Chapter VI. Aid, Arms and Abuses in the Indonesian Archipelago ...... 162 Introduction ...... 162 Indonesia: Background ...... 165 Colonial Legacies and State Institutions ...... 168 The Long Shadow of Conflict ...... 172 State Coercion in the Indonesian Context ...... 177 Aiding and Abetting State Coercion in Indonesia ...... 180 The Sukarno Years, 1949-1966 ...... 187 The Early Suharto Years, 1967-1985 ...... 198 The Decline of the Suharto Regime, 1986-1998 ...... 216 The Transition to Democracy ...... 225 Conclusion ...... 231 Appendix ...... 234 Chapter VII. Conclusion ...... 235 Introduction ...... 235 Beyond Indonesia: Assessing the Validity of the Coercive Effect of Aid ...... 236 El Salvador ...... 238 South Korea ...... 248 Conclusion ...... 257 The Limits of International Efforts to Promote Human Rights ...... 259 The Question of Culpability ...... 261 The Future of Foreign Aid as a Policy Tool ...... 263 Bibliography ...... 265
vi Acknowledgements
They say it takes a village to raise a child. This dissertation has benefitted from the wisdom and care of members of many villages, spread across multiple countries.
To my dissertation committee—those who were part of this project from the beginning—Steve Saideman, Juliet Johnson and T.V. Paul, thank you for your guidance and for seeing me through to the end. To Ross Burkhart, thank you for thoughtful feedback on my project and an attention to detail that goes well beyond what I ever could have expected. The support and endless patience that you all provided were truly a blessing. Your comments and suggestions have greatly improved what inevitably remains an imperfect project.
In addition to my committee, I have benefited from the guidance of many mentors, advisors, and peers. I would like to thank Stathis Kalyvas, Jason Lyall, and all those involved in the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence at Yale
University from 2010-2012 for comments on various parts of this project. My exposure to the rich variety of ideas and approaches associated with the OCV workshop has undoubtedly improved my work and made me a better scholar. I would especially like to thank Jonah Shulhofer-Wohl and Nils B. Weidmann. I would also like to thank Bruce Russet and Nicholas Sambanis for the opportunity to participate in the MacMillan International Relations Seminar Series at Yale, where I received substantial feedback on the project from workshop participants.
This project has also been shaped by the input of my fellow villagers. My gratitude is extended to the many friends and colleagues at Yale who endured my
vii numerous presentations and offered helpful advice including Gina Bateson,
Evgeny Finkle, Francesca Grandi, Audrey Latura, Janet Lewis, Nuno Monteiro,
Sarah Parkinson, Cyrus Samii, Livia Schubiger, and Suchitra Vijayan. To those in
Montreal and Cambridge, including Aneel Brar, Stefanie von Hlatky, Joshua
Bader Martin, Reo Matsuzaki, Theo McLauchlin, Andrew Radin, Joshua R.
Itzkowitz Shifrinson, Munir Squires, Ora Szekeley, and Rami Tabri, I thank you for lending your time and support to the betterment of this dissertation. I thank
Nick Caruana for his research assistance and Sarah-Eve Philippe-Beauchamp for her help with translation.
Because this study is about how money really does change the world, I acknowledge support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council through a three-year Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Doctoral
Scholarship, as well as a one-year scholarship from the Security and Defence
Forum at the Canadian Department of National Defence. The Centre for
International Peace and Security Studies generously funded my travel to multiple conferences. Travel grants from the International Studies Association and the
Faculty of Arts at McGill University also contributed to my ability to present portions of this research in locations ranging from New Orleans to Seoul. Start-up funds from the University of Western Ontario’s Political Science Department enabled me to undertake field research in Timor-Leste in August 2012. The Mike and Maureen Mansfield Foundation in Washington DC and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale provided much appreciated office space for the writing
viii of this manuscript. The independent research presented here does not reflect the views or policies of any of the aforementioned organisations.
Most importantly, the credit goes to my family for their enduring love and support. To the Trisko and Domingo families, I appreciate every gift you have given me. To Mishka, thank you for being there for me with a smile. To Keith, thank you for continuing to believe that I am better than I am. To Mom, thank you for raising me with the knowledge that the world can always be made better.
Because of you, I’m a fighter.
Jessica Nicole Trisko August 2012 Vancouver, B.C.
ix
To Lourdes (née Asuncion) and the late Elpidio Domingo,
For leaving one life behind to choose a better life for all of us.
x Figures, Tables, and Maps
Figure 2.1: The Domestic Effects of Foreign Aid on State Coercion ...... 44 Figure 3.1: Expanded Causal Model for Empirical Testing ...... 83 Figure 4.1: U.S. Bilateral Military Aid to Developing Countries, 1976-2005 .. 123 Figure 4.2: U.S. Bilateral Economic Aid to Developing Countries, 1976-2005 124 Figure A4.1: U.S. Bilateral Military Aid to Selected Countries, 1976-2005 .... 134 Figure A4.2: U.S. Bilateral Economic Aid to Selected Countries, 1976-2005 . 134 Figure 5.1: Annual Distribution of U.S. Bilateral Foreign Aid, 1976-2005 ...... 139 Figure 5.2: Annual Distribution of U.S. Economic Aid by Region, 1976-2005 141 Figure 5.3: Annual Distribution of U.S. Military Aid by Region, 1976-2005 .. 141 Figure 6.1: U.S. Bilateral Aid to Indonesia, 1949-2010 ...... 183 Figure 6.2. Japanese ODA to Indonesia, 1960-2010 ...... 185 Figure 6.3: Types of U.S. Bilateral Economic Aid, 1949-1966 ...... 187 Figure 6.4: Types of U.S. Military Aid, 1949-1966 ...... 192 Figure 6.5: Indonesian Arms Imports, 1960-2010 ...... 194 Figure 6.6: Key Types of Economic Aid to Indonesia, 1967-1985 ...... 199 Figure 6.7: Types of U.S. Military Assistance to Indonesia, 1967-1985 ...... 203 Figure 6.8: Indonesian Armed Forces Personnel, 1968-2010 ...... 211 Figure 6.9: Excerpt from Telegram 14397, September 9, 1983 ...... 216 Figure 6.10: Types of U.S. Economic Assistance to Indonesia, 1986-1998 ..... 217 Figure 6.11: Types of U.S. Military Assistance to Indonesia, 1986-1998 ...... 218 Figure 6.12: Types of U.S. Economic Assistance to Indonesia, 1999-2010 ..... 226 Figure 6.13: Types of U.S. Military Assistance to Indonesia, 1999-2010 ...... 227 Figure A6.1: Main Bilateral ODA Donors to Indonesia, 1960-2010 ...... 234 Figure A6.2: Indonesia’s External Debt and ODA as a Percentage of Gross National Income, 1967-2010 ...... 234
Table 3.1: State Coercion Indicators ...... 78 Table 3.2: Independent Variables ...... 95 Table A3.1: Available Quantitative Measures of State Coercion ...... 101 Table A3.2: State Coercion Summary Statistics ...... 102 Table A3.3: Summary Statistics of Explanatory and Control Variables ...... 103 Table 4.1: Correlation Matrix for State Coercion Indicators ...... 107 Table 4.2: Foreign Aid and State Coercion, Ordered Logit (1976-2005) ...... 108 Table 4.3: Theoretical Expectations for Explanatory Variables ...... 111 Table 4.4: Determinants of State Coercion, Ordered Logit (1976-2005) ...... 113 Table 4.5: Summary of the Determinants of State Coercion ...... 117 Table 4.6: Determinants of Torture, Ordered Logit (1981-2005) ...... 121 Table 4.7: Disaggregated Foreign Aid and State Coercion, Ordered Logit (1976- 2005) ...... 125 Table A4.1: State Coercion Summary Statistics ...... 131 Table A4.2: Correlation Matrix for Explanatory and Control Variables ...... 131 Table A4.2: Correlation Matrix for Explanatory and Control Variables, cont. . 132 Table A4.3: Correlation Matrix for Torture Indicators ...... 132
xi Table A4.4: Determinants of State Coercion with Lagged DV, Ordered Logit (1976-2005) ...... 133 Table 5.1: Foreign Aid and Repression, Ordered Logit (1976-2005) ...... 144 Table 5.2: Foreign Aid and State Coercion during the Cold War, Ordered Logit (1976-1990) ...... 147 Table 5.3: Foreign Aid and State Coercion after the Cold War, Ordered Logit (1991-2005) ...... 149 Table 5.4: Summary of Findings with Year Fixed-Effects ...... 149 Table 5.5: Foreign Aid and State Coercion with 9/11 Impact, Ordered Logit (1976-2005) ...... 154 Table 5.6: Foreign Aid and State Violence with Democratic Presidential Administrations, Ordered Logit (1976-2005) ...... 157 Table A5.1: Summary Statistics for the Cold War Sample (1976-1990) ...... 161 Table A5.2: Summary Statistics for the post-Cold War Sample (1991-2005) .. 161 Table 6.1: Top Five OECD ODA Donors to Indonesia, 1960-2010 ...... 184 Table 6.2: Foreign Loans to Indonesia from Eastern Block Donors in Millions of U.S. Dollars, 1955-1965 ...... 189 Table 6.3: Reported Human Rights Violations in Aceh, May 2003 to March 2005 ...... 229
Map 6.1: Indonesia’s Komando Daerah Militer Post-2002 ...... 169
xii Acronyms and Initializations
AI: Amnesty International
CAVR: Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação de Timor-Leste, Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation
DAC: Development Assistance Committee
DOM: Daerah Operasi Militar, Military Operations Area
EXIM: Export-Import
FAA: Foreign Assistance Act
FMF: Foreign Military Financing
FMLN: Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front
FRETILIN: Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente, Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor
FRUS: Foreign Relations of the United States
GAM: Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, Free Aceh Movement
GDP: Gross Domestic Product
GNI: Gross National Income
IMET: International Military Education and Training
IMF: International Monetary Fund
ITT: Ill-Treatment and Torture Data Collection Project
KCIA: Korean Central Intelligence Agency
KPP-HAM: Komisi Penyelidik Pelanggaran Hak Asasi Manusia di Timor Timur, Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Violations in East Timor
MAP: Military Assistance Program
MCC: Millennium Challenge Corporation
NARA: National Archives and Records Administration
NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization
xiii ODA: Official Development Assistance
OECD: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
OPEC: Organization for the Petroleum Exporting Countries
OPM: Organisasi Papua Merdeka, Free Papua Movement
PKI: Partai Komunis Indonesia, Communist Party of Indonesia
PRIO: Peace Research Institute of Oslo
PTS: Political Terror Scale
TNI: Tentara Nasional Indonesia, Armed Forces of Indonesia
UCDP: Uppsala Conflict Data Program
UN: United Nations
UNTAET: United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor
USAID: United States Agency for International Development
xiv Chapter I. International Influences on Human Rights and State Coercion
Introduction
When is international intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state justified? This question has raised numerous debates in recent years regarding so- called humanitarian intervention, economic statecraft, and the operation of international financial institutions. On one side, the wisdom of the international community has been pitted against the parochialism of local interests while, on the other side of the debate, ignorant and even nefarious external actors have been seen to undermine more adept local practices. Oftentimes, these debates neglect the fact that international actors may actively contribute to the local dynamics that such interventions seek to disrupt.
Broadly, the focus of the present study is the effects that the foreign policy decisions made by international actors have in societies that are intervened upon.1
More specifically, this study examines the provision of foreign aid by international donors as an external subsidy to the state and how this particular form of international intervention affects contentious state-society relations in the recipient country. The study of international intervention through the provision of external support to one side in a conflict has ranged from analyses of covert
1 I leave aside the question of whether such interventions are legally or morally justified and explore whether outside actors have the capability to affect change in societies, intentionally or not, as well as the nature of the changes in the targeted societies that occur upon intervention.
1 operations and foreign assistance during the Cold War to, more recently, external support to both state and non-state actors in the context of civil war.2
The question of whether international actors are able to affect change in other societies through their foreign policy measures is especially salient when it comes to the issue of human rights abuses. If states are supposed to guarantee the safety and security of their citizens, what is to be done by outside actors when states openly and egregiously violate the very rights they are tasked to protect?
The pessimistic answer to this question is that the international community often does little in the face of ongoing human rights violations by state actors. The actions of the state-sponsored janjaweed militias in the Darfur region of Sudan or the genocidaires in Rwanda occurred with little concerted international effort to stop them. In reality, the international community can utilize a variety of mechanisms to influence state behaviour. The available tools range from symbolic diplomatic actions, such as international condemnation, to direct military engagement, with many forms of influence in between. For example, the extensive debate regarding whether state-sponsored violence in Sudan constitutes genocide reflects the hesitancy of certain members of the international community to create obligations of intervention to stop state violence and other human rights abuses. The declaration of genocide in Darfur by the George W. Bush
2 See, Ibrahim A. Elbadawi and Nicholas Sambanis, “External Intervention and the Duration of Civil Wars,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 2433 (2000): 1-18; Christian Skrede Gleditsch, “The Transnational Dimesnsions of Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research 44.3 (2007): 293-309; David E. Cunningham, “Blocking Resolution: How External States Can Prolong Civil Wars,” Journal of Peace Research 47.2 (2010): 115-127; Ora Beach Szekely, Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money: The Politics of Militia Survival in the Middle East, Ph.D. Dissertation, Montreal, QC: McGill University, 2011; Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl, Dynamics of Civil Wars: The Causes and Consequences of Subsidies to Armed Groups, Ph.D. Dissertation, New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2012.
2 administration and the subsequent lack of armed intervention raises the question of whether such obligations exist, even in principle.
When international actors choose to intervene in the name of human rights, they often do so with significant results. NATO military intervention to protect civilians in Libya in March 2011 led to the overthrow of the Qaddafi regime, while a similar intervention in Kosovo in the late 1990s played an important role in ending targeted violence and establishing that country’s sovereign statehood. However, the various mechanisms of influence available to states vary widely in their effectiveness, their cost, and legal or other limitations on their use. Some are used to buy influence with potentially coercive governments while others are employed to isolate abusive regimes.
All of the international policy tools for addressing human rights violations presume that international intervention has a net positive influence in the societies that are intervened upon. Due in part to this presumption, both the literature on international intervention and the literature on state coercion has thus far failed to generate a coherent explanation for the role that powerful states may play in facilitating state violence and other human rights abuses. Explanations have instead focused on the foreign policy whims of major powers, which have intervened militarily in the face of some episodes of political violence while turning a blind eye to others. In this study, I take issue with the presumption of innocence behind international human rights interventions and present an analysis of the determinants of state coercion that focuses on a key international policy tool—the provision of bilateral foreign aid. I believe that a more systematic
3 explanation of the role of international actors in both mitigating and facilitating human rights abuses is possible.
Bilateral foreign aid has for many decades been used as a foreign policy tool by developed donor countries, including the United States, to create and maintain ties with countries in order to shape their political and economic orientation. While some types of foreign aid, such as military assistance, are considered to be highly politicised, other forms bilateral foreign aid, particularly disaster relief or humanitarian assistance, have traditionally been thought of as largely altruistic on the part of donor nations. Although increases in foreign aid can be promised and its cut-off threatened, the provision of foreign aid is generally considered part of the normal course of relations between developed and less developed countries.
In terms of influencing human rights behaviour, foreign aid can be leveraged in two ways. First, it can be provided as a reward for positive changes in behaviour and as a result may be an important incentive for abusive states to moderate their behaviour in order to obtain material support. Second, the cut-off of foreign aid can be imposed as a punitive measure in response to worsening human rights conditions in a given country. Examples abound of foreign aid being used in both these ways, although recent research suggests that the cut-off of aid to a particular country can contribute to the emergence of violent conflict there.3
Although foreign aid is occasionally manipulated in response to human rights abuses, this is not the main, or even a typical, reason why foreign aid levels
3 Richard A. Nielsen, Michael G. Findley, Zachary S. Davis, Tara Candland, and Daniel L. Nielson, “Foreign Aid Shocks as a Cause of Violent Armed Conflict,” American Journal of Political Science 55.2 (2011): 219-232.
4 to a particular country change over time. Changing conditions in the aid donor country can affect the overall amount of foreign aid allocated in a given year.
Relevant changes in foreign aid policy may stem from a change in government, budgetary politics including the institution of a period of fiscal restraint, and changing geo-political priorities. The strength and nature of the relationship between the donor and recipient country also matter. The two most robust determinants of foreign aid are first, whether the aid recipient was a former colony of the donor and second, whether the two are military allies or have an important trading relationship.4 Other factors, such as the recipient country’s level of development are also important. Unsurprisingly, more aid flows to less developed countries than to developed ones. However, these country-level structural characteristics rarely change over time and do little to explain temporal variation in foreign aid allocations.
What forms the core interest of this study is not how foreign aid may be manipulated in response to changing human rights conditions but rather the ways in which foreign aid influences state behaviour while it is being provided. As a result, this study fills a critical gap in the literature on the effects of international intervention by focusing on how the very provision of foreign aid can influence a state’s human rights behaviour. In the pages that follow, I argue that recipient countries can harness the foreign assistance given by developed donor countries to increase the coercive capacity of the state irrespective of the intended purposes of the aid. By acting as non-tax revenue to the state, bilateral foreign aid is not
4 Alberto Alesina and David Dollar, “Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why?” Journal of Economic Growth 5 (2000): 33-63.
5 tied to any popular expectations regarding the provision of domestic services by the state. This enables foreign aid to be used for a variety of purposes, which sometimes include improving or increasing government services and other times can involve buttressing the state’s capacity for coercion through increased military expenditure or arms acquisitions. For non-democratic regimes, the state’s coercive capacity is often a vital tool for political leaders to maintain their hold on power.
The argument that I present focuses first on how foreign aid is translated into increased coercive capacity and second on how the changes brought about through foreign aid lead to increased state violence and other human rights abuses. While some countries are largely immune to episodes of state violence and repression due to institutionalised forms of accommodation or cooption, of which democratic electoral systems represent one possibility, in other countries foreign aid may help tip the balance and enable unstable regimes to employ coercion against their citizens as a way to ensure their continued tenure.
This study helps to answer a range of questions regarding the domestic effects of international intervention through foreign aid: does foreign aid support peace or violence in recipient states? Can foreign aid play a role in altering the coercive capacity of the state? Does the potentially coercive effect of foreign aid vary according to the type of aid that is provided? Are the effects of foreign aid on state coercion fairly consistent over time or related to a particular historical period? What mechanisms may account for the potential relationship between foreign aid and state coercion?
6 I address the above questions are answered through a two-pronged approach. First, I employ a time-series cross-national statistical analysis of 132 countries over a 35-year period to analyse broad trends in the relationship between foreign aid and negative human rights behaviour. I operationalize negative human rights behaviour in terms of state killings, state violence, repression and torture. The quantitative portion of the study draws on data from the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID), the U.S. Department of Defense, the Correlates of War project, and
Amnesty International and U.S. Department of State human rights reports, among other sources.
The second portion of the study introduces detailed case studies in order to illustrate the potential mechanisms underlying the coercive effect of foreign aid identified in the statistical analysis. The case studies use data from the U.S.
Department of State’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) archives, multiple human rights reports on Indonesia and East Timor, and both historical and eye witness accounts, in addition to the quantitative data.
In the analysis provided in the following chapters, I focus on bilateral foreign aid from the United States for a number of reasons. First, the United
States has historically been one of the leading providers of bilateral economic aid and the leading provider of bilateral military aid. While I attempt to account for other sources of bilateral foreign aid in the case studies, in particular aid from the
Soviet Union and Japan, the aid provided by the United States has the best documentation and has received the most attention in previous analyses. Aid from
7 Japan, which was the world’s leading Official Development Assistance (ODA) donor for over a decade, has a much higher loan to grant ratio than the United
States which limits the flexibility of recipient governments in spending these funds because they are expected to repay the loans within an agreed-upon period.
In comparison, much of the foreign assistance provided by the United States has in effect been free money; this was particularly true in regard to military assistance prior to the mid-1970s.
One limitation of my focus on the United States is that this study captures only a slice (though potentially an extremely large slice) of the external resources that a developing state receives. I compensate for this limitation by including other factors, such as natural resource rents or other major sources of aid, whenever possible. However, I do not address the role of foreign assistance from multilateral agencies such as the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, the Asian
Development Bank, etc. Some of these resources primarily take the form of loans and therefore fall under a similar logic as that described above for Japan. Many of these organizations deploy their own field staff and therefore have much greater oversight of aid projects. Others dispense aid directly to non-governmental and other civil society organizations and bypass government coffers. In addition, because of their multilateral and highly bureaucratic nature, the foreign assistance provided by multilateral agencies is less likely to be subject to the political whims of international aid donors. As a result, the aid that is provided is not intended to reflect changing foreign policy priorities or foreign policy interests with respect to
8 a particular country. This brings us to the second reason for focusing on the
United States.
Throughout its history the United States has pursued a liberal foreign policy agenda. In recent decades, this agenda has explicitly drawn upon the rhetoric of international human rights. Neither Japan nor the Soviet Union would claim that their foreign policies were motivated by similar principles. In international forums and the public eye, the United States has claimed to respect and promote human rights. This was especially true during the Carter and Clinton presidencies. This study then, in part, serves the function of determining whether the United States has put its money where its mouth is. Have the billions of foreign aid dollars funded by American taxpayers translated into improved human rights conditions in aid recipient countries? The findings of this study suggest that the answer is a disappointing “no”.
The importance of the finding presented in this study that U.S. bilateral foreign aid at best does not improve human rights conditions in many aid recipient countries and at worst contributes to increased state coercion is best seen in comparison with other foreign policy tools that have been identified as potential mechanisms for altering a state’s human rights behaviour. The vast majority of these tools are punitive in nature and are therefore only intended to influence state behaviour once human rights abuses have reached an unacceptable level. While some tools, such as preferential trade agreements, could potentially be seen as serving as an incentive for improved human rights behaviour by states, once they are implemented there is little that can be done by the main trading state
9 to prevent backsliding in human rights behaviour by its partner. Although the provision of foreign aid shares both these characteristics – its cut-off can be punitive and its promise may serve as an incentive for positive change5 – foreign aid has effects on human rights behaviour that are independent of these characteristics. The very provision of foreign aid has human rights implications.
The findings presented here suggest that these implications may, more often than not, be negative.
Mechanisms of International Human Rights Influence
Great powers have a variety of mechanisms through which they influence the politics and economies of lesser states. In this section, I briefly review several of the alternatives to the manipulation of foreign aid: international condemnation; economic liberalism; economic sanctions; democracy promotion; and, military intervention. More often then not, these mechanisms are arranged on a spectrum ranging from diplomatic to military action and may be used in combination. All of these tools have their shortcomings as mechanisms for improving human rights behaviour in other states and most, like foreign aid, have been demonstrated to have potentially pernicious effects. The following discussion of each of these tools helps to highlight why a new examination of the implications of foreign aid for state coercion is so vital. As of yet, we simply do not think of foreign aid in
5 This is particularly true of foreign aid that is targeted towards democracy promotion and other human rights initiatives. For example, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is a US government body established in 2004 that has an explicit goal of reducing poverty but focuses on the presumed linkage between economic growth and democracy. As a result, the institution imposes conditions on aid disbursements based on a country’s progress in strengthening “democratic accountability.” See, Alicia Phillips Mandaville, MCC and the Long Term Goal of Deepening Democracy, Washington, DC: Millennium Challenge Corporation, 2007.
10 the same terms as other forms of international intervention in the name of human rights.
Institutions such as the UN and the regularized diplomatic interaction that these institutions provide create one mechanism for influencing state behaviour.
“Naming and shaming” or international condemnation as a mechanism of international influence is based on the belief that international actors are able to shift states from abusive or coercive behaviour to more cooperative behaviour by exerting normative pressure upon states that have violated internationally accepted human rights norms.6 This normative pressure can sometimes succeed in pushing states to join international treaties aimed at the promotion of human rights7 or to allow greater international oversight of their domestic behaviour.
However, the effects of such treaties on actual human rights practices vary substantially, particularly since the jump from treaty ratification to implementation to compliance is fraught with challenges. 8 International
6 Clair Apodaca, “The Whole World Could Be Watching: Human Rights and the Media,” Journal of Human Rights 6.2 (2007): 147-164; James C. Franklin, “Shame on You: The Impact of Human Rights Criticism on Political Repression in Latin America,” International Studies Quarterly 52 (2008): 187-211. 7 See, Oona A. Hathaway, “Why Do Countries Commit to Human Rights Treaties?,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 51.4 (2007): 588-621; James Raymond Vreeland, “Political Institutions and Human Rights: Why Dictatorships enter into the United Nations Convention Against Torture.” International Organization 62.1 (2008): 65-101. 8 For example, Thania Sanchez, After Ratification: The Domestic Politics of Treaty Implementation and Compliance, Ph.D. Dissertation, New York: Columbia University, 2009; Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, “Sticks and Stones: Naming and Shaming the Human Rights Enforcement Problem,” International Organization 62 (2008): 689-716; Eric Neumayer, “Do International Human Rights Treaties Improve Respect for Human Rights?,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49.6 (2005): 925-953; Oona A. Hathaway, “Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?,” The Yale Law Journal 111.8 (2002): 1935-2042.
11 condemnation and normative pressure may therefore be of limited effect in stopping human rights abuses in a timely fashion.9
A major stumbling block in using normative pressure to change coercive state behaviour is that it is contingent upon human rights violations or state violence occurring on a scale which is recognized by the international community but not yet serious enough to warrant stronger action. Such violence must also occur in countries where the international community feels it can exert a normative influence and has an interest in doing so. The motives behind international condemnation, like other policy tools, are varied and may reflect the shaming agent’s own interest (or even sub-national interests) rather than the interests of citizens in the target country.10
The role that countries’ own interests play in affecting their sensitivity to political violence in other countries is also problematic for the exercise of normative pressure. Both China and Russia are notorious for refusing to sanction abusive regimes through the UN Security Council in order to deflect potential criticism from their respective human rights records. China has openly aligned itself with countries such as Cuba, North Korea, and Myanmar, which have operated largely outside of the international normative system and are therefore less susceptible to normative pressure in the first place. For example, Russia has recently protected Syria from Security Council condemnation for the internal
9 See, Michael J. Gilligan and Nathaniel H. Nesbitt, “Do Norms Reduce Torture?,” The Journal of Legal Studies 38.2 (2009): 445-470; Emilie M. Hafner-Burton and Kiyoteru Tsutsui, “Human Rights in a Globalizing World: the Paradox of Empty Promises,” American Journal of Sociology 110.5 (2005): 1373-1411. 10 Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham, “Commerce and Imagination: The Sources of Concern about International Human Rights in the US Congress,” International Studies Quarterly 54 (2010): 633-655.
12 military campaign against its own citizens that began in March 2011.11 The state- run Chinese media has also been used to defend the actions of the Syrian government.12
Another limitation of “naming and shaming” as a way to influence human rights behaviour is that it does not address the underlying causes of violence and is therefore unable to account for the onset or severity of human rights abuses in a particular time and place. Norms favouring respect for human rights have existed for some time and it remains unclear as to why these international norms continue to affect countries differently. As a result, this body of research is unable to account for why human rights violations sometimes persist despite ongoing pressures for compliance with international legal obligations.13 It is therefore inherently difficult to assess the direct impact of international human rights criticism upon subsequent state behaviour.
Economic liberalism is a second mechanism that has been identified as an international influence on human rights behaviour. The positive effects of economic liberalization for human rights are thought to occur through the benefits of globalization and economic development. Economic globalization consists of the integration of national economies into the international economy through trade, foreign direct investment, and capital flows. Opening a country’s borders to trade and financial investment is seen as stimulating economic growth, the
11 BBC News, “Sergei Lavrov: Russia Rejects Use of Force in Syria,” 9 June 2012, accessed 26 June 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18384519. 12 BBC News, “How Russian and Chinese Media Justify Syrian Support,” 13 June 2012, accessed 26 June 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18424991. 13 Sonia Cardenas, “Norm Collision: Explaining the Effects of International Human Rights Pressure on State Behavior,” International Studies Review 6 (2004): 213-231.
13 development of a middle class and an increasingly stable political environment that respects individual human rights and civil liberties.14 The United States, in this view, works through institutions such as the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization to promote neoliberal economic values centered on openness and free trade. Independently, it signs bilateral investment treaties and preferential trade agreements with individual countries that help tie them to the economy of the United States and by extension the global economy.15 American economic statecraft is therefore seen as part of the country’s liberal foreign policy agenda and in accord with political liberalization and respect for human rights.
While only a limited number of studies have addressed the relationship between globalization and human rights abuses, integration into the world economy has been found to both worsen the protection of individual rights and to improve respect for rights.16 Many of the positive results about the impact of globalization have been shown to be extremely fragile.17 When carried out in a highly institutionalized manner through preferential trade agreements, there is evidence that trade incentives may lead to improved human rights practices since the threat of trade restrictions in response to human rights abuses should reinforce
14 David L. Richards, Ronald D. Gelleny, and David H. Sacko, “Money with a Mean Streak? Foreign Economic Penetration and Government Respect for Human Rights in Developing Countries,” International Studies Quarterly 45 (2001): 219-239; Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 48 (1959): 69-105. 15 Eric Neumayer, “Self-Interest, Foreign Need, and Good Governance: Are Bilateral Investment Treaty Programs Similar to Aid Allocation?” Foreign Policy Analysis 2 (2006): 245-267; Eric Neumayer and Laura Spess, “Do Bilateral Investment Treaties Increase Foreign Direct Investment to Developing Countries?” World Development 33.10 (2005): 1567-1585. 16 William H. Meyer, “Human Rights and MNCs: Theory versus Quantitative Analysis,” Human Rights Quarterly 18 (1996): 368-397; Richards et al., “Money with a Mean Streak?” 17 Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, “Right or Robust? The Sensitive Nature of Repression to Globalization,” Journal of Peace Research 42.6 (2005): 679-698.
14 positive behavioural changes in trading partners.18 Essentially, some states are willing to give up repression to gain from trade. The problem is that the state that is offering trade concessions, and is the potential enforcer of any trade cut-offs, has a vested interest in the continuance of trade with its new partner. Trade is therefore likely to be an effective mechanism for changing state behaviour only in those instances where trade relations were previously poor and the goods being traded are not of vital interest to the dominant trading partner.
Greater economic openness may also have negative effects on a state’s human rights behaviour. IMF austerity programs and World Bank structural adjustment agreements have been found to worsen human rights conditions in developing countries, albeit sometimes after an initial period of improvement.19
By engaging with the global economy, countries may also become more vulnerable to global economic shocks and capital flight, which may contribute to escalating opposition to the government and trigger a coercive response by the state.20 Because the economic motivations for the reduction of state coercion are channelled through improved economic development, liberalised political institutions, and other poorly specified pathways, the ability for international actors to change a country’s human rights practices through economic
18 Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, “Trading Human Rights: How Preferential Trade Agreements Influence Government Repression,” International Organization 59 (2005): 593-629. 19 M. Rodwan Abouharb and David L. Cingranelli, “The Human Rights Effects of World Bank Structural Adjustment, 1981-2000,” International Studies Quarterly 50 (2006): 233-262; L. M. McLaren, “The Effect of IMF Austerity Programs on Human Rights Violations: An Exploratory Analysis of Peru, Argentina, and Brazil,” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, 1998; James C. Franklin, “IMF Conditionality, Threat Perception, and Political Repression: A Cross-National Analysis,” Comparative Political Studies 30 (1997): 576-606. 20 William H. Meyer, Human Rights and International Political Economy in Third World Nations: Multinational Corporations, Foreign Aid, and Repression, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.
15 liberalization and globalization is limited by the slow-moving nature of these types of changes.
A third mechanism employed by international actors to influence coercive state behaviour is economic sanctions. Sanctions are typically punitive economic measures designed to punish a state for violating international law or internationally held norms by imposing restrictions on trade or financial transactions that are designed to hurt the target country’s economy. Occasionally, economic sanctions may be targeted at specific individuals through the freezing or seizure of overseas assets or travel bans. Unlike naming and shaming, sanctioning is a two-pronged approach to behavioural change. States have the ability to threaten sanctions in an attempt to change coercive behaviour as well as the ability to implement the sanctions if the threat does not result in the expected behavioural change in the target state. 21 Work by scholars including Dursen
Peksen, A. Cooper Drury, and Reed M. Wood suggests that the imposition of both unilateral and multilateral economic sanctions worsens coercive state behaviour in sanctioned countries by increasing popular opposition to the governing regime and thereby triggering a repressive response by the government. 22 The implication of such findings is that, in general, international actors should not impose sanctions in the name of promoting human rights.
21 Daniel W. Drezner, “The Hidden Hand of Economic Coercion,” International Organization 57.3 (2003): 643-659. 22 Dursun Peksen, “Better or Worse? The Effect of Economic Sanctions on Human Rights,” Journal of Peace Research 46.1(2009): 59-77; Dursun Peksen and A. Cooper Drury, “Economic Sanctions and Political Repression: Assessing the Impact of Coercive Diplomacy on Political Freedoms,” Human Rights Review 10 (2009): 393-411; Reed M. Wood, “A Hand upon the Throat of the Nation:” Economic Sanctions and State Repression, 1976-2001,” International Studies Quarterly 52 (2008): 489-513.
16 Furthermore, the normative value of sanctions as an indirect policy tool has been deeply challenged by their negative impact on civilians irrespective of attempts at crafting so-called smart sanctions that target the state’s leadership.23
While both the threat and imposition of sanctions can send an important normative signal to the sanctioned state, an inherent part of employing sanctions as a policy tool is the implicit or explicit promise of “rewarding” future behavioural change through the removal of sanctions. This raises the issue of the credibility of sanctions threats in changing state behaviour.24 Like international condemnation, sanctions are often imposed on countries that have poor relationships with the sanctioning actors and where they are the least likely to be effective. Indeed, because of the small number of cases where sanctions were imposed based on human rights violations, it is difficult to assess whether sanctions have a systematic impact on subsequent human rights behaviour especially since governments may only temporarily reform their behaviour in order for sanctions to be removed. All of these factors combine to make sanctions a poor tool for human rights interventions.
Perhaps the most controversial mechanism for international actors to improve human rights behaviour in other states has been to promote democratic progress. Democracy promotion as a form of intervention is based on the perceived positive externalities of democracy for human rights and economic growth. As former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, Elliott Abrams,
23 David Cortright and George A. Lopez, eds. Smart Sanctions: Targeting Economic Statecraft, New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 24 Lisa L. Martin, Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
17 claimed, “Generally speaking, democratic governments are far less likely to engage in torture than non-democratic governments. This is because such institutions as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and association, and free elections have built respect for human rights into the very foundations of democratic government.”25 As an international policy, democracy promotion can take place through support for pro-democracy civil society organizations and media, elections monitoring, and direct intervention on the behalf of pro-democracy opposition forces, among other avenues.
The value of democracy promotion efforts for improvements in human rights remains unclear. As Hafner-Burton and Ron note, “more than one-third of the world’s population lives in countries that are both democratic and abusive of human rights.” 26 The heavy emphasis in democracy promotion activities on stimulating political participation at the local level may undermine the ability of governments to effectively respond to citizen needs and concerns, and lead to the use of state coercion during periods of political transition. 27 Studies have demonstrated that the absence of democracy does not necessarily mean human rights are destined to be violated.28 However, certain forms of democracy, such as
25 US Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations, The Phenomenon of Torture: Hearings and Markup, May 15, 16, 6 September 1984, 98th Congress, 2nd session, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1984, 158. 26 Emilie M. Hafner-Burton and James Ron, “Seeing Double: Human Rights Impact through Qualitative and Quantitative Eyes,” World Politics 61.2 (2009): 360-401. 27 See, David Alan Armstrong, “Measuring the Democracy-Repression Nexus,” Electoral Studies 28 (2009): 403-412; Larry Diamond, “Foreign Aid in the National Interest: The Importance of Democracy and Governance,” Foreign Aid and Foreign Policy: Lessons for the Next Half- Century, ed. Louis A. Picard, Robert Groelsema, and Terry F. Buss, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharp, 2008, 61-85. 28 Steven C. Poe, C. Neal Tate, and Linda Camp Keith, “Repression of the Human Right to Personal Integrity Revisited: A Global Cross-National Study Covering the Years 1976-1993,” International Studies Quarterly 43 (1999): 291-313.
18 open-list, proportional representation systems, do appear to be well suited for creating conditions in which state coercion is constrained.29 Only those regimes with fully developed institutional practices and mass political behaviour consistent with democratic principles have been found to yield pacifying effects on state coercion.30
The most extreme and direct form of international intervention to promote or protect human rights is direct military involvement, which may occur under the mantle of humanitarian intervention. Military intervention is typically seen as a means of gaining policy outcomes preferable to the intervening party irrespective of subsequent domestic political developments in the invaded country, rather than as an appropriate means of changing the internal behaviour of states.31 Instead, the elimination of a particular dictatorial ruler has typically been the main goal, with improved state-society relations seen as a potential side effect of this change.
American intervention in Haiti to overthrow the Duvalier regime and attempts to unseat Mohammed Farrah Aidid in Somalia are examples of this type of military intervention. Under the George W. Bush administration, military intervention was used in combination with democracy promotion efforts to achieve regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq. The limited evidence regarding the relationship between
29 David Cingranelli and Mikhail Filippov, “Electoral Rules and Incentives to Protect Human Rights,” The Journal of Politics 72.1 (2010): 243-257. 30 Christian Davenport and David A. Armstrong, “Democracy and the Violation of Human Rights: A Statistical Analysis from 1976 to 1996,” American Journal of Political Science 48.3 (2004): 538-554. 31 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs, “Intervention and Democracy,” International Organization 60 (2006): 627-649. Although the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s used the poor human rights reputations of the Taliban and Hussein regimes as a rhetorical justification, the continued violence within both of these countries following Western military intervention and the subsequent establishment of ‘democratic’ governments provides the best possible anecdotal evidence that violence is rarely stopped through violence.
19 military intervention and subsequent state violence or human rights abuses suggests that this relationship is highly contingent on the political stability of the subsequent government.32
Recent debate has focused on whether international actors have a responsibility to protect citizens that are not their own.33 The relevance of military intervention as a tool for improving human rights conditions is most evident in the context of a civil war, where the reduction or elimination of violence against civilians by one or both parties is often a direct result of the conflict’s resolution.
Military interventions in Bosnia and in Libya are examples of this. As military intervention is by far the most costly foreign policy tool (politically and financially) with which international actors can influence state violence abroad, the questionable effectiveness of prior military interventions suggests that its use for human rights promotion should remain limited.
The foregoing discussion has demonstrated that while analyses of responsive foreign policy tools are important, even more critical is an understanding how international actors affect the domestic-level foundations of coercive state behaviour. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the role that foreign aid plays in facilitating state coercion and human rights abuses. While bilateral foreign aid undoubtedly has positive effects globally, knowing when aid harms rather than helps is a worthy subject of study. Given the findings noted
32 Andrew J. Enterline and J. Michael Greig, “Perfect Storms? Political Instability in Imposed Polities and the Futures of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52.6 (2008): 880- 915. 33 Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, “The Responsibility to Protect,” Foreign Affairs 81.6 (2002): 99-110.
20 above about the pernicious effects of other foreign policy tools on human rights, it is high time that we ask similar questions about foreign aid.
Structure of the Study
The next chapter presents the theoretical backbone of the study. I first examine the role of coercion in the modern state in order to answer the question of why states repress. In doing so, I address various definitions of state coercion. I then turn to the international dimensions of state coercion and in particular the role that foreign aid plays as an external resource to the state. The theory of the coercive effect of foreign aid contends that both military and economic aid can potentially contribute to state coercion. The former can and is often intended to be used for arms acquisitions and security sector training. The latter can be diverted to support military expenditure as well as providing grants and subsidies that benefit the armed forces or other coercive state agents. The chapter closes with a discussion of how the coercive effect of foreign aid may be conditioned by the particular characteristics of a given country, including its political regime and institutions, its institutional strength and capacity and its history of conflict. In short, the argument I present in this study is that foreign aid exacerbates what could be thought of as pre-existing risk factors for a given country’s use of state coercion. Foreign aid is unlikely to make a peaceful democratic state coercive, but in those states characterized by weak accommodative institutions and non- democratic political processes foreign aid is likely to have a pernicious effect on
21 human rights by increasing the likelihood and/or intensity of various forms of state coercion.
The third chapter focuses on the operationalization of the theory of the coercive effect of foreign aid. The key unit of analysis in this study is the country- year; observations mark the overall condition in a given country for a particular year. As a result, the measures of state coercion that I employ are generalized across a country and over the course of a year. Massive episodes of state coercion are generalized to genocide (4000 or more fatalities in a year) and mass killing
(1000 or more), while lower-level violence is categorised as state killings (300 or more) and state violence (25 or more). Repression is examined as a separate category of state coercion as the intent is not necessarily to cause the death of an individual but to generate a broader sense of fear and intimidation through political imprisonment and other tactics. Chapter 3 also lays out other potentially relevant international influences on state coercion, such as the presence of foreign troops and prior participation in an interstate war, and additional domestic factors including natural resource wealth, the level of government service provision and the size of the country’s armed forces.
Chapter 4 presents the results of cross-national time-series analyses of the relationship between U.S. bilateral foreign aid and state coercion based on the data described in Chapter 3. The results suggest that foreign aid is positively associated with increased state coercion in the following year but that this relationship varies according to the type and intensity of coercion. In addition, the chapter investigates the relative effects of military versus economic aid on various
22 forms of coercion and finds that the relationship between economic aid and state coercion is fairly general, while that of military aid is restricted to high-intensity violence and torture.
Chapter 5 describes a series of analyses regarding the dynamics of the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion over time. I discuss how shifts in the international system such as the end of the Cold War and the events of
September 11, 2001 may have affected the relationship described in Chapter 4. I also examine the relevance of changes in American foreign policy that resulted from differing presidential priorities. In addition to these temporal dynamics, the chapter explores the potential for region-specific variation resulting from historical developments such as the Vietnam War and the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel, which led to a significantly higher level of U.S. bilateral foreign aid being directed to the Middle East.
A detailed case study of U.S. bilateral foreign aid flows to Indonesia is presented in Chapter 6. While the preceding statistical analysis begins in 1976, the analysis of Indonesia begins in 1949 upon the official independence of the state.
This enables me to address the broader historical context of Indonesia’s aid relations with the United States, including a period of competition between the
United States, the Soviet Union, and China for influence over Indonesia. After examining the relevant characteristics of the Indonesian state and summarising the main forms of state coercion that have occurred in the country, I identify variation in both the amount and type of foreign aid provided by the United States as the most significant factor explaining variation in the intensity of coercive state
23 behaviour in Indonesia. I divide the country’s post-independence history into four historical periods and link patterns in foreign aid to human rights abuses in several regions of the country by focusing on changes in Indonesia’s military capacity. I take particular care to disaggregate both economic and military aid into key sub-types of aid in order to more closely associate specific aid flows with substantive changes in the state’s coercive capacity. The chapter demonstrates that foreign assistance from the United States facilitated state coercion in
Indonesia through several different channels. At the same time, the case highlights that annual foreign aid flows do little to account for the specific timing or location of acts of violence within a given year. These micro-level dynamics are influenced, but not fully determined, by macro-level processes.
The concluding chapter, Chapter 7, explores additional case studies of El
Salvador and South Korea in order to assess how the mechanisms underlying the coercive effect of foreign aid operate in different contexts. El Salvador provides a case where American interest in the country was initially limited but expanded rapidly due to regional developments. The level of U.S. foreign aid to El Salvador escalated in response to political violence in that country and served to fund a decade of state-led violence in the context of a civil war. The case of South Korea illustrates the potential limitations of the theory by considering additional domestic factors such as key decisions made by the country’s leadership in the face of domestic opposition. The conclusion of Chapter 7 deals with several normative and policy implications of the study and highlights the study’s
24 contribution to a growing area of research on the myriad connections between political violence and economic development.
25 Chapter II. Aiding Violence or Peace? A Theory of the Coercive Effects of Foreign Aid
Introduction
Foreign aid has traditionally been justified by a principle of “do no harm.”34 International aid donors typically seek to promote change in recipient countries in terms of economic development, democratization, and human rights through the provision of foreign aid. In addition, it has long been thought possible for the international community, or even individual donor nations, to raise the costs of human rights violations through aid policy.35 Yet, existing research has not adequately addressed the question of whether, in practice, foreign aid supports peace or violence in recipient countries. While foreign aid proponents argue that it promotes political and economic stability by supporting growth and the provision of government services,36 a growing body of research suggests that foreign aid facilitates the deterioration of political institutions and contributes to the outbreak of political violence.37 If true, this research calls into question whether the costs of providing foreign aid, to both to aid donor and recipient, outweigh the benefits.
34 Emilie M. Hafner-Burton and James Ron, “Seeing Double: Human Rights Impact through Qualitative and Quantitative Eyes,” World Politics 61.2 (2009): 360-401; Mary B. Anderson, Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace--or War, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999. 35 James M. McCormick and Neil Mitchell, “Is US Aid Really Linked to Human Rights in Latin America?” American Journal of Political Science 32 (1988): 231-239. 36 Doug Johnson and Tristan Zajonc, “Can Foreign Aid Create an Incentive for Good Governance? Evidence from the Millennium Challenge Corporation,” Center for International Development at Harvard University Working Paper 11 (2006): 1-40; Craig Burnside and David Dollar, “Aid, Policies, and Growth,” American Economic Review 90.4 (2000): 847-868; Thomas Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve, Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999. 37 For example, Simeon Djankov and Marta Reynal-Querol, “Poverty and Civil War: Revisiting the evidence,” CEPR Discussion Papers 6980 (2008): 1-22; William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, New York: Penguin, 2006; Sarah Kenyon Lischer, “Collateral Damage: Humanitarian Assistance as a Cause of Conflict,” International Security 28.1 (2003): 79-109; Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler,
26 In posing the question of whether foreign aid supports peace or violence in recipient countries, I seek to understand how international actors, such as the
United States, can directly affect the level of human rights abuses in other countries through the type and amount of foreign aid they provide. The international relations literature has been largely silent on the question of how international actors contribute to the occurrence of political violence, focusing instead on international responses to human rights abuses38 and the negative impact of internationally promoted economic policies. 39 Although economic factors have been prominent in recent studies of intrastate conflict,40 this literature has neglected the role of external actors in providing vital sources of support to states. As a result, scholarship on the interaction between the international and domestic determinants of political violence remains limited in spite of the growing attention being paid to the provision of external resources to non-state actors.41
“Aid, Policy and Peace: Reducing the Risks of Civil Conflict,” Defence and Peace Economics 13.1 (2002): 435-450; Stephen Knack, “Aid Dependence and the Quality of Governance: Cross- Country Empirical Tests,” Southern Economic Journal 68.2 (2001): 310-329. 38 Dursun Peksen and A. Cooper Drury, “Economic Sanctions and Political Repression: Assessing the Impact of Coercive Diplomacy on Political Freedoms,” Human Rights Review 10 (2009): 393- 411; James Franklin, “Shame on You: The Impact of Human Rights Criticism on Political Repression in Latin America,” International Studies Quarterly 52 (2008): 187-211; James H. Lebovic and Erik Voeten, “The Politics of Shame: The Condemnation of Country Human Rights Practices in the UNCHR,” International Studies Quarterly 50 (2006): 861-888. 39 Rodwan M. Abouharb and David L. Cingranelli, “The Human Rights Effects of World Bank Structural Adjustment, 1981-2000,” International Studies Quarterly 50 (2006): 233-262. 40 See for example, Jeremy Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97.1 (2003): 75-90; Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed, Grievance, and Civil War,” Oxford Economics Papers 56.4 (2004): 563-595; Indra De Soysa, “Paradise is a Bazaar? Greed, Creed, and Governance in Civil War, 1989-99,” Journal of Peace Research 39.4 (2002): 395-416. 41 See, Idean Salehyan, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and David E. Cunningham, “Explaining External Support for Insurgent Groups,” International Organization 65 (2011): 709-744; Stathis H. Kalyvas and Laia Balcells, “International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict,” American Political Science Review 104.3 (2010): 415-
27 Drawing on studies of government repression and opposition violence42, I seek to fill this critical gap in the existing literature by analysing how U.S. foreign aid policy affects the recipient state’s ability and propensity to employ violence against its citizens. By focusing on the role of external resources in shaping the state’s capacity and proclivity to use coercion, this study brings U.S. foreign policy back into the study of internal conflict.43 To answer the pivotal question of whether foreign aid supports violence or peace within recipient countries, I first explore the role of coercion in the modern state. After highlighting the domestic sources of state coercion, I turn to the role of international influences. Employing the insights of studies on the fungibility of foreign aid, I then present a theory of the coercive effects of foreign aid. The theory posits that foreign aid serves as general budgetary support for recipient countries and as such can be used to increase the state’s coercive capacity. Increased coercive capacity is manifest in changes in coercive institutions, such as the national military and intelligence apparatus. I contend that the potential for foreign aid to have a coercive effect is conditioned by the structural characteristics of the recipient country and its past history of conflict. Based on this theory, I derive several hypotheses that are
429; Joppe de Ree and Eleonora Nillesen, “Aiding Violence or Peace? The Impact of Foreign Aid on the Risk of Civil Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of Development Economics 88 (2009): 301-313; Stephen Saideman, “Discrimination in International Relations: Analyzing External Support for Ethnic Groups,” Journal of Peace Research 39 (2002): 27-50. 42 See, Christian Davenport and David A. Armstrong, “Democracy and the Violation of Human Rights: A Statistical Analysis from 1976 to 1996,” American Journal of Political Science 48.3 (2004): 538-554; Scott Sigmund Gartner and Patrick M. Regan, “Threat and Repression: The Non- Linear Relationship between Government and Opposition Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 33.3 (1996): 273-287; Mark Lichbach, “Deterrence or Escalation? The Puzzle of Aggregate Studies of Repression and Dissent,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 31 (1987): 266-297. 43 Earlier work, including William Odom’s On Internal War, has highlighted the role of superpower support. This study represents a return to this perspective. See, William E. Odom, On Internal War: American and Soviet Approaches to Third World Clients and Insurgents, Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.
28 tested in subsequent chapters. Overall, the theory I develop in this chapter provides insight into the role of international actors in shaping state-society relations abroad.
Why States Repress: Coercion, Violence and the Modern State
To assess the degree to which foreign aid may enable governments to employ violence against their citizens, it is necessary to understand the role of coercion in the modern state and the complex interactions that give rise to political violence.44 States and statehood are defined primarily by the ability of a government to monopolize the legitimate use of violence within a specific territory through a government-controlled security apparatus.45 The legitimacy of the state and its institutions are a function of its authority over the population, which can in turn be defined as the state’s ability to command obedience without recourse to violence. Additionally, the state is responsible for defining the
44 The focus on coercive state behaviour adopted here necessarily neglects the role of individual actors who may be driven by personal motivations in contributing to the overall amount of violence that is perpetrated by the state. See, Alok K. Bohara, Neil J. Mitchell, Mani Nepal, and Nejem Raheem,“Human Rights Violations, Corruption, and the Policy of Repression,” The Policy Studies Journal 36 (2008): 1-18. However, by focusing on state agents I account for the role of individuals as part of the state security apparatus. While individuals play an important role in the state’s coercive capacity, they are ultimately accountable to the government that controls it. Emphasizing the role of the state and state agents as actors is also important because when extremely violent acts of coercion trigger a response by the international community, it is typically the state, not individuals, which is immediately held responsible. Much of the responsibility for controlling state violence is therefore placed at the state level. Assessing the degree to which international actors shape violent state behaviour means that despite the fact that state violence is perpetrated by and affects individuals, the factors that support violent acts must inevitably been seen through the prism of the state. Just as individuals do not rebel in a vacuum and often require external sources of support, so too the state does not coerce in the absence of a broader context in which international actors play a role. See, Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970; Ted Robert Gurr and Raymond Duvall, “Civil Conflict in the 1960s: A Reciprocal Theoretical System with Parameter Estimates,” Comparative Political Studies 6.2 (1973): 135-70. 45 H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. and eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.
29 conditions for the legitimate use of force and ensuring that the illegitimate use of violence by non-state actors is prevented or punished through institutions that promote law and order.46 The state therefore has a strategic motive for employing coercion as a means of managing challenges to its power and authority.
The dominant theoretical position in studies of political violence is that state coercion results from the strategic interaction of the government and opposition groups.47 Political violence is commonly seen as the outcome of situations in which the government responds to protest with repression, which then provokes an escalation of dissent in a continuing cycle of action and response.48 Although coercive state behaviour may persist long after an initial challenge to the state has passed, it is widely held that state coercion is triggered by events or behaviours that challenge the existing political order. Therefore, most theoretical and empirical work assumes the presence of an organized opposition that may or may not have a broader network of supporters. As a result, understanding the origins of state coercion is in a way a ‘chicken and the egg’ problem where the preconditions for the use of violence by the state and by the opposition remain unclear.
46 However, while a certain degree of coercion is required to maintain order, the use of state violence to consolidate the government’s hold on power and defend itself against opposition threats may be perceived as undermining its legitimacy. 47 For example, Nicholas Sambanis and Annalisa Zinn, “From Protest to Violence: An Analysis of Conflict Escalation with an Application to Self-Determination Movements,” Unpublished Manuscript, New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2005; Christopher J. Anderson, Patrick M. Regan, and Robert L. Ostergard, “Political Repression and Public Perceptions of Human Rights,” Political Research Quarterly 55.2 (2002): 439-456; Paul Rich and Richard Stubbs, The Counter- Insurgent State: Guerrilla Warfare and State-Building in the Twentieth Century, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997; Gartner and Regan, “Threat and Repression”; Davenport, “Multi- Dimensional Threat Perception and State Repression”; T.D. Mason and D. Krane, “The Political Economy of Death Squads: Toward a Theory of the Impact of State-Sanctioned Terror,” International Studies Quarterly 33 (1989): 175-98; Gurr, Why Men Rebel. 48 Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1978.
30 To understand why states employ violence against their own citizens,49 I first examine sources of opposition to the state. I then turn to the issue of state coercion and how our understanding of this concept affects how we approach the study of violent state-society interactions. I clearly define the conceptual boundaries between coercive and non-coercive state behaviour in order to assess the degree to which international actors can influence this type of state behaviour.
Opposition and Rebellion
The rationale underlying opposition to the state has, of late, been characterized in terms of ‘opportunity’- or ‘grievance’-based explanations. The grievance school draws on Gurr’s ground-breaking work Why Men Rebel,50 which argues that the socioeconomic conditions that cause relative deprivation, defined as a discrepancy between value expectations and value capabilities, have a general effect on the magnitude of political violence in a country. The underlying cause of conflict is therefore the discrepancy between what people think they deserve and what they think they can obtain. These perceived discrepancies might be tied to broader identity categories such as ethnic or communal identities.51 Substantial case study evidence suggests that relative deprivation has played a role in
49 I prefer the use of the term civilian to the more specific term non-combatant, defined as any unarmed person who is not a member of a professional or guerilla military group and who does not actively participate in hostilities by intending to cause physical harm to enemy personnel or property, although the two may be used interchangeably. See, Benjamin Valentino, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-Lindsay, “Draining the Sea”: Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare,” International Organization 58 (2004): 375-407. 50 Gurr, Why Men Rebel. 51 Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
31 fostering political violence in diverse social contexts. 52 While the relative deprivation thesis has been difficult to test in cross-national studies, findings based on income inequality have shown that more unequal societies are weakyl characterized by higher levels of political violence.53
While the ‘grievance’ literature goes a long way in accounting for the sources of popular mobilization against the state, the emphasis placed on the role of identity and perceived inequalities is undermined by work suggesting that both identities and the norms of appropriate behaviour they generate are fluid and shaped by conflict.54 Awareness of cultural or other differences between groups does not necessarily mean that social or political meaning is attached to these differences.55 The impact of grievances on political violence has been shown to vary across different categories of intrastate conflict56 and while grievances and group solidarity may be important in explaining mobilization, they are not
52 For example, Alex Cobham, “Causes of Conflict in Sudan: Testing The Black Box,” The European Journal of Development Research 17.3 (2002): 462-480; Svetlana P. Glinkina and Dorothy J. Rosenberg, “The Socioeconomic Roots of Conflict in the Caucasus,” Journal of International Development 15.4 (2003): 513-524; Mansoob Murshed and Scott Gates, “Spatial Horizontal Inequality and the Maoist Insurgency in Nepal,” Review of Development Economics 9.1 (2005): 121-134; Frances Stewart, ed., Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understanding Group Violence in Multiethnic Societies, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 53 See, Todd Landman and Marco Larizza, “Inequality and Human Rights: Who Controls What, When, and How,” International Studies Quarterly 53 (2009): 715-736; Christopher Cramer, “Does inequality cause conflict?” Journal of International Development 15.4 (2003): 397-412; Mark Irving Lichbach, “An Evaluation of “Does Economic Inequality Breed Political Conflict?” Studies,” World Politics 41.4 (1989): 431-470; Manus I. Midlarsky, “Rulers and the Ruled: Patterned Inequality and the Onset of Mass Political Violence,” The American Political Science Review 82.2 (1988): 491-509; Edward N. Mueller and Mitchell A. Seligson, “Inequality and Insurgency,” The American Political Science Review 81.2 (1987): 425-452; Lee Sigelman and Miles Simpson, “A Cross-National Test of the Linkage between Economic Inequality and Political Violence,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 2.1 (1977): 105-128. 54 Elizabeth Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003. 55 See, for example, Daniel N. Posner, “Measuring Ethnic Fractionalization in Africa,” American Journal of Political Science 48 (2004): 849-863. 56 Marie L. Besancon, “Relative Resources: Inequality in Ethnic Wars, Revolutions, and Genocides,” Journal of Peace Research, 42.4 (2005): 393-415.
32 necessary factors for civil war outbreak.57 Therefore, the existing grievance-based explanations fall short in accounting for the mobilization against the state that, in many cases, triggers state coercion.
Those focusing on opportunities-based explanations emphasize rational incentives for rebellion from the perspective of rebel actors. 58 The role of resources—both the financial resources available to the rebel group and the resources controlled by the state—is the primary focus of much of this literature.
Findings suggest that rebel groups in natural resource rich environments, or those that have the support of a patron, tend to commit high levels of indiscriminate violence, while those in resource-poor contexts employ violence selectively and strategically due to higher costs. 59 Research on Indonesia suggests that the discovery of natural resource wealth in Aceh was directly linked to an escalation of separatist demands in that region.60
At the national level, the overall amount of resources available for appropriation by non-state actors is seen as key in determining a country’s propensity for conflict. However, while countries with abundant natural resources have a higher risk of conflict, countries with a very high dependence on natural resources have a relatively lower risk because these resources also act as a source of government revenue that can, like the revenue provided by foreign aid, be
57 Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.” 58 For example, Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis, eds., Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, Washington: The World Bank, 2005; Collier and Hoeffler, “Aid, Policy and Peace”; Ibrahim A. Elbadawi and Nicholas Sambanis, “How Much War Will we see? Explaining the Prevalence of Civil War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 46.3 (2002): 307-334. 59 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion. This study is, in part, a test of Weinstein’s findings at the state level. 60 Michael Ross, “Resources and Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia,” Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, ed. Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis, Washington: The World Bank, 2005, 35-58.
33 spent on greater internal security.61 Because the leaders of states risk their tenure and the state’s livelihood in such conflicts, the strength of their response and the resort to coercion is drive by a similar logic.
The limitation of the opportunities-based explanations for opposition to the state is the relative degree of under-theorisation. In emphasizing rational self- interested behaviour and access to enabling resources, little attention has been paid to why rebellion is chosen by individuals over alternative behaviours. As violence is only one means of appropriating the resources of the state, it is necessary to specify the conditions under which violence becomes a viable or more attractive option relative to the alternatives.62
While the civil war literature has led to extensive progress in explaining state violence against civilians during intrastate conflicts,63 only a few attempts have been made to bridge studies of intrastate and ethnic conflict and studies of political violence in order to come up with a coherent account of state coercion in non-civil war contexts.64 The role of external support to both the opposition and the state has been relatively understudied in the intrastate conflict literature as a factor affecting political violence. Externally provided resources can support the
61 Collier and Hoeffler, “Aid, Policy and Peace.” 62 Syed Mansoob Murshed and Mohammed Zulfan Tadjoeddin, “Revisiting the Greed and Grievance Explanations for Violent Internal Conflict,” Journal of International Development 21 (2009): 87-111. 63 For example, Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Jason Lyall, “Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks? Evidence from Chechnya,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53.3 (2009): 331-362. 64 See, Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson, “Repression or Civil War?” American Economic Review 99 (2009): 292-297; Christian Davenport, David A. Armstrong, and Mark I. Lichbach, “From Mountains to Movements: Dissent, Repression and Escalation to Civil War,” Unpublished Manuscript, 2006; Jean-Paul Azam and Anke Hoeffler, “Violence Against Civilians in Civil Wars: Looting or Terror?” Journal of Peace Research 39 (2002): 461-483; Rogers Brubaker and David D. Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence,” Annual Review of Sociology 4 (1998): 423-452.
34 state as well as rebel actors or transnational movements that contest the status quo. If rational or choice-theoretic models dictate both groups’ decision calculus, then what role can resources such as foreign aid play in altering the choices that state actors make?65
Defining State Coercion
States have a variety of options in responding to domestic opposition, which range from successful threat deterrence or accommodation to successful repression.66 In practice, states often employ repression even when opposition forces are weak or seemingly non-existent. Viewing state coercion as inherently responsive can neglect the path dependent nature of repression. For example,
Carey argues that the “autoregressive tendencies caused by self-perpetuating dynamics and inertia are probably particularly strong for severe and widespread repression, which is not easily reduced or switched off once it has been initiated.”67 Countries may therefore continue to feature high levels of state coercion irrespective of the strength of organised opposition groups. Arendt’s work, in particular, challenges the cyclical view of opposition-government interaction and instead contends that the use of terror and coercion by authoritarian regimes increases with regime consolidation and the corresponding
65 See, Lichbach, “Deterrence or Escalation?”; Will H. Moore, “The Repression of Dissent: A Substitution Model of Government Coercion,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 44.1 (2000): 107- 127. 66 Jan Henryk Pierskalla, “Protest, Deterrence, and Escalation: The Strategic Calculus of Government Repression,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 54.1 (2010): 117-145. 67 Sabine C. Carey, “The Use of Repression as Response to Domestic Dissent,” Political Studies 58.1 (2010): 170.
35 weakness of opponents.68 Authoritarian governments may also resort to violence as a means of policy implementation.69
Given the dynamic nature of state coercion, defining the conceptual boundaries of illegitimate uses of violence by the state has proven to be a continuing challenge in spite of numerous attempts to map out the field.70 I delineate state coercion as several behaviours placed along a spectrum ranging from cooption to violence. Cooption defined as a non-coercive state behaviour that can involve persuasion and/or the provision of material benefits to the population or segments of the population in order to generate support for the state. Cooption includes both accommodation of opposition groups and maintenance of the status quo and involves the use of state resources, including political resources, to peacefully respond to dissent. Examples include increased social service provision and domestic subsidies of key goods such as electricity or gas. This form of state behaviour is likely to dominate when the state has a combination of accommodative political institutions, a high level of resources, and/or a low level of threat.
Repression is defined here as coercive acts undertaken by state agents with the intention of controlling behaviour through means short of intentionally causing deaths.71 Repression includes acts such as arrests and activities aimed at
68 Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. 69 Juan J. Linz, Totalitarianism and Authoritarian Regimes, Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000. 70 For example, Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present, Boston: Schenckman/G.K. Hall, 1978; Christian Davenport, State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 71 Similar perspectives define repression as government regulatory action directed at those challenging existing power relationships between the state and citizen. See, Christian Davenport, “Assessing the Military’s Influence on Political Repression,” Journal of Political and Military
36 breaking up demonstrations, strikes and riots. While civilian deaths may result from repressive acts, directly causing civilians deaths is not the primary goal of state agents who instead employ repression to create a generalized sense of fear and intimidation.
Repression has, alternatively, come to be increasingly defined in terms of the violation of internationally recognised human rights. For example, Carey defines state terror as the “large-scale and widespread violation of life integrity rights, such as torture and extrajudicial killings. State terror indicates that the violation of these kinds of human rights is not an isolated and rare event, but forms part of a government’s strategy to deal with internal opponents.”72 The human rights approach typified by Cingranelli and Richards,73 among others, subsumes the diversity of coercive state behaviour and the nuance with which different coercive actions are employed.
Human rights violations differ in type not just amount, such that
they cannot be clearly represented on a single scale. That is, there
is a substantive difference between the use of imprisonment on the
one hand and the use of torture and killing on the other.
Substantively, these are quite different types of government
Sociology 23 (1995): 119-144; Christian Davenport, “Multi-Dimensional Threat Perception and State Repression: An Inquiry into Why States Apply Negative Sanctions,” American Journal of Political Science 39.3 (1995): 683-713. 72 Carey, “The Use of Repression as Response to Domestic Dissent,” 168. 73 David L. Cingranelli and David L. Richards. The Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Dataset, data set, 2010, accessed 20 April 2010, http://www.humanrightsdata.org; and, David L. Cingranelli and David L. Richards, “Measuring the Level, Pattern, and Sequence of Government Respect for Physical Integrity Rights,” International Studies Quarterly 43.2 (1999): 407-18. See also, David L. Richards, Ronald D. Gelleny, and David H. Sacko, “Money with a Mean Streak? Foreign Economic Penetration and Government Respect for Human Rights in Developing Countries,” International Studies Quarterly 45 (2001): 219-239.
37 activity, with differing consequences for the victims, differing use
of governmental resources and capabilities, and differing costs for
the government, both domestically and internationally.74
State violence constitutes the severe end of the spectrum of coercive state behaviour and is defined as the direct and intentional use of armed force against civilians by a government or formally organized and government-affiliated group that results in civilian casualties.75 State violence can range from individual or collective extrajudicial killings to mass killings or genocide where segments of the population are targeted by the state. The role of the state as an intentional perpetrator of violence serves to differentiate victims of state violence from those of civilian-on-civilian violence and collateral damage in conflict-related violence.
In reality, however, state violence often occurs in the context of broader conflict and civilians may be intentionally victimized as part of a war effort.76 Given the path dependent nature of state coercion, abuses of the civilian population that occur during periods of conflict may continue to influence state violence in subsequent periods while concurrently generating very real grievances against the state.
74 James M. McCormick and Neil Mitchell, “Human Rights Violations, Umbrella Concepts and Empirical Analysis,” World Politics 49 (1997): 513. 75 Ekaterina Stepanova, “Trends in Armed Conflicts: One-Sided Violence against Civilians,” SIPRI Yearbook 2009: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Note that this definition explicitly excludes violence against civilians by non-state actors. A further elaboration of the definitions of state violence and repression is provided in the following chapter. 76 For recent work on this issue in reference to the Vietnam War, see, Rex Douglass, “Hearts, Minds, or Bodies: The Politics and Strategy of Civilian Targeting during the Vietnam War,” Paper presented at the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence Series, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2012; Stathis H. Kalyvas and Matthew Adam Kocher, “The Dynamics of Violence in Vietnam: An Analysis of the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES),” Journal of Peace Research 46.3 (2009): 335-355.
38 The International Dimensions of State Coercion
Previous studies of international influences on state coercion have focused primarily on how international actors can exert pressure on states to stop abuses through formal or informal mechanisms. International actors are seen as responsive to political violence in other states and act in a punitive manner to pressure or socialize states into engaging in less coercive behaviour.77 This may occur through direct pressure or be mediated by international institutions such as the UN.78 Underlying these studies is the assumption that a shared understanding exists of the line between legitimate and illegitimate uses of state violence and that international pressure can and should be brought to bear when this line is crossed. Until very recently, this literature largely overlooked the fact that international actors also contribute to the use of coercion abroad through their own foreign policy decisions. By focusing on the international determinants of state coercion, I contribute to a new perspective to the literature by providing a theoretical account of one of the mechanisms linking international influences with political violence.
To understand the factors that support the use of state violence, I focus on the role of foreign aid in enhancing the coercive capacity of the recipient state.
77 See, Emilie Hafner-Burton, “Sticks and Stones: Naming and Shaming the Human Rights Enforcement Problem,” International Organization 62 (2008): 689-716; Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights and the Demise of Communism, Princeton; Princeton University Press, 2001; Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Andrew Moravcsik, “Explaining International Human Rights Regimes: Liberal Theory and Western Europe,” European Journal of International Relations 1.2 (1995): 157-189. 78 For example, Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, 3rd ed. Washington: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2009; Daniel W. Drezner, The Sanctions Paradox: Economic Statecraft and International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
39 The main argument I present is that bilateral, government-to-government, foreign aid is used by the recipient as generalized budgetary support or government revenue which enables the recipient government to spend the funds as they see fit.
States that may have been too weak to respond to dissent with coercion may, through foreign aid, come to possess the resources necessary to employ violence.
States that had a pre-existing coercive capacity may see this capacity strengthened through the receipt of foreign aid, with significant consequences for the forms and extent of coercion that the state is able to employ. When certain permissive conditions exist, I argue that aid is likely to be channelled into state coercion rather than developmental ends. The theory developed in the following sections outlines these conditions as well as factors that may mitigate the coercive effect of foreign aid.
The Implications of Aid Fungibility
The argument developed throughout this study rests upon a mechanism, which enables foreign aid to be used as government revenue, and subsequently translated into increased coercive capacity. This mechanism is known as fungibility. A substantial economic literature on the fungibility of aid suggests that whether provided as project-based “tied” aid or as humanitarian assistance in the form of food aid, foreign aid as an external resource is easily diverted from its designated purposes.79 Fungibility is, by definition, “the ability of an aid recipient
79 For example, Tarhan Feyzioglu, Vinaya Swaroop, and Min Zhu, “A Panel Data Analysis of the Fungibility of Foreign Aid,” The World Bank Economic Review 12.1 (1998): 29-58; Howard Pack and Janet Rothenberg Pack, “Foreign Aid and the Question of Fungibility,” The Review of
40 to circumvent donor imposed restrictions and spend some amount of categorical or targeted aid on non-targeted programs.”80 If aid provided by donors to finance a specific activity can be spent as freely by the recipient as aid provided for general budgetary support, then aid is considered to be fully fungible.81 Often linked to corruption and the diversion of funds for personal purposes,82 aid fungibility operates above the level of individual actors and occurs even in contexts where corruption is minimal.
The effects of aid fungibility are profound. As Bueno de Mesquita and
Smith contend, “aid giving and getting is a strategic process in which donors purchase policy support from recipients who use at least some of the assistance to ensure that they are securely ensconced in power.”83 Acknowledgement by donors of the diversion of aid to support the incumbent government may be tacit or explicit. Donor intentions are particularly important when considering aid fungibility into military expenditure.84 As Khilji and Zampelli note, “if a donor country refuses to provide military aid while continuing to give economic assistance, it does not ensure that the recipient country is effectively constrained
Economics and Statistics 75.2 (1993): 258-268; Rick Travis and Nikolaos Zaharandis, “Aid for Arms: The Impact of Superpower Economic Assistance on Military Spending in Sub-Saharan Africa,” International Interactions 17.3 (1992): 233-245. 80 Nasir Khilji and Ernest M. Zampelli, “The Fungibility of US Military and Non-Military Assistance and the Impacts on Expenditures of Major Aid Recipients,” Journal of Development Economics 43 (1994): 349. 81 Mark McGillivray and Oliver Morrissey, “Aid Fungibility in Assessing Aid: Red Herring or True Concern?” Journal of International Development 12 (2000): 413-428; David Dollar and Lant Pritchett, Assessing Aid--What Works, What Doesn't, and Why, New York: The World Bank and Oxford University Press, 1998. 82 For example, Phillippe Le Billon, “Buying Peace or Fuelling War: The Role of Corruption in Armed Conflicts,” Journal of International Development 15 (2003): 413-426. 83 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, “Foreign Aid and Policy Concessions,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 51.2 (2007): 254. 84 Syed Mansoob Murshed and Somnath Sen, “Aid Conditionality and Military Expenditure Reduction in Developing Countries: Models of Asymmetric Information,” The Economic Journal 105 (1995): 498-509.
41 from spending on armaments.”85 Indeed, given the fungibility of aid, when the provision of military aid to a particular recipient becomes unacceptable to the donor state’s public, the donor may increase the amount of economic aid given with the understanding (tacit or explicit) that this aid will be employed for military purposes.
International donors may also choose to vary the amount of attention they pay to aid fungibility amongst their various aid recipients. For example, “a government pursing bad policies may be expected to ‘behave fungible,’ and divert funds for less productive expenditures. However, another government pursuing good policies and ‘trusted’ by donors may instead be ‘allowed’ to behave fungible” and allocate aid to programs that it deems most beneficial to the country.86 The overarching policy implication of aid fungibility is that donors will not be able to convince aid recipients to implement policies that the recipients are not willing or able to implement, often due to political or institutional weakness in combination with the inherent difficulty of monitoring by donors.87
In sum, the fungibility of foreign aid enables the resources provided by international donors to be used for a variety of purposes; donors ultimately have only limited control over what aid is actually spent on. To the degree that fungibility is taken into account in aid donors’ allocation processes, it is considered in light of how it can best further the donor’s own policy goals rather than the effect it may have on the recipient country’s domestic politics. By
85 Khilji and Zampelli, “The Fungibility of US Military and Non-Military Assistance,” 1096. 86 Jan Pettersson, “Foreign Sectoral Aid Fungibility, Growth and Poverty Reduction,” Journal of International Development 19.8 (2007): 1074-1098. 87 McGillivray and Morrissey, “Aid Fungibility in Assessing Aid”; Feyzioglu et al., “A Panel Data Analysis of the Fungibility of Foreign Aid.”
42 shifting the focus of this discussion to the domestic effects of foreign aid, I emphasize the role that international donors play in shaping political conditions in recipient countries through both intentional aid policy decisions and the unintentional outcomes of those decisions.
The Coercive Effect of Foreign Aid
Foreign aid affects state-society relations by altering the resources available to the state. Due to the fungibility of foreign aid, internationally provided resources can be used to ensure that the government remains ensconced in power through two mechanisms: cooption and coercion. Whether aid contributes to cooption or coercion is determined by the structural characteristics of the state as well as government decisions about how to distribute foreign aid within the domestic budget. Since the allocation of government resources between defence expenditure and consumption has been formally modelled elsewhere,88 I focus here on explicating the outcomes of these distributional decisions by providing a theory of the coercive effect of foreign aid. I then address how different domestic-level factors condition the degree to which foreign aid may contribute to coercive outcomes in a particular country context.
88 For example, Jean-Paul Azam, “How to Pay for the Peace? A Theoretical Framework with References to African Countries,” Public Choice 83 (1995): 173-184; Heng-Fu Zou, “A Dynamic Model of Capital and Arms Accumulation,” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 19 (1995): 371-393; Saadet Deger and Somnath Sen, “Military Expenditure, Aid, and Economic Development,” Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Development Economics 1991, Washington: World Bank, 1992, 159-186.
43 Figure 2.1: The Domestic Effects of Foreign Aid on State Coercion
Figure 2.1 illustrates the theorized relationship between foreign aid and recipient state behaviour. The first stage of the theoretical model begins with the provision of foreign aid by a donor state, in this case the United States, to a selected aid recipient. The donor state chooses whether to provide military and/or economic aid, the amount of aid to provide, as well as any conditionality or other restrictions that may be imposed. These funds are then transferred to the recipient government. In the second stage, the aid recipient government decides how to distribute the external resources it has been allocated within the context of the government’s annual budget. In a gross simplification of the budgetary process, state leader decide whether to channel foreign aid resources into the country’s service capacity or coercive capacity. The former refers to the government’s public service institutions such as education, health, etc. The latter refers to the country’s coercive institutions including the national military, police and intelligence services. In the third stage, the relative balance of the state’s coercive capacity and service capacity determines what behaviour the government will use to maintain its hold on power or deal with opposition challenges.
How foreign aid is distributed within the government’s annual budget is to a large degree dependent on the nature of the government receiving the aid and its
44 perceived current and future levels of threat.89 Both military aid and economic aid provide external resources that a government may use to support its hold on power through military expenditure or consumption, respectively. Military expenditure builds the coercive capacity of the state while consumption, or general government spending, is used to provide public services that may increase public support for the regime. These two mechanisms for dealing with opposition reflect a longstanding tension within the modern state between accommodation and coercion.90
The coercive capacity of the state refers to the human and technological resources available to the government in the imposition of negative sanctions or punishment.91 A state’s coercive capacity can be operationalized as the capacity of the military and internal security apparatus (police, internal security service, militia, etc.) and the infrastructural requirements of using that capacity. Coercive behaviour is easily employed by these organizations because they are prepared to use force at all times and because coercive acts are congruent with their ideology of control through the application of force.92 The coercive capacity of the state can be concretely measured by military spending, the size of the armed forces and internal security services relative to the population, as well as the number and sophistication of arms.
89 Azam, “How to Pay for the Peace?”; Zou, “A Dynamic Model of Capital and Arms Accumulation.” 90 T.V. Paul and Theodore McLaughlin, “Transforming South Asia: Is a Pluralistic Security Community Feasible?” ed. T.V. Paul, South Asia’s Weak States: Understanding the Regional Insecurity Predicament, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, 295. 91 Christian Davenport, “The Weight of the Past: Exploring Lagged Determinants of Political Repression,” Political Research Quarterly 49.2 (1996): 377-403. 92 Davenport, “Assessing the Military’s Influence on Political Repression.”
45 I assume that military aid is always used to support the coercive capacity of the state through military expenditure. 93 Although political and military influences on budgetary policy play a role in shaping the overall amount of resources devoted to military expenditure, the most crucial determinant seems to be financial and economic constraints. 94 In conditions of severe resource constraints, military aid may serve as a substitute for a country’s own military spending.95 For example, Collier and Hoeffler suggest that around 40 percent of
African military spending is inadvertently financed by foreign aid due to the scarcity of government resources.96 With the receipt of military aid, a greater amount of funding is available for security purposes and is often directed towards internal security.97 If governments can afford to increase military spending, more often than not they will do so. Enhanced coercive capacity, combined with sufficient motivation and permissive structural conditions, increases the likelihood that the state will employ coercion against its citizens,98 thereby creating what I term the coercive effect of foreign aid.
The second way that foreign aid may affect state coercion is by augmenting the state’s capacity for service provision by funding additional government consumption. If the state chooses to spend foreign aid resources on
93 Deger and Sen, “Military Expenditure, Aid, and Economic Development.” 94 Saadat Deger and Somnath Sen, “Military Expenditure and Developing Countries,” Handbook of Defense Economics, Vol. 1, ed. Keith Hartley and Todd Sandler, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science BV, 1995, 298. 95 Travis and Zahariadis, “Aid for Arms.” 96 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Unintended Consequences: Does Aid Promote Arms Races?” Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 69.1 (2007): 1-24. 97 Collier and Hoeffler, “Aid, Policy and Peace”; Collier and Hoeffler, “Unintended Consequences.” 98 See, Michael Colarsi and Sabine C. Carey, “To Kill or to Protect: Security Forces, Domestic Institutions, and Genocide,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52.1 (2008): 39-67.
46 providing increased public goods provision, it can utilize these services to buy off opposition through a cooption effect.99 Seen differently, foreign aid provides the resources necessary to expand the government’s winning coalition and stave off opposition.100 This process would decrease the state’s reliance on coercion by creating an alternative mechanism for responding to dissent and accommodating opposition demands. If a country’s social contract is reliant on a high degree of public service provision, this may constrain the amount of foreign aid devoted to the security sector and mitigate the potential coercive effect of foreign aid.
While, theoretically, military aid is fungible into consumption and could be used to support service provision, 101 it is unlikely to be used for this purpose due to the relatively higher defence burdens of developing countries as well as the tying of U.S. military aid to arms sales and other equipment.102 However, it is important to note that donor country military equipment purchased through foreign aid may or may not be appropriate for internal security functions.103
Assistance for military professionalization can increase the coercive capacity of
99 Although this is similar to the ‘corruption buys peace’ argument wherein corruption facilitates the creation of political resources which rulers can use to co-opt opposition groups through clientalistic ties, thereby providing a measure of political stability and avoiding conflict (see, Le Billon, “Buying Peace or Fueling War”). I assume here that cooption takes place through regular state channels which are supported by foreign aid, such as subsidies and public wage increases. I do not, however, exclude the possibility that cooption through corruption and clientalistic networks is facilitated by foreign aid and takes place concurrently with the coercion and cooption effects I describe. 100 Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, “Foreign Aid and Policy Concessions.” 101 Azam has additionally modeled the use of foreign aid by recipient governments as a “positive- gift” in terms of a Stackelberg equilibrium whereby the government plays a strategy where it can maintain power by trading off increased defense expenditures for more “gift” to buy off the opponent. This strategy is necessary, though not sufficient, for foreign aid to be directed away from military expenditure. See, Azam, “How to Pay for the Peace.” 102 Arms sales funded through the Foreign Military Sales program are typically determined by requests from prospective aid recipient countries. 103 Peter N. Hess, “Force Ratios, Arms Imports and Foreign Aid Receipts in the Developing Nations,” Journal of Peace Research 26.4 (1989): 399-412.
47 the state by making the military more effective and efficient, but it may also help restrain the use of repression by establishing civil-military relations norms.
Economic aid is traditionally considered to be more fungible than military aid, particularly in states whose governments are not accountable to their population for developmental outcomes or those faced with a high level of external threat.104 Research suggests that even “tied” or non-monetary forms of economic aid free up resources that the government would have otherwise devoted to providing these goods.105 There is substantial case study evidence that suggests that even food aid is fungible for military purposes. During the 1985 famine in Ethiopia, Western grain deliveries permitted Mengistu’s dictatorship to divert almost all of the government’s resources from feeding the starving to resettling men from the troublesome north-central highlands to other areas where rebels could not actively recruit them.106
I therefore contend that foreign aid frees up resources that are reallocated according to government preferences. Economic aid may be used to increase the state’s capacity for service provision or it may be redirected to fund the state’s coercive capacity.107 If service capacity and public goods provision is favoured,
104 Martin C. McGuire, “US Assistance, Israeli Allocation, and the Arms Race in the Middle East: An Analysis of Three Interdependent Resource Allocation Processes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 26.2 (1982): 199-235. 105 Zahariadis et al., “Military Substitution Effects from Foreign Economic Aid.” 106 Filip Palda, “Can Repressive Regimes be Moderated through Foreign Aid?” Public Choice 77 (1993): 535-550. 107 This follows from Zou’s and van der Ploeg and Zeeuw’s (1990) assumption that the utility from consumption does not depend on current weapons stocks. This means that the benefit a government derives from providing increased services is not dependant on its existing level of coercive capacity (i.e., there is no minimum level of coercive capacity a government needs to attain before it can begin to benefit from increased service provision). However, as a strategy, governments may still choose to redirect economic aid toward military expenditure because they derive greater utility from increasing the state’s coercive capacity. See, Zou, “A Dynamic Model of Capital and Arms Accumulation”; F. van der Ploeg and A. J. de Zeeuw, “Perfect Equilibrium in
48 then economic aid should facilitate the successful cooption of opposition by increasing the amount of resources with which the government can buy support.
Rather than contribute to political violence, foreign aid will in this case produce a cooption effect measurable by the absence of state coercion. Alternatively, if the state chooses to allocate military and/or economic aid resources to increasing its coercive capacity then foreign aid is likely to produce a coercive effect.
Domestic Influences on the Coercive Effect of Aid
Important country-specific characteristics may potentially condition the theorized relationship between foreign aid and state coercion posited above. Both the structural attributes of the state and more situational factors can serve to limit or increase the likelihood that foreign aid revenues will be devoted to the state’s coercive capacity. I contend that political institutions and, in particular, the role that political institutions play in maintaining the executive’s legitimacy play a key role in determining whether foreign aid has a coercive effect. The interaction between the overall institutional strength and reach of the state and its ability to provide public goods is another potential intervening factor. Lastly, the conflict history of a particular country plays a significant role in affecting the likelihood that aid will be used for military purposes.
a Model of Competitive Arms Accumulation,” International Economic Review 31.1 (1990): 131- 146.
49 Regime Type and Political Institutions
Structural conditions, such as a country’s political institutions, play an important role in determining both how foreign aid resources will be allocated and the likelihood of state coercion. A major finding of the repression literature is that certain political institutions may impede the state’s ability to employ violence.
Known as the ‘Domestic Democratic Peace’ theory, studies have demonstrated that democracy may reduce the likelihood of both repression and civil war.108 On the whole, democratic states are thought to be more internally peaceful in accordance with system-level findings that democratic states are unlikely to wage war against each other.109
As in the international relations literature, the pacific effect of democracy domestically has been articulated along normative and institutional lines.
Democracies feature individual-centred norms regarding tolerance and deliberation that pose a high barrier to the domestic use of violence. From an institutional perspective, democratic political cycles raise the costs for states to use coercion because elected leaders wish to continue in office, accept the societal control mechanism offered by the democratic process, and are therefore less inclined to violate human rights.110 In particular, countries where all members of
108 Davenport, “State Repression and the Tyrannical Peace”; Davenport and Armstrong, “Democracy and the Violation of Human Rights”; Håvard Hegre, Tania Ellingsen, Scott Gates, and Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Towards a Democratic Civil Peace,” The American Political Science Review 95.1 (2001): 33-48. 109See, John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett, “The Kantian Peace: The Pacific Benefits of Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885-1992,” World Politics 52.1 (1999): 1-37; Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, “Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946- 1986,” The American Political Science Review 87.3 (1993): 624-638; Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith, “An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace,” The American Political Science Review 93.4 (1999): 791-807. 110 Davenport and Armstrong, “Democracy and the Violation of Human Rights.”
50 parliament are elected through proportional representation and where voters cast a vote for individual candidates have been found to display a higher average respect for individual rights.111 Most importantly, democracies feature institutionalized channels for grievance airing and accommodation, which reduce the likelihood of conflict and provide an alternative mechanism for social control through political participation.112 By and large, states with responsive political institutions should be more likely to channel foreign aid into service capacity and other forms of cooption as popularly legitimated governments do not have to have to maintain legitimacy and stay in power through coercion.113
Nevertheless, in focusing on democracy as a potential cure-all for state coercion, the domestic democratic peace literature has difficulty in accounting for the absence of state violence in many authoritarian regimes. Referred to by Scott as steady pressure,114 both violence and dissent are less likely in such countries due to the high degree of societal control exercised by the state. As formulated by
Muller, and subsequently by Muller and Seligson, the severe costs of rebellion in an extremely repressive political system may inhibit an organized opposition from forming.115 Seen in this light, political institutions may also affect the type of dissent that arises, in addition to shaping a state’s response to dissent.
111 David L. Cingranelli and Mikhail Filippov, “Electoral Rules and Incentives to Protect Human Rights,” The Journal of Politics 72.1 (2010): 245-257. 112 Davenport, State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace. 113 Deger and Sen, “Military Expenditure and Developing Countries.” 114 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. 115 Edward N. Muller, “Income Inequality, Regime Repressiveness, and Political Violence,” American Sociological Review 50.1 (1985): 47-61; Muller and Seligson, “Inequality and Insurgency.”
51 Because state coercion may be limited in both democracies and authoritarian regimes, much emphasis has been placed on understanding the sources of political violence in transitional or anocratic regimes types—those that are neither consolidated democracies or autocracies. Known as the ‘more murder in the middle’ hypothesis, studies of the non-monotonic or inverted U-shaped relationship between regime type and repression contend that low levels of state violence occur at either end of the regime type spectrum with the vast majority of violent state action perpetrated by regimes with mixed political institutions.116
Countries transitioning from one political regime type to another have been found to be highly politically unstable which likely accounts for an increased use of state coercion and a greater propensity to become engaged in civil war.117 In particular, the least stable political systems have been found to be dictatorships with high levels of political participation.118
Variation in coercive state behaviour cannot be explained exclusively with reference to differences in political institutions. Why do some democracies resort to coercion while others do not? Why are some authoritarian regimes highly
116 Gartner and Regan, “Threat and Repression”; Helen Fein, “More Murder in the Middle: Life- Integrity Violations and Democracy in the World, 1987,” Human Rights Quarterly 17.1 (1995): 170-191; Hegre et al., “Towards a Democratic Civil Peace”; Patrick Regan and Errol A. Henderson, “Democracy, Threats and Political Repression in Developing Countries: Are Democracies Internally Less Violent?” Third World Quarterly 23.1 (2002): 119-136. 117 For example, Lars-Erik Cederman, Simon Hug, and Lutz F. Krebs, “Democratization and Civil War—Empirical evidence,” Journal of Peace Research 47.4 (2010): 377-394; Patrick M. Regan and Sam R. Bell, “Changing Lanes or Stuck in the Middle: Why are Anocracies More Prone to Civil Wars?” Political Research Quarterly 63.4 (2010): 747-759; James Raymond Vreeland, “The Effect of Political Regime on Civil War: Unpacking Anocracy,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52.3 (2008): 401-442; Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War”; Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratic Transitions, Institutional Strength, and War,” International Organization 56.2 (2002): 297-337. 118 Scott Gates, Harvard Hegre, Mark P. Jones, and Harvard Strand, “Institutional Inconsistency and Political Instability: Polity Duration, 1800-2000,” American Journal of Political Science 50.4 (2006): 893-908.
52 repressive while others feature amicable state-society relations? I argue that the external resources provided by foreign aid offer one potential explanation for this observed variation. I contend that a country’s political institutions play a significant role in determining the extent to which foreign aid is channelled into coercive outcomes. Democracies tend to be highly constrained and are therefore the least likely to spend aid on coercion. Anocratic regimes, on the other hand, are subject to limited popular accountability and are often highly unstable. I therefore hypothesize that foreign aid contributes to a greater increase in state coercion in countries with anocratic regime types due to the limited accountability of governments and their greater exposure to dissent. In general, I anticipate a positive relationship between foreign aid and state coercion in dictatorships generally but, in consolidated autocratic regimes, state coercion may have such an entrenched history that fluctuations in foreign aid have little impact.119
State Strength and the Capacity for Coercion
The strength of the state is another important structural factor potentially affecting the relative allocation of a state’s foreign aid resources. Generally, state capacity is defined as “the ability of a state to develop and implement policies in order to provide collective goods such as security, order, and welfare to its citizens in a legitimate and effective manner untrammelled by internal or external
119 The period of time for which a country has been governed by a dictator may be an important additional consideration. Foreign aid may help with the initial start-up costs of instituting coercion as a tool of governance but once a country’s coercive capacity reaches a certain level, coercive institutions may be self-perpetuating.
53 actors.” 120 State strength has typically been conceptualized as a continuum ranging from strong states with consolidated governments to failed states, which display few domestic attributes of statehood.
Weak states include a broad continuum of states that are inherently weak, basically strong but temporarily weak, and a mixture of the two.121 Due to severe challenges, weak states cannot monopolize the use of force vis-à-vis non-state actors and are therefore incapable of fully projecting power within their national boundaries. Weak states continue to provide some political goods to citizens, mostly monopolize the legitimate use of force, and command the allegiance of most of the population but are typically unable to provide sufficient levels of protection to all citizens.122 The creation of stateless areas beyond the control of the central government may result in the continual threat of secession, civil war, and large-scale internal struggles for control between the government and non- state actors that may eventually lead to state failure.123 Furthermore, the ruling elite often lack legitimate authority and will frequently “have to engage in brute force to suppress dissidence among disenchanted ethnic or political groups.”124 At the far end of the continuum of state strength, failed states are unable to provide services or other economic incentives as a means of dealing with opposition threats. Failing states must establish authority over potential challengers largely
120 T.V. Paul, “State Capacity and South Asia’s Perennial Insecurity Problems,” South Asia’s Weak States: Understanding the Regional Insecurity Predicament, ed. T.V. Paul, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, 2-33. 121 Robert I. Rotberg, State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. 122 Paul, “State Capacity and South Asia’s Perennial Insecurity Problems,” 5. 123 James A. Piazza, “Incubators of Terror: Do Failed and Failing States Promote Transnational Terrorism?” International Studies Quarterly 52 (2008): 469-488. 124 Paul, “State Capacity and South Asia’s Perennial Insecurity,” 6.
54 through the use of force.125 Failed states often resort to violence to deal with organized challenges to the government’s hold on power and to repression as a means of suppressing discontent with the government’s policies.126
Clearly then, the strength of the state interacts with its coercive capacity.
Strong states unquestionably control their territories and deliver a full range and high quality of social goods to their citizens. Strong states may maintain order through a developed coercive capacity or may provide a high level of social services. Strong states, while having full control of their coercive apparatus, may chose not to engage in coercive behaviour because they have the resources and institutional strength to pursue more accommodative positions and co-opt opposition. If states are rational actors, then promoting stability through coercion comes at a cost and is unlikely to be used unless the government has no other options.127
Weak states, on the other hand, tend to vary in their degree of coercive capacity as some governments invest in large armed forces to maintain their rule while others seek to extract as many resources from the state as possible during their tenure and instead undermine overall state capacity. Weak states are likely resort to violent tactics because the weakness of the state precludes less extreme responses.128 Often, states may possess coercive resources but lack the ability to provide public goods and ensure the legitimacy required for long-term stability
125 Shahar Hameiri, “Failed States or a Failed Paradigm? State Capacity and the Limits of Institutionalism,” Journal of International Relations and Development 10.2 (2007): 122-149; William I. Zatman, Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995. 126 Rotberg, State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror. 127 Palda, “Can Repressive Regimes be Moderated through Foreign Aid?” 128 Mason and Krane, “The Political Economy of Death Squads.”
55 thereby relying on, as Paul notes, “a kind of ‘strength’ that ‘is ultimately based on fear, force, and coercion.’”129
The interaction between state strength and coercive capacity is important not only because it affects the state’s ability to employ coercion but also because state capacity is a characteristic of the state assessed by international aid donors.
Weak states, in particular, may provide a fertile environment for the intervention of external powers.130 I hypothesize that foreign aid contributes to a greater increase in state coercion in countries with limited state capacity due to the underdevelopment of the state’s institutional strength and reach and the concomitant inability to distribute public goods.
Conflict History
In addition to these structural factors, prior conflict also plays an important conditioning role in shaping the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion. Though participation in an international or intrastate conflict is largely situational, repeated participation in conflict may affect key state structures and raise the profile of the national military in politics. Assessing the role that conflict plays in mediating the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion is important because engagement in a conflict directly contributes to a shift in state resources towards coercion. Nations engaged in war spend more on the military than they otherwise would.131 Other findings suggest a degree of endogeneity in
129 Paul, “State Capacity and South Asia’s Perennial Insecurity Problems”, 6. 130 Paul, “State Capacity and South Asia’s Perennial Insecurity Problems,” 8. 131 Travis and Zahariadis, “Aid for Arms.”
56 military expenditure where once a country has participated in an interstate war it subsequently chooses a considerably higher level of military spending.132 Conflict can also increase the fungibility of non-military aid into military expenditure based on the increasing demands for a military build-up. For example, de Ree and
Nillesen find that foreign aid translated into military expenditure more effectively when a country was at war, or when a country was experiencing an increased likelihood of war.133
Second, conflict can affect foreign aid flows. Balla and Reinhardt suggest that every bilateral donor conditions aid on conflict. Once political and economic interests are controlled for, most donors reduce aid to a recipient with an in-house or nearby intense conflict.134 The United States is an outlier in this regard as Balla and Reinhardt find that it allocates large amounts of foreign aid to countries bordering a conflict. Donors are also seemingly averse to high levels of military expenditure in aid recipients, which suggests an alternate route through which conflict may influence foreign aid flows.135 More relevant to the study at hand, conflict also impairs the ability of the aid that is given to work effectively. Donor oversight is severely hampered in conflict situations, providing one explanation for increased fungibility. This is frequently seen with humanitarian or food aid where combatants can disrupt distribution channels.
Third, foreign aid to countries engaged in war may serve to sustain the conflict. Foreign aid may perpetuate conflict by reinforcing political, economic
132 Collier and Hoeffler, “Unintended Consequences.” 133 de Ree and Nillesen, “Aiding Violence or Peace?” 134 Eliana Balla and Gina Yannitell Reinhardt, “Giving and Receiving Foreign Aid: Does Conflict Count?” World Development 36.12 (2008): 2566-2585. 135 Collier and Hoeffler, “Unintended Consequences.”
57 and social fault lines.136 The need to distribute aid at the local level may also lead to cooperation with local strongmen or faction leaders and further subvert national institutions. In feeding both combatants and non-combatants, food aid may relieve actors involved in conflict of the responsibility to provide for themselves and for their supporters.137 Recent evidence suggests that millions of dollars of aid for
Ethiopian famine victims raised through Live Aid concerts and provided to organizations associated with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front were diverted for military purposes.138 The provision of aid may also sustain conflict by shaping international opinion and providing legitimacy to particular actors, both state and non-state. One example of this is the millions of dollars in foreign aid and equipment pledged to Syrian opposition groups by the United States, United
Kingdom and several Arab states in April 2012.139 While U.S. Secretary of
Defense Panetta emphasised the provision of “nonlethal” aid by the Department of Defense, including $25 million for humanitarian relief, Panetta also acknowledged that this aid would support an on-going insurgency.140
Conflict or the threat of renewed conflict may generate pressure to allocate foreign aid revenues to increased military spending. Aid given in the context of an on-going conflict may serve to sustain political violence. However, there is some
136 Johnathan Goodhand, “Aiding Violence or Building Peace? The Role of International Aid in Afghanistan,” Third World Quarterly 23.5 (2002): 837-859. 137 Lischer, “Collateral Damage.” 138 Martin Plaut, “Ethiopia Aid ‘Spent on Weapons,’” BBC News, 3 March 2010, accessed 8 March 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/8535189.stm; Peter Gill, Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia since Live Aid, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 139 Al Jazeera English, “Aid Pledged to Syrian Opposition Groups,” 2 April 2012, accessed 20 April 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/04/20124253422612678.html. 140 Cindy Saine, “Pentagon Ready to Help Protect Syrian People, Panetta Says,” Voice of America, 19 April 2012, accessed 20 April 2012, http://www.voanews.com/english/news/usa/US-Defense- Secretary-Pentagon-Ready-to-Help-Protect-Syrian-People-148143755.html.
58 evidence that the receipt of foreign aid may reduce the likelihood of conflict in part by increasing state capacity.141 All else being equal, I hypothesize that foreign aid contributes to a greater increase in state coercion in recipient countries with a history of armed conflict.
To summarize the argument that far, the coercive effect of foreign aid is expected to be most likely in countries with anocratic or autocratic political regimes, where political institutions are in transition or where non-democratic political institutions are in place. The coercive effect of foreign aid is also likely to be seen in countries with limited state capacity and therefore the reduced possibility of buying support for the incumbent government through social spending. Lastly, a history of conflict, be it inter- or intrastate, likely plays an important role in determining how much foreign aid gets channelled into the state’s coercive capacity. The coercive effect of aid is most likely to be constrained in democratic countries with strong state institutions and a limited history of conflict because of the development of accommodative methods of dealing with dissent and challenges to political tenure.
Conclusion
This study is motivated by the question of whether foreign aid contributes to peace or to violence in recipient countries. The ability of international actors to
141 Collier and Hoeffler contend that aid may reduce the risk of conflict by increasing government budgets and thereby increasing the financial viability constraint for potential rebellions. They find that economic policy improvement is effective in reducing risk via its effect on economic structure and growth. In turn, growth has both a direct effect on risk reduction and indirect effects via the level of income and the structure of the economy. See, Collier and Hoeffler, “Aid, Policy, and Peace.”
59 shape state-society relations abroad through tools such as foreign aid is inherently tied to the question of whether the benefits of policy change outweigh the costs – including costs that are unanticipated. The theory of the coercive effect of foreign aid presented in this chapter identifies potential underlying mechanisms linking the receipt of foreign aid with subsequent coercive state behaviour. Specifically, I argue against the belief that bilateral military aid and economic aid have differential effects on political violence. Rather, the fungibility of aid means that even aid given for humanitarian or economic development purposes can contribute to the recipient state’s military capacity. All else being equal, governments which allocate a greater proportion of their foreign aid revenue to building the state’s coercive capacity through military expenditure, force expansion, or arms acquisitions, may increase their propensity to employ coercion. I therefore provide a coherent, supply-side explanation for coercive state behaviour.
I additionally contend that the recipient country’s political institutions, state strength, and history of conflict condition the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion. Each country has its own unique combination of these factors and this context is hugely important in determining if and how foreign aid will translate into increased violence against civilians by state actors. The overarching argument I present, then, is that the receipt of foreign aid will have a negative effect in countries with the necessary preconditions or risk factors for state coercion identified in the broader literature. In general, the likelihood of state coercion is circumscribed by democratic governance and by the adequate
60 provision of public goods and services by responsive governments. When these conditions are not met, foreign aid is likely to facilitate coercion by strengthening the state’s security apparatus as the key tool of governance.
61 Chapter III. Counting the Costs of Foreign Aid
Introduction
How can we measure the true costs of foreign aid in countries subject to aid’s coercive effect? Likened to bribery by Morgenthau,142 foreign aid has been given to authoritarian rulers, spent on lavish ‘conspicuous consumption’ projects that benefit few, and purchased modern military technology that has then been used in conflicts, both internal and external.143 Military assistance has been linked to numerous coup leaders, including the leader of the March 2012 coup in Mali.144
While such incidents may not outweigh the overall good that foreign aid achieves globally, they are an empirical reality that must be grappled with by those who provide aid. Unfortunately, although critics may easily claim that foreign aid is
“subsidizing a regime that is rapidly becoming one of the most repressive and dictatorial on the continent,” as Helen Epstein writes of Ethiopia under Meles,145 empirically assessing such claims is inherently challenging for those who seek to understand the causes and consequences of the potentially pernicious effects of aid. Tracing the flow of aid dollars through government budgets wrought with poor accounting and/or corruption is an almost impossible task. Part of the
142 Hans Morgenthau, “A Political Theory of Foreign Aid,” The American Political Science Review 56.2 (1962): 301-309. 143 William Easterly, Roberta Gatti, and Sergio Kurlat, “Development, Democracy and Mass Killings,” Journal of Economic Growth 11.2 (2006): 129-156; Doug Bandow, “Foreign Aid Simply Won't Reform Dictators,” The Cato Institute, 11 July 1997, accessed 12 August 2011, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=61223. 144 Joshua E. Keating, “Trained in the USA,” Foreign Policy, 28 March 2012, accessed 20 April 2012, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/28/trained_in_the_usa?page=0,0. 145 Helen Epstein, “Cruel Ethiopia,” The New York Review of Books, 14 April 2010, accessed 7 August 2012, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/13/cruel- ethiopia/?pagination=false.
62 challenge of concretely linking foreign aid with negative state behaviour is that both aid donors and recipients may see this issue as secondary, at best, to the political ties that bind them.
Numerous academic studies have sought to assess the relationship between foreign aid and various forms of state coercion. The literature largely remains divided between those who assess the degree to which human rights abuses affect the foreign aid allocation process and those who examine the causes of state coercion, with little work being done at the nexus of these two approaches. By divorcing how human rights violations affect the allocation of foreign aid from the receipt of foreign aid by those same human rights-abusive countries, the issue of how foreign aid as an international influence may affect a state’s ability or propensity to coerce its citizens has received little attention. The present study seeks to fill this gap.
I contend that the effects of bilateral foreign aid in recipient countries are largely independent of the process by which aid recipients are selected. Although the criteria by which the United States selects countries to receive aid includes human rights abuses as an explicit consideration, the application of this criteria only excludes exceedingly coercive governments and has been applied unevenly over time. Indeed, analyses of the U.S. State Department Reports on Human
Rights strongly suggest that the inclusion of human rights considerations has been influenced by broader political dynamics associated with the Cold War.146 Aside from the exclusion of highly abusive regimes such as those in the Islamic
146 Nancy Qian and David Yanagizawa-Drott, “Watchdog or Lapdog? The Effect of US Strategic Objectives on Human Rights News Coverage during the Cold War,” NBER Working Paper No. 15738, Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2010.
63 Republic of Iran, the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and
Burma, there is little reason to believe that there is any systematic relationship between which developing countries are chosen as foreign aid recipients and their propensity to employ violence against civilians. Given the above examples, it is often extremely difficult to disentangle the application of human rights conditionality from broader foreign policy interests.
A second approach to the study of state coercion has focused primarily on assessing the sources of changes in state coercion, including the determinants of the most egregious forms of state violence such as mass killings and genocide.147
Studies of state violence have typically neglected the influence of external actors in changing patterns of state coercion. When the role of international actors has been addressed, it is characteristically with reference to efforts to stop on going killings through the use of peacekeepers and other forms of direct intervention.148
International influences are therefore seen almost exclusively as a way to reduce state violence against civilians.
147 For example, Christian Davenport, “State Repression and Political Order,” Annual Review of Political Science 10.1 (2007): 1-23; Easterly, Gatti, and Kurlat, “Development, Democracy and Mass Killings”; Barbara Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955,” American Political Science Review 97.1 (2003): 57-73; Steven C Poe, C. Neal Tate, and Linda Camp Keith, “Repression of the Human Right to Personal Integrity Revisited: A Global Cross-National Study Covering the Years 1976-1993,” International Studies Quarterly 43.2 (1999): 291-313; James Ron, “Varying Methods of State Violence,” International Organization 51.2 (1997): 275-300; Christian Davenport, “The Weight of the Past: Exploring Lagged Determinants of Political Repression,” Political Research Quarterly 49.2 (1996): 377-403. 148 For example, Martin Binder, “Humanitarian Crises and the International Politics of Selectivity,” Human Rights Review 10.3 (2009): 327-348; Michael Gilligan and Stephen J. Stedman, “Where Do the Peacekeepers Go?” International Studies Review 5.4 (2003): 37-54. Indeed, as Davenport has noted, “some important aspects are largely peripheral to the core research program and tend to be ignored, such as international influences that are consistently discussed by policy makers, activists, and ordinary citizens as a way to end or significantly reduce state repression.” See, Christian Davenport, “State Repression and Political Order.” Annual Review of Political Science 10.1 (2007): 2.
64 In this study, I focus on the role of external influences on multiple forms of state coercion, ranging from the absence of coercion to fatal violence. I focus specifically on how changes in the level of foreign assistance provided to countries affect the type and intensity of state coercion. If international actors inadvertently contribute to political violence abroad through mechanisms such as foreign aid, it is essential to understand the nuances of this relationship by examining its potential effects on multiple manifestations of state coercion.
Moreover, I examine the possible conditioning roles that the recipient country’s political institutions, state strength, and history of conflict may play in determining the overall level of political violence in a country.
I test the hypotheses on foreign aid and state coercion presented in Chapter
2 using a pooled, time-series cross-national dataset of 132 middle and low-income countries for the period of 1976-2005.149 The analysis begins in 1976 because of important changes in the structure and policy of U.S. foreign aid that resulted from the passage of the Foreign Assistance Act by Congress. Also by the mid-
1970s, the majority of developing countries had begun or completed a process of decolonization. The greater availability of cross-national data from the 1970s onwards permits the inclusion of more domestic characteristics of aid recipient countries. Additionally, the sample is restricted to those countries with a population of over 500,000. This is because population size affects the scale of
149 Specifically, I exclude high-income countries designated by the World Bank as having a 2009 per capita gross national income in excess of $12,196. The resulting dataset is unbalanced due to the introduction of new countries. 72.36% of the country panels have full temporal coverage (i.e. 89 of the 123 included countries have T=33). Two countries, Montenegro and Suriname, have only 3 years of data available. Subsequent listwise deletion due to missing data results in a range of 102 to 113 countries being included in the pooled analysis. See, World Bank, World Development Indicators.
65 political violence as well as the likelihood that state coercion will be observed and reported by the international media and NGOs, which form the basis of the state coercion measures I employ.
The following sections present the data used in the statistical analysis that follows in Chapters 4 and 5. First, I outline the dependent variable in this study – state coercion – and pay special attention to comparing widely used datasets that measure different manifestations of coercion. This is followed by a discussion of the independent variables, which I group as international influences and state- level or domestic influences on state coercion. In this second section, I also discuss the relevant control variables. Third, I present the method of statistical estimation and explain the structure and selection of the case studies. To conclude, I briefly discuss the benefits of my approach and how it builds on the existing empirical literature.
State Repression, Violence and Mass Killings: Concepts and Definitions
A major critique of early empirical work in the field of human rights was that such research was “driven as much by policy priorities and data availability as by theory.”150 This critique continues to ring true. Despite valiant efforts devoted to data collection and the creation of new, more clearly specified datasets, the quantitative study of state coercion remains plagued by a dearth of verifiable data. Cross-national measures of state violence remain extremely limited and those that do exist span different historical periods and geographical domains.
150 James M. McCormick and Neil J. Mitchell, “Human Rights Violations, Umbrella Concepts, and Empirical Analysis,” World Politics 49.4 (1997): 510.
66 This has led many scholars to focus on the history of state violence within a particular region or country,151 specific conflicts and conflict periods,152 or even individual episodes of state coercion.153
This section provides a discussion and critical evaluation of existing measures of state coercion, delineated here as mass killings, state violence and repression. State coercion is defined as the intentional use of armed force and/or forceful coercive acts by a government or government agents where civilians are directly and intentionally targeted.154 I identified the various measures of state coercion discussed here through an extensive review of the existing literature on
151 For example, A. Varshney, Z. Tadjoeddin, and R. Panggabean, “Creating Datasets in Information-Poor Environments: Patterns of Collective Violence in Indonesia (1990- 2003).” Journal of East Asian Studies 8.3 (2008): 361-394; James Ron, Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003); Mohammed M. Hafez, Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003); Philip Verwimp, “The Pre-Genocide Massacres in Rwanda 1990-1992: A New Interpretation,” Paper Presented at the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence Speaker Series at Yale University, 17 November 2010, in New Haven, CT 152 For example, Ravi Bhavnani, Dan Miodownik, and Hyun Jin Choi, “Three Two Tango: Territorial Control and Selective Violence in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 55.1 (2011): 133-158; Jason Lyall, “Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks? Evidence from Chechnya,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53.3 (2009): 331-362; John B. Dunlop, “How Many Soldiers and Civilians Died during the Russo-Chechen War of 1994-1996?” Central Asian Survey 19.3/4 (2000): 328-338; Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, “War-related Deaths in the 1992-1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results,” European Journal of Population 21 (2005): 187-215; Jorge A. Restrepo, Michael Spagat, and Juan F. Vargas, “The Dynamics of the Colombian Civil Conflict: A New Data Set;” Homo Oeconomicus 21.2 (2004): 396-428; Malcolm Sutton, Bear in Mind These Dead: An Index of Deaths from the Conflict in Ireland, 1969-1993, Belfast, UK: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1994. 153 Jessica N. Trisko, “Coping with the Islamist Threat: Analysing Repression in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan,” Central Asian Survey 24.4 (2005): 373-389; Kenneth P. Serbin, “The Anatomy of a Death: Repression, Human Rights and the Case of Alexandre Vannucchi Leme in Authoritarian Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30.1 (1998): 1-33. 154 Intentionality is a key part of the definition of state coercion I employ. Whether violence against civilians is accepted as part of the security forces standard operating procedure or whether it occurs in exceptional circumstances, the intention to use force against civilians must be present. In the case of state violence, force must be intended to cause severe bodily harm. In the case of repression, state agents display the intention to control the civilian population through fear or other means. While deaths may occur, for example through the use of methods such as torture, the intent of repressive acts is not to cause death per se. Notably, this definition neglects indirect civilian deaths that may be caused by government policies, such as those which lead to food shortages, the inaccessibility of healthcare, etc. as well as casualties inflicted as collateral damage.
67 violence against civilians, summarised in Table A3.1. In the discussion that follows, I pay particular attention to distinguishing coercive state actions according to their severity. I highlight the conceptual and practical distinction between those actions intended to cause civilian deaths and those which are intended to control the population through fear and intimidation because I see this as an important line dividing state violence from repression.
Mass Killings
The most explicit, and controversial, way to study state violence has been to focus on episodes of state or state-sponsored violence that occur on a massive scale. Whether termed genocides, politicides, democides, or mass killings, this segment of the literature has sought to explain when and why the state resorts to the murder of large numbers of individuals who are members of a politically, religiously, ethnically, or racially defined group.
Scholars pursuing the comparative study of genocide have recently expanded this growing area of study. 155 Seeing many similarities between genocide, defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” and mass political killings by authoritarian regimes, scholars such as Barbara Harff and Rudolph J. Rummel have brought together the study of these two phenomena. The term ‘mass killings’ has been adopted as a de-politicised concept for high intensity episodes of
155 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
68 violence by government actors or loosely affiliated groups. The definition of genocides and politicides reflects this underlying concept:
Genocides and politicides are the promotion, execution and/or
implied consent of sustained policies by governing elites or their
agents—or in the case of civil war, either of the contending
authorities—that are intended to destroy, in whole or part, a
communal, political or politicized ethnic group.”156
The role of intentional actions by state agents are emphasised by Harff and her co- researchers, Ted Gurr and Monty Marshall, who use the duration of mass killing episodes as a measure of intent, arguing that “any persistent, coherent pattern of action by the state and its agents, or by a dominant social group, that brings about the destruction of a people's existence, in whole or in part, within the effective territorial control of a ruling authority is prima facie evidence of that state, or other, authority’s responsibility.”157 However, diversity in the scope, duration, and victims of mass killings has led to substantial internal divisions in this field between those recording the history and victims of episodes of mass killing as part of memorialisation and those who emphasise cross-national comparisons in order to better understand how mass killings can be prevented.158
156 Italics in original. Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?” 157 Monty G. Marshall, Ted Robert Gurr, and Barbara Harff, “Internal Wars and Failures of Governance, 1955-2008,” Political Instability (formerly, State Failure) Task Force (PITF), data set, 2009, accessed 25 April 2012, http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/pitfcode.htm. 158 Jessica N. Trisko and Izabela Steflja, “Counting Bodies, Counting Lives: What We Learn from Documenting Civilian Casualties in Times of War,” Paper presented at the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence Speaker Series at Yale University, 28 September 2011, in New Haven, CT; Herbert Hirsch, Genocide and the Politics of Memory: Studying Death to Preserve Life, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995; Scott Straus, “The Promise and Limits of Comparison: Rwanda and the Holocaust,” Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, 3rd ed., ed. Alan Rosenbaum, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009. 245-257; Scott
69 Other challenges arise from the difficulty of combining existing datasets on mass killings based on discrepancies in the underlying unit of analysis.159
These discrepancies are heightened by divergence in the estimated number of fatalities for specific episodes. For example, Wayman and Tago note the lack of overlap between Rummel’s and Harff’s datasets which cover the periods of 1900-
1987 and 1955-2009 respectively.160 Only eight episodes of mass killing are coded with the same onset and end years in these datasets. Other examples include Easterly et al. who compile a list of 163 mass killing episodes in 71 countries throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.161 Their list includes episodes of communal violence as well as state-led violence against civilians. While Easterly et al.’s work is useful in identifying particular episodes of mass killing, it fails to list high-profile cases of state violence, such as the 1989 violence against student protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and excludes pivotal cases such as
Cambodia, Poland, Yugoslavia and Rwanda from analysis due to missing data.
The lower bound of their concept of mass killing is also unclear.162
Straus, “Second-Generation Comparative Research on Genocide,” World Politics 59.3 (2007): 476-501. 159 Benjamin Valentino, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-Lindsay, “‘Draining the Sea:’ Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare,” International Organization 58 (2004): 375-407; Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?” 160 Frank W. Wayman and Atsushi Tago, “Explaining the Onset of Mass Killing, 1949-87,” Journal of Peace Research 47.1 (2010): 3-13. 161 Easterly, Gatti, and Kurlat, “Development, Democracy and Mass Killings.” 162 By lower bound, I refer to the number of deaths necessary for an episode of state violence to qualify as a mass killing. At one point, the authors exclude episodes with fewer than 200 and 500 victims. An example of episodes that get dropped as a result include the 210 Ba’hai killed in Iran between 1979-1984 and the 171 Israelis killed in the West Bank and Gazaas a result of the First Intifada (1987-1994). There also appears to be significant conceptual slippage in the list of Mass Killing Episodes they employ, with the inclusion of 17 deaths from the expulsion of Mormon communities from the state of Missouri in the 1830s.
70 Due to the absence of annual fatality estimates and indeed estimates for all episodes, Easterly et al. aggregate fatalities by the decade.163 In Krain’s study of the role of ‘big opportunities’ in enabling “the massive effort required to kill thousands or millions of one’s own population,” he employs the initial Harff and
Gurr data on genocides and politicides for the period of 1948 to 1982 but aggregates the entire 35 year period of study due to the absence of precise annual data.164 Using similar data, Valentino et al. set a lower bound of 50,000 fatalities incurred over a period of less than five years and identify 31 episodes of mass killing during wartime for the period 1945-2000. 165 Alternatively, Querido employs a limit of 1,000 or more civilians killed in the course of combat during an intrastate conflict.166
Many of the challenges faced in the quantitative study of political violence stem from the fact that accurate estimates of civilian deaths are inherently linked to our ability to identify mass killings while they are on going. Empirically, coping with the magnitude of mass killing episodes is difficult. Statistical results can be driven by a few extreme cases, such as the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, and the omission of one or more of these cases can dramatically affect the results. Such decisions have theoretical as well as econometric implications.
163 Easterly, Gatti, and Kurlat, “Development, Democracy and Mass Killings.” 164 Matthew Krain, “State-Sponsored Mass Murder: The Onset and Severity of Genocides and Politicides,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41.3 (1997): 334; Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, “Systematic Early Warning of Humanitarian Emergencies,” Journal of Peace Research 35.5 (1998): 551-579. 165 Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay, “‘Draining the Sea.’” See also Joan M. Esteban, Massimo Morelli, and Dominic Rohner, “Strategic Mass Killings,” Paper presented at the Leitner Political Economy Seminar, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 11 October 2010. 166 Chyanda M. Querido, “State-Sponsored Mass Killing in African Wars—Greed or Grievance?” International Advances in Economic Research 15.3 (2009): 351-361.
71 Theoretically, they raise the question of how many people must die in a particular time and place for it to qualify as a mass killing episode.
Such questions are also inextricably tied to the value individuals and the international community attach to concepts such as ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide.’
Differentiating between mass killings and genocides is particularly problematic in this respect. Recent debates regarding violence in the Darfur region of the
Democratic Republic of Condo have centred on whether the use of the ‘G’ word is appropriate.167 While the use of such terminology is deeply related to the international community’s ability to ‘name and shame’ state perpetrators of human rights abuses, precisely defining when killing becomes genocide remains difficult.168 For example, Philip Verwimp and others have demonstrated that episodes of mass killing preceded the Rwandan genocide.169 Others stress that the uniqueness of genocide and politicide as phenomena require that they be distinguished from other forms of state coercion. The key distinction then becomes the motivations of the actors involved. While all forms of state coercion are driven by strategic motivations, “in cases of state terror authorities arrest, persecute or execute a few members of a group in ways designed to terrorize the majority of the group into passivity or acquiescence. In the case of genocide and
167 Eric A. Heinze, “The Rhetoric of Genocide in US Foreign Policy: Rwanda and Darfur Compared,” Political Science Quarterly 122.3 (2007): 359-383; Scott Straus, “Darfur and the Genocide Debate,” Foreign Affairs 84.1 (2005): 123-133. 168 James H. Lebovic and Erik Voeten, “The Politics of Shame: The Condemnation of Country Human Rights Practices in the UNCHR,” International Studies Quarterly 50 (2006): 861-888; James C. Franklin, (2008) “Shame on You: The Impact of Human Rights Criticism on Political Repression in Latin America,” International Studies Quarterly 52 (2008): 187-211; James H. Lebovic and Erik Voeten, “The Cost of Shame: International Organizations and Foreign Aid in the Punishing of Human Rights Violators,” Journal of Peace Research 46.1 (2009): 79-97. 169 Verwimp, “The pre-genocide massacres in Rwanda”; Tom Bundervoet, “Livestock, Land and Political Power: The 1993 Killings in Burundi,” Journal of Peace Research 46 (2009): 357-376.
72 politicide authorities physically exterminate enough (not necessarily all) members of a target group so that it can no longer pose any conceivable threat to their rule or interests.”170
Debates about how best to classify, measure and analyse mass killings are unlikely to be resolved in the near future, yet the phenomenon of state-led murder on a massive scale continues to occur. I address genocide and mass killing in this study by employing the most recent data from the Political Instability Task
Force’s GenoPoliticides dataset, not only because it spans the entire period of interest but also because it has conveniently been converted into annual observations. While precise fatality estimates for individual countries are still not available, the GenoPoliticides dataset reports a ‘death magnitude’ scale of the annual number of deaths ranging from a lower bound of less than 300 to an upper bound of 256,000 or more.171 This particular measure overcomes some of the limitations of poorly estimated body counts while still providing an important indicator of the intensity of mass killing within a country in a given year. I recode the data into a binary genocide indicator, coded as 1 when 4000 or more fatalities occur in a particular year. Additionally, I use a binary mass killing indicator that combines several data sources on civilian fatalities and adopt Querido’s threshold of 1,000 deaths in a given year.172
170 Monty G. Marshall, Ted Gurr, and Barbara Harff, PITF Problem Set Codebook, data set, Arlington, VA: Center for Global Policy, 2009, accessed 8 August 2012, http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/political-instability-task-force-home/pitf-problem-set-codebook/. 171 Marshall, Gurr, and Harff, “Internal Wars and Failures of Governance.” 172 Querido, “State-Sponsored Mass Killing in African Wars.”
73 State Violence
A more inclusive approach to the study of state coercion has been to examine smaller-scale events and the day-to-day operation of state violence, while also accounting for exceptional episodes of mass killing. An expansive view of state violence is encapsulated in Rummel’s concept of democides:
The intentional government killing of an unarmed person or
people: because of their religion, race, language, ethnicity, national
origin, class, politics, speech, actions construed as opposing the
government or wrecking social policy, or by virtue of their
relationship to such people; in order to fulfill a quota or requisition
system; in furtherance of a system of forced labor or
enslavement; by massacre; through imposition of lethal living
conditions; [and/or] by directly targeting noncombatants during a
war or violent conflict.173
Shorthanded to ‘death by government,’ the specific acts by which such deaths may occur include: “deadly prison, concentration camp, forced labor, prisoner of war, or recruit camp conditions; medical or scientific experiments on humans; torture or beatings; murder, or rape, looting, and pillage during which people are killed; a famine or epidemic during which government authorities withhold aid, or knowingly act in a way to make it more deadly; forced deportations and expulsions causing deaths.”174
173 Rudolph J. Rummel, Death by Government, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994, 36-38. 174 Rummel, Death by Government, 37.
74 While highly inclusive, this definition encompasses a number of policies and conditions that indirectly lead to civilian deaths. Because such action or inaction is largely unobservable, it is difficult to grapple with empirically.
Furthermore, there may indeed be a fine line between ‘deadly’ and non-lethal conditions and assessing intentionality in such contexts poses a major challenge.
By labelling all acts, policies, or institutions that lead to civilian deaths and can be attributed to the state or state actors as ‘death by government,’ Rummel’s proposed definition of state violence lacks a necessary degree of conceptual clarity.
Alternatively, I define state violence as the direct and intentional use of armed force against civilians by a government or formally organized and government-affiliated group that results in civilian fatalities. To operationalize this definition, I draw largely on the UCDP One-Sided Violence Dataset (1989-
2009).175 One-sided violence is defined as the intentional and direct killing of civilians as a result of armed force. This dataset is based on over 350,000 news reports from a variety of news agencies that were individually coded into an events dataset and subsequently aggregated into annual measures. For a country to be included in this dataset, 25 or more state-caused civilian fatalities must have occurred in a given year.176 Along with the UCDP data, I employ Schrodt’s
175 Kristine Eck and Lisa Hultman, “One-Sided Violence against Civilians in War: Insights from New Fatality Data,” Journal of Peace Research 44.2 (2007): 233-246. 176 Rummel imposes no such limit, stating that “even one person reportedly murdered by a government” should be included in his definition of democide. See, Rummel, Death by Government, 286.
75 Political Instability Task Force Worldwide Atrocities Dataset to generate a comprehensive estimate of the number of state-caused civilian fatalities.177
To create a binary state violence indicator, which covers all country-years in which state-caused fatalities occurred, I use data from Marshall, Gurr and
Harff’s Internal Wars and Failures of Governance (1955-2008) dataset, the UCDP
One-Sided Violence Dataset and the Atrocities Dataset.178 To specifically capture higher levels of state violence, the binary state killing indicator is coded for all years where annual civilian fatalities were more than 300 according to the above data sources. Together, these measures allow me to capture the nuances of state violence across countries and over time.
Repression
Repression is defined here as coercive acts undertaken by state agents with the intention of controlling behaviour through means short of intentionally causing deaths. While the existing data on state violence against civilians has been strongly influenced by those studying civil wars, quantitative data has been used in the study of government repression and human rights violations throughout the past three decades. This research has led to a consensus regarding the importance of democratic political institutions in mitigating the pressures that lead to government repression in the face of popular opposition. Due in part to this emphasis on democratic political institutions and the associated norms of
177 Philip Schrodt, Political Instability Task Force Worldwide Atrocities Dataset, data set, 2009, accessed 28 April 2011, http://web.ku.edu/~keds/data.dir/atrocities.html. 178 Marshall, Gurr, and Harff, “Internal Wars and Failures of Governance”; Eck and Hultman, “One-Sided Violence Against Civilians in War.”
76 inclusion and accountability, the empirical literature has tended to define repression as the direct violation by the state of its citizens’ physical (or personal) integrity rights, which are a subset of human rights affirmed in the 1948 UN
Declaration of Human Rights. This notion of ‘rights repression’ typically focuses on multiple forms of coercive state behaviour including the use of beatings, torture, mass arrests, disappearances and summary executions,179 while the extent to which these behaviours are prevalent or generalized throughout society is also an important consideration.180 The two main datasets on rights repression follow a similar approach to data generation, although they differ in a number of important respects.181
The Political Terror Scale (PTS, 1976-2009) seeks to capture the scope, intensity and range of repression carried out by the state in a given year.182 PTS provides a country-year rating of individual countries on an indexed scale of 1 to
5, which accounts for the level of political violence and terror perpetrated by the state. The measure is produced through a coding of the qualitative evidence provided in the U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights
Practices and annual reports from Amnesty International (AI). By using multiple sources of data in the index, the risk of bias and event selectivity is reduced.
However, given the institutional priorities of the State Department, important biases may exist in the original data sources, particularly for the Cold War period.
179 David L. Cingranelli and David L. Richards, “The Cingranelli and Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project,” Human Rights Quarterly 32.2 (2010): 401-424. 180 Mark Gibney, Linda Cornett, and Reed Wood, The Political Terror Scale, 1976-2010, data set, 2010, accessed 28 January 2012, http://www.politicalterrorscale.org. 181 See Reed M. Wood and Mark Gibney, “The Political Terror Scale (PTS): A Re-introduction and a Comparison to CIRI,” Human Rights Quarterly 32 (2010): 367-400. 182 Gibney, Cornett, and Wood, The Political Terror Scale.
77 I employ the AI-based PTS data, and supplement it with the State Department data when no AI measure is available.
The literature has increasingly emphasized the need to disaggregate repression.183 One prominent example is research done by Oona Hathaway, who produced a 5-point scale rating countries according to their torture practices as described in the U.S. Department of State reports for the period of 1985 to
1999.184 The Ill-Treatment & Torture (ITT) Data Project employs a similar 5- point scale but uses AI as their data source and focuses specifically on practices that are alleged to be employed nationwide.185 I examine torture as a specific repression behaviour and employ a binary indicator based on data from Hathaway and the Cingranelli-Richard Human Rights Dataset due to ITT’s inclusion of unsubstantiated allegations.186
Table 3.1: State Coercion Indicators
Variable Description Coding Genocide Binary variable indicating 4000 or more state-caused 0 – 1 fatalities in a given country-year Mass Killing Binary variable indicating 1000 or more state-caused 0 – 1 fatalities in a given country-year State Killings Binary variable indicating 300 or more state-caused 0 – 1 civilian fatalities in a given country-year State Violence Binary variable indicating 25 or more state-caused 0 – 1 fatalities in a given country-year Repression Ordinal variable indicating the extent of human rights 0 – 4 violations in a given country-year Torture Binary variable indicating allegations of torture in a 0 – 1 given country-year
183McCormick and Mitchell, “Human Rights Violations, Umbrella Concepts, and Empirical Analysis.” 184 Oona A. Hathaway, “Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?” The Yale Law Journal 111.8 (2002): 1935-2042. 185 Courtenay R. Conrad and Will H. Moore, “Country-Year (CY) Level of Torture Data,” The Ill- Treatment & Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project, data set, 2011, accessed 28 January 2012, http://www.politicalscience.uncc.edu/cconra16/UNCC/Data.html. 186 Cingranelli and Richards, “The Cingranelli and Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project.”
78
All of the state coercion measures I employ in the subsequent analyses are described in Table 3.1. Summary statistics are available in Table A3.2 in the appendix to this chapter.
Biases in State Coercion Measures
An important concern with many of the measures discussed above is the possibility of an underlying bias in reporting on state violence and repression.
This bias may stem from a number of factors. First, as Easterly et al. note,
“societies that are more democratic, and thus have freedom of speech and press, are more likely to record any episodes of mass killings, while authoritarian regimes may keep mass killings a secret from the history books.”187 Rummel echoes this stating that, “as a practical matter governments keep their murders secret and it is only when people are killed in the dozens and sometimes not until in the thousands that this democide leaks out to foreign journalists, governments, and human rights groups.”188 Clearly, issues of access to information plague the documentation of episodes of state coercion. In the analysis presented here, this issue is alleviated somewhat by my focus on the period from 1976 onward when international reporting and the monitoring of human rights practices became increasingly prevalent. Nevertheless, systematic differences in both media and
U.S. government reporting exist across the Cold War and post-Cold War periods.
187 Easterly, Gatti, and Kurlat, “Development, Democracy and Mass Killings,” 8. 188 Rudolph J. Rummel, Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998, 268.
79 Research has demonstrated that there was a systematic downward bias in
U.S. human rights reporting during the Cold War for countries that were politically allied with the United States, as opposed to the Soviet Union, in the
UN General Assembly.189 Comments from the State Department strongly suggest that initial human rights reports provided to Congress were “designed to have as little disruptive effect as possible on our bilateral relations (given the problem), while at the same time being responsive to the new legislation,” which required this reporting to justify U.S. security assistance.190 Further work on this issue found similar patterns of bias in major U.S. newspaper reports.191 The findings suggest that AI may be less subject to such biases, which lends support to using data derived from AI reports.
Second, the occurrence of conflict in a country, be it inter- or intrastate, may also bias reporting on state coercion. It possible that state actions against civilians in countries experiencing civil war will be reported to a much greater extent than coercion that takes place in the absence of broader conflict, thanks in part to the increased presence of international reporters and other monitors. In the
UCDP dataset, Eck and Hultman find that less than one percent of reported fatalities occur in countries that were not engaged in armed conflict,192 but this finding is likely to be strongly influenced by the additional media attention paid to countries at war. This media bias, combined with restricted access to many non-
189 Nancy Qian and David Yanagizawa-Drott, “The Strategic Determinants of US Human Rights Reporting: Evidence from the Cold War,” Journal of the European Economic Association, Papers & Proceedings 8.2-3 (2009): 446-45. 190 “STATE 233405.” 21 September 1976. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park. 191 Qian and Yanagizawa-Drott, “Watchdog or Lapdog?” 192 Eck and Hultman, “One-Sided Violence against Civilians in War,” 237.
80 democratic regimes, has led to a disproportionate amount of attention being devoted to studies of civilian deaths in the context of civil war, to the detriment of our understanding of state violence against civilians in non-conflict situations.
Third, geography and other day-to-day issues of access may also affect reporting on state coercion. Since media reports typically provide snapshots of particular locales, there is likely to be an underreporting of coercive acts that occur outside of the capital or in relatively less accessible areas. Reporting may also be strongly influenced by geographic or cultural proximity to international media centres. Recent research suggests that Western media reporting on rights violations varies non-randomly as a function of the networks produced by the international human rights movement. Furthermore, empirical support has been found for the hitherto anecdotal claim that Western elites perceive similar events differently across world regions. 193 Such differences are compounded by linguistic and cultural differences that impede access to local reporting.194
Despite the issues associated with media-based measures of state coercion, other data generation methods face even stronger challenges. Attempts to forensically account for individual deaths have been understandably limited to specific countries and years, often as part of international criminal tribunals or other accountability mechanisms.195 Getting accurate assessments of the extent or
193 Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, “Right or Robust? The Sensitive Nature of Repression to Globalization,” Journal of Peace Research 42.6 (2005): 679-698. 194 Emilie M. Hafner-Burton and James Ron, “The Latin Bias: Regions, the Western Media and Human Rights,” Division de Estudios Internacionales Numero 221, Mexico: Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, 2011. 195 See, for example, Tabeau and Bijak, “War-related Deaths in the 1992-1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina”; Lara J. Nettlefield, “Research and Repercussions of Death Tolls: The Case of the Bosnian Book of the Dead,” Sex, Drugs and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in
81 severity of state coercion is particularly difficult in countries where the leaders sanctioning state violence remain in power. However, the insights gained from a cross-national analysis of state coercion, even with the limitations posed by the existing data, greatly outweigh the costs of limiting my analysis to episodes of state coercion that have individual-level verification. The binary measures that I employ in this study are blunt instruments, but ones that nonetheless have real world meaning.
The International Determinants of State Coercion
This study examines international influences, and in particular the role of foreign aid, as determinants of state coercion. The theory presented in the previous chapter posits that the receipt of foreign economic and/or military aid affects subsequent state behaviour through coercion or cooption effects, which depend on how foreign aid revenues are channelled into the recipient state’s capacity. I examine foreign aid as an input into a causal chain leading to state coercion. Figure 3.1 provides a representation of how different domestic and international factors may affect this causal chain.
Global Crime and Conflict, ed. Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. 159-187.
82 Figure 3.1: Expanded Causal Model for Empirical Testing
Operating as system shocks, the end of the Cold War and 9/11 may have affected the level of state coercion in aid recipient countries by altering the global distribution of foreign aid. At the state-level, the domestic determinants of state coercion, including a country’s regime type, political institutions, conflict history and access to alternative non-tax resources, may influence how foreign aid resources are distributed between the state’s coercive and service capacities.
These factors, combined with other international determinants of state coercion, may affect the degree to which foreign aid is used to build the coercive capacity of the state. While certain domestic characteristics may facilitate the fungibility of aid into coercion, international factors that expose states to greater international oversight, such as the presence of U.S. troops, may mitigate the coercive effect of foreign aid. Together, all of these influences potentially affect the causal chain linking foreign aid and state coercion by altering the relative availability of resources that the state can dedicate to its coercive capacity. In the following sections, I first outline the international influences on state coercion and then discuss state-level variables.
83 United States Bilateral Foreign Aid: Economic and Military
To account for variation in coercive state behaviour over time, I turn to
U.S. bilateral foreign aid as the key explanatory variable. The substantial literature on the allocation of U.S. foreign aid has provided important insights into variation in the significance of human rights in U.S. foreign policy over time and particularly across different presidential administrations.196 As the process behind the allocation of U.S. foreign aid has been studied extensively elsewhere197 and is beyond the scope of the current study, I leave aside the question of the determinants of U.S. foreign aid allocations. I instead employ variation in the distribution of aid as a potential explanation for changes in the level of state coercion in aid recipient countries.
To assess the effect of foreign aid on state coercion, I utilize three measures of foreign aid commitments: 1) total annual U.S. bilateral foreign aid; 2)
U.S. bilateral military aid; and 3) U.S. bilateral economic aid to each country in a given year. Total annual foreign aid is the sum of all forms of bilateral assistance provided by the United States to a particular country as reported in the United
196 See, for example, Eric Neumayer, “Do International Human Rights Treaties Improve Respect for Human Rights?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49.6 (2005): 925-953; Clair Apodaca and Michael Stohl, “United States Human Rights Policy and Foreign Assistance,” International Studies Quarterly 43.1 (1999): 185-198; James Meernik, Erik L. Krueger, and Steven C. Poe, “Testing Models of US Foreign Policy: Foreign Aid During and After the Cold War,” The Journal of Politics 60.1 (1998): 63-85; Patrick M. Regan, “US Economic Aid and Political Repression: An Empirical Evaluation of US Foreign Policy,” Political Research Quarterly 48.3 (1995): 613-628; David L. Cingranelli and Thomas E. Pasquarello, “Human Rights Practices and the Distribution of US Foreign Aid to Latin American Countries,” American Journal of Political Science 29.3 (1985): 539-563. 197 Robert K. Fleck and Christopher Kilby, “Changing aid regimes? US foreign aid from the Cold War to the War on Terror,” Journal of Development Economics 91.2 (2010): 185-197; Alberto Alesina and David Dollar, “Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why?” Journal of Economic Growth 5 (2000): 33-63; David Dollar and Victoria Levin, “The Increasing Selectivity of Foreign Aid, 1984-2003,” World Development 34.12 (2006): 2034-2046; Helen V. Milner and Dustin H. Tingley, “The Political Economy of US Foreign Aid: American Legislators and the Domestic Politics of Aid,” Economics & Politics 22 (2010): 200-232.
84 States Overseas Loans & Grants Greenbook and provided in constant (2009) U.S. dollars.198 By employing total aid, I in effect assume full fungibility between different forms of aid. I then disaggregate foreign aid to assess whether the type of aid given affects state coercion differently.
While some research has examined the independent effects of U.S. military aid on political violence,199 there has been little effort to assess the effects of military aid cross-nationally. Indeed, most studies of military aid focus on
Latin American countries and exceptional cases such as Israel.200 Foreign military aid given by the United States is largely divided into two categories: foreign military financing (FMF) and international military education and training
(IMET). FMF is direct support for recipient countries’ militaries by providing the financial resources necessary to support military spending and arms acquisitions.
IMET, on the other hand, is seen as strengthening military-to-military ties and civil-military relations. The IMET objectives include the professionalization of
198 United States Agency for International Development (USAID). US Overseas Loans and Grants: Obligations and Loan Authorizations, July 1, 1945-September 30, 2010. Washington, DC: USAID, 2011. Aid allocations are logged in order to correct for the skewed distribution. 1 is added to the total amount of aid to avoid losing zeros as observations. 199 Oeindrila Dube and Suresh Naidu, “Bases, Bullets and Ballots: The Effect of US Military Aid on Political Conflict in Colombia,” Paper presented at the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence Speaker Series at Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2012; Steven C. Poe, “Human Rights and the Allocation of US Military Assistance,” Journal of Peace Research 28.2 (1991): 205-216; Edward T. Rowe, “Aid and Coups d’Etat: Aspect of the Impact of American Military Assistance Programs in the Less Developed Countries,” International Studies Quarterly 18.2 (1974): 239-255. 200 Dube and Naidu, “Bases, Bullets and Ballots”; James M. McCormick and Neil Mitchell, “Is US Aid Really Linked to Human Rights in Latin America?” American Journal of Political Science 32.1 (1988): 231-239; John M. Baines, “US Military Assistance to Latin America: An Assessment,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 14.4 (1972), 469-487.
85 national militaries. 201 Other Department of Defence assistance includes humanitarian relief.
Economic aid, like military aid, is an aggregate measure consisting of various forms of assistance categorised according to its providers. The United
States Agency for International Development (USAID) provides development assistance and funds numerous other initiatives including economic support funds, which are direct budgetary support. 202 State Department funding supports a variety of initiatives including: global health and child survival; the global
HIV/AIDS initiative; narcotics control; migration and refugee assistance; the national endowment for democracy and the democracy fund; and, non- proliferation and terrorism related programs. The Department of Agriculture largely funds PL-480 food aid programs in addition to other health and agricultural services. Other economic assistance programs include funding for the
National Endowment for Democracy, the Millennium Challenge Corporation
(beginning in 2004) and the Peace Corps, among others.203
Other International Influences
While changes in the amount of foreign aid provided to countries should directly affect the level of coercion governments are able to employ in subsequent
201 Curt Tarnoff and Marian Leonardo Lawson, “Foreign Aid: An Introduction to US Programs and Policy,” CRS Report for Congress R40213, Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2009. These two categories of military aid may affect state coercion differently. In theory, FMF should be positively associated with state coercion due to its role in building the state’s threat capacity and its fungibility. However, the effect of IMET could potentially go in either direction. Military professionalization may make the use of force against civilians less likely or it may make the military more efficient in its use of force. 202 USAID, US Overseas Loans and Grants. 203 Ibid.
86 years, to properly assess the impact of foreign aid on state coercion it is necessary to account for potentially competing international influences. These factors may work in the same direction as foreign aid by increasing the availability of resources for the state to devote to its threat capacity or they may potentially mitigate the coercive effects of aid.
U.S. Troops. Basing agreements are often built upon alliance ties forged in the heat of warfare and the aftermath of war. The presence of U.S. troops is typically seen as a stabilizing factor preventing the outbreak of hostilities in places such as the Korean peninsula or the Persian Gulf. The presence of U.S. troops in aid recipient countries may also work against the use of state coercion through their role in military professionalization and as independent observers.204
U.S. troops have previously been identified as a potential influence on human rights violations, with specifications utilizing a binary measure identifying countries with at least 100 U.S. troops present.205 In this study, I use the natural logarithm of the number of U.S. military personnel stationed in a given country based on data obtained from the U.S. Department of Defense.206
Interstate War. A country’s participation in an interstate war likely conditions the effect of foreign aid on state coercion due to the increasing
204 One potential confounder in this relationship is when US troops are stationed in a country because they are actively engaged in combat. For the period under investigation, 1976-2009, I address this issue by excluding Afghanistan and Iraq from the analyses conducted in the next chapter as a robustness check on the obtained results. 205 See, Shannon L. Blanton, “Promoting Human Rights and Democracy in the Developing World: US Rhetoric versus US Arms Exports,” American Journal of Political Science 44.1 (2000): 123- 131; Meernik, Krueger, and Poe, “Testing Models of US Foreign Policy.” 206 United States Department of Defense. Active Duty Military Personnel by Service by Region/Country, 2003-2008. Washington, DC: Department of Defense Statistical Information Analysis Division, 2010; Tim Kane, Global US Troop Deployment, 1950-2003. Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 2004.
87 militarization of governance and need for social stability during periods of external conflict. Militarized interstate disputes have been found to be a significant cause of human rights abuses. 207 I control for the potential confounding relationship between interstate war and state coercion by including a binary interstate war variable based on the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict
Dataset.208
The Domestic Determinants of State Coercion
The domestic characteristics of a state have been proven to influence its conflict propensity. In addition, they may influence the degree to which foreign aid will be devoted to building the state’s coercive capacity. In this study, I focus on three distinct country-level characteristics: regime type and political institutions, state strength and reach, and internal conflict history.
Regime Type and Political Institutions
Anocracy. To take into account the findings of the ‘domestic democratic peace’ literature, I utilize the Polity IV dataset, which measures the authority characteristics of a country. Rather than employ the Polity2 measure, which has typically been used in either a linear or quadratic form,209 I generate a binary
207 Steven C. Poe and C. Neal Tate, “Repression of Human Rights to Personal Integrity in the 1980s: A Global Analysis,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 853-900; Poe, Tate, and Keith, “Repression of the Human Right to Personal Integrity Revisited.” 208 Kristian Skrede Gleditsch and Andrea Ruggieri, “Political Opportunity Structures, Democracy, and Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research 47.3 (2010): 299-310. 209 See Gleditsch and Ruggieri, “Political Opportunity Structures, Democracy, and Civil War”; Cullen S. Hendrix, “Measuring State Capacity: Theoretical and Empirical Implications for the
88 variable indicating anocratic regimes types which lie between consolidated democracies and consolidated autocracies.210 I anticipate a positive relationship between state coercion and anocratic regimes because such regimes typically lack the appropriate institutions for dealing with dissent as an accepted part of the political process and at the same time do not have the highly institutionalized forms of repression or state terror associated with autocracies.
Dictatorship. Based on data from the Institutions and Elections Project,211
I employ a binary variable indicating the years in which a country was governed by a dictatorship. A dictator is defined as, “someone who rules without the normal set of political constraints and whose support and continued rule is guaranteed by coercion, either the actual resort to force or the threat to do so.”212 The presence of a dictator is included in the analysis as an important factor facilitating the likelihood of coercion because of the potential absence of constraints on the exercise of a dictator’s control over the armed forces and the political system.
Study of Civil Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 47.3 (2010): 273-285; James Raymond Vreeland, “The Effect of Political Regime on Civil War: Unpacking Anocracy,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52.3 (2008): 401-425; James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97.1 (2003): 75-90; Håvard Hegre, Tanja Ellingsen, Scott Gates, and Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Towards a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816-1992,” American Political Science Review 95 (2001): 33-48. 210 Hegre et al., “Towards a Democratic Civil Peace?”; Cassady Craft and Joseph P. Smaldone, “The Arms Trade and the Incidence of Political Violence in Sub-saharan Africa, 1967-97,” Journal of Peace Research 39.6 (2002): 693-710; Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratic Transitions, Institutional Strength, and War,” International Organization 56.2 (2002): 297-337; Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005; Vreeland, “The Effect of Political Regime on Civil War.” 211 Jan Teorell, Marcus Samanni, Sören Holmberg, and Bo Rothstein. The Quality of Government Basic Dataset made from the QoG Standard Dataset version 6Apr11. Data set. Gothenburg, Sweden: The Quality of Government Institute, 2011. 212 Teorell et al., The Quality of Government Dataset.
89 State Strength and Reach
Military Personnel. The size of a country’s armed forces, measured in terms of the number of military personnel, is employed as an indicator of the military capacity of the state.213 States that possess a greater coercive capacity may have a greater likelihood of employing coercion. However, this depends to a great extent on whether state leaders are willing and able to turn their security apparatus upon their own populace. Events in Libya, Syria and Bahrain in early
2012 suggest that national militaries can contribute to state violence, while the experience of Egypt during the 2011 Arab Spring demonstrated that the military can be a key actor preventing the direct targeting of civilians by state agents. I employ the natural logarithm of the number of military personnel as reported by the Correlates of War and the World Bank.214
Service Provision. I contend that a country’s service capacity plays an important intervening role in the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion. A strong service capacity may obviate the need for coercion. I employ government consumption expenditure as a percentage of GDP, reported by the
World Bank, as a proxy for service provision. Because this is not a direct measure of service provision and may reflect a distribution of resources that favours the state’s coercive apparatus, I also employ the under-5 mortality rate (per 1,000 births) as a proxy for health service provision as part of a robustness test.215 Infant
213 See Davenport, “The Weight of the Past.” 214 J. David Singer, Stuart Bremer, and John Stuckey, “Capability Distribution, Uncertainty, and Major Power War, 1820-1965,” Peace, War, and Numbers, ed. Bruce Russett, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publishers, 1972, 19-48; World Bank, World Development Indicators, data set, Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2010, accessed 12 November 2010, http://data.worldbank.org/data- catalog/world-development-indicators. 215 Teorell et al., The Quality of Government Dataset.
90 health is a good proxy for the provision of public services to a broad spectrum of society and is typically a development metric examined by international aid donors.216
Rentier State. 217 In addition to foreign assistance and domestic tax revenue, some states accrue high rents from natural resources, such as oil or natural gas, and mineral wealth that contribute to government revenue. 218
Controlling for high rent resources is essential as the ability to access and manipulate these rents, which are not tied to the state’s ability to tax domestically, may lessen a state’s dependence on foreign aid as an external, non-tax resource. I combine four different types of high rent resources including natural resource rents, mineral rents, gas rents, and oil rents into a single binary indicator that is coded as 1 if resource rents exceed 10% of GDP in a particular year.219 The nature of the relationship between higher natural resource revenues and state coercion has been fairly uncertain in prior research.220
216 Nicole Schiegg, “Every Child Deserves a 5th Birthday,” The White House Blog, 23 April 2012, Washington, DC: The White House, 2012, accessed 25 April 2012, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/04/23/every-child-deserves-5th-birthday. 217 I use the term rentier state to refer to states “where the rents are paid by foreign actors, where they accrue directly to the state, and where ‘only a few are engaged in the generation of this rent (wealth), the majority being only involved in the distribution or utilization of it’.” See Hazem Beblawi, “The Rentier State in the Arab World,” The Rentier State, eds. Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, New York: Croom Helm, 1987, 51, cited in Michael Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?” World Politics 53 (2001): 329. 218 Less traditional definitions of high rent resources would also include commodities such as narcotics, provided that the state is able to produce or levy a tax on the production of these commodities. 219 World Bank, World Development Indicators. 220 Matthias Basedau and Jann Lay. “Resource Curse or Rentier Peace? The Ambiguous Effects of Oil Wealth and Oil Dependence on Violent Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 46.6 (2009): 757-776.
91 Internal Conflict History
Prior experience of domestic conflict may affect the propensity of the state to resort to coercion while concurrently shaping the training, readiness and size of the country’s armed forces and in particular their ability to execute internal security operations.
Civil War. When faced with internal challenges such as an insurgency or secessionist movement, a government may employ coercion to suppress support for the opposition. Internal conflict may therefore act as an independent influence on the level of repression or it may intervene in the relationship between aid and repression. To test for the potential relationship between civil war and state coercion, I employ a binary variable based on the internal armed conflict and the internationalized internal armed conflict variables of the UCDP/PRIO Armed
Conflict Dataset both as an independent variable and as an interaction term.221
Previous State Coercion. Many scholars have emphasized path dependence in state coercion as successful uses of violence by the state to seize or maintain power often result in the establishment of agencies and practices that rely on coercion.222 Controlling for previous levels of state coercion is essential because “elites and security forces may become habituated to mass killing [or other forms of coercion] as a strategic response to challenges to state security and, also, because targeted groups are rarely destroyed in their entirety.”223 I therefore
221 Nils Petter Gleditsch, Peter Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margareta Sollenberg, and Håvard Strand, “Armed Conflict 1946-2001: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 39.5 (2002): 615-637. 222 Krain, “State-Sponsored Mass Murder.” 223 Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?”
92 include a lagged dependent variable indicating the level of state coercion in the previous year(s) as a robustness test.224
Control Variables
Economic Development. A country’s level of economic development may influence both the amount of foreign aid it receives and other factors affecting the likelihood of state coercion. The best available measure of economic development is GDP per capita which has been identified by Fearon and Latin, among others, as a major influence on a country’s propensity for political violence.225 As a control variable, I employ the natural logarithm of GDP per capita in constant dollars as reported by the World Bank.
Population. I include a variable indicating the natural logarithm of a country’s population, as reported by the World Bank, as a key control. Smaller countries may receive a disproportionate amount of aid per capita.226 Gleditsch
224 Nathaniel Beck, Johnathan N. Katz, and Richard Tucker, “Taking Time Seriously: Time- Series-Cross-Section Analysis with a Binary Dependent Variable,” American Journal of Political Science 42.4 (1998): 1260-1288; Thomas Plumper, Vera E. Troeger, and Philip Manow, “Panel Data Analysis in Comparative Politics: Linking Method to Theory,” European Journal of Political Research 44 (2005): 327-354; but see Christopher Achen, “Why Lagged Dependent Variables Can Suppress the Explanatory Power of the Independent Variables,” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 2000. 225 Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War”; Robert K. Fleck and Christopher Kilby, “Changing Aid Regimes? US Foreign Aid from the Cold War to the War on Terror,” Journal of Development Economics 91.2 (2010): 185-197; Reed M. Wood, “‘A Hand upon the Throat of the Nation:’ Economic Sanctions and State Repression, 1976-2001,” International Studies Quarterly 52 (2008): 489-513; Scott Gates, Havard Hegre, Mark P. Jones, and Havard Strand, “Institutional Inconsistency and Political Instability: Polity Duration, 1800-2000,” American Journal of Political Science 50.4 (2006): 893-908. 226 For examples, see Fleck and Kilby, “Changing Aid Regimes?”; Joseph Wright, “How Foreign Aid Can Foster Democratization in Authoritarian Regimes,” American Journal of Political Science 53.3 (2009): 552-571; Benjamin O. Fordham, “Power or Plenty? Economic Interests, Security Concerns, and American Intervention,” International Studies Quarterly 52 (2008): 737- 758.
93 and Ruggeri provide additional logic for including population by arguing that
“larger countries potentially could be systematically more stable (for example, through a screening effect where weaker states disintegrate over time) or have more opportunities for instability because they have larger or more diverse populations.”227 I anticipate a positive, though potentially spurious, relationship between population size and state coercion.
Cold War. I also take stock of the influence of the Cold War to determine whether the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion differed in this period. While in general I expect the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion to hold throughout the entire period that I examine, the Cold War years may be systematically different due to the nature of superpower competition. The end of the Cold War can be conceptualized as an exogenous shock affecting both international aid flows and international security dynamics.228 To identify the importance of Cold War security dynamics, I employ a binary variable indicating the years 1976 to 1989. I then split the data into the Cold War and post-Cold War periods to assess whether foreign aid had differential effects across these periods.
9/11. An exogenous shock specific to the United States was the events of
September 11, 2001. The ensuing War on Terror provided a justification for the contraction of civil liberties in the United States and worldwide while spurring increased foreign aid allocations to countries partnering with the United States in the War on Terror or which faced their own domestic terrorist challenges. To
227 Gleditsch and Ruggeri, “Political Opportunity Structures, Democracy, and Civil War,” 304. 228 Stathis H.Kalyvas and Laia Balcells, “International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict,” American Political Science Review 104.3 (2010): 415-429.
94 account for these changes in the allocation of U.S. foreign aid, I include various specifications of a 9/11 impact variable. First, I include 9/11 as a short-term effect through a binary variable coded 1 for the year 2002 to capture the immediate effects of policy changes. Second, I explore 9/11 as a mid-term effect including the lead up to and invasion of Iraq by generating a binary variable indicating the years 2002 to 2003.229 Lastly, I examine the events of 9/11 as indicating a structural break from the previous period and code a binary variable indicating
2002 onwards.230
Table 3.2: Independent Variables
Variable Description Coding International Influences Ln(US aid) Continuous variable indicating the logarithm of U.S. 0 - 9.33 foreign aid in millions of constant (2009) dollars Ln(mil aid) Continuous variable indicating the logarithm of U.S. 0 – 8.25 military aid in millions of constant (2009) dollars Ln(econ aid) Continuous variable indicating the logarithm of U.S. 0 – 9.09 economic aid in millions of constant (2009) dollars Ln(US troops) Continuous variable indicating the natural 0 - 12.03 logarithm of number of U.S. troop present in a country Interstate war Binary variable indicating the country’s 0 – 1 involvement in an interstate war Domestic Influences Anocracy Binary variable indicating anocratic regime types 0 – 1 Dictator Binary variable indicating a dictatorship 0 – 1 Ln(armed forces) Continuous variable indicating the natural 0 - 15.24 logarithm of number of military personnel Govt share of GDP Continuous variable indicating government share 1.44 - 83.35 of GDP as a percentage Rentier state Binary variable indicating states where natural 0 – 1 resource rents exceed 10% of GDP Civil war Binary variable indicating the country’s 0 – 1 involvement in a civil war
229 Although Iraq was invaded by the United States in 2003, the data on US foreign aid is provided according to the fiscal year. 230 This is the approach taken by Fleck and Kilby. See, Fleck and Kilby, “Changing Aid Regimes?” 187.
95 Table 3.2 provides a description of the various independent variables used in the subsequent analysis. Summary statistics can be found in Table A3.3 in the appendix to this chapter.
Empirical Strategy
This section discusses the various empirical investigations of the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion that are analysed in the following chapters. Two types of statistical models have typically been estimated in quantitative studies of state coercion. The first is a pooled, time-series cross- sectional ordinary least squares model with panel corrected standard errors to address panel heteroskedasticity.231 This method of estimation assumes that the explanatory variables are time varying for at least some cross-section units and treats the dependent variable of state coercion as linear.232 The second method of estimation typically employed is an ordered probit model which assumes that the assigned values of the dependent variable are discrete and ordered but that there is
231 For example, Poe and Tate, “Repression of Human Rights to Personal Integrity in the 1980s”; Nathaniel Beck and Johnathan N. Katz, “What to Do (and not Do) with Time-Series Cross-Section Data,” American Political Science Review. 89.3 (1995): 634-647; Poe, Tate, and Keith, “Repression of the Human Right to Personal Integrity Revisited”; Christian Davenport and David A. Armstrong, “Democracy and the Violation of Human Rights: A Statistical Analysis from 1976 to 1996,” American Journal of Political Science 48.3 (2004): 538-554. 232 This approach has been critiqued based on the structure of the various repression measures. However, the distribution of these variables approximates a normal distribution and all three variables have been estimated in this manner in respected research. I defend the linear assumption behind OLS for testing the theory developed here. Because greater amounts of foreign aid can be used to purchase more weaponry, train more security forces members and generally increase the supply side of state coercion, the assumption of a linear relationship between foreign aid and state coercion corresponds to the general theoretical framework I employ.
96 a latent continuous metric underlying the ordinal scale which is partitioned into the various ordinal categories by thresholds.233
I take an alternative approach by estimated an ordered logit model. I chose this method of estimation due to the structure of the PTS repression variable, which prohibits the use of a binary logit model. This method of estimation assumes that the categories of response are discrete and ordered: y = 0 if y* ≤ µ1, y = 1 if µ1 < y* ≤ µ2, y = 2 if µ2 < y* ≤ µ3, …, y = N if µN < y* (1)
The odds ratio forms the parameter of interest and is the ratio, given a one-unit increase in the covariate, of the odds of being in a higher rather than a lower category. The odds ratio is calculated as:
Θj = prob(category ≤ j) / (1 – prob((category ≤ j)) (2)
The ordered logit model is therefore estimated as:
Ln(Θj) = β0 + β1x1 + β2x2 + … + βkxk (3)
This model forms my primary method of estimation, with the cut points in the ordered model equivalent to the alpha in a regular logit model.234
233 For example, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, “Right or Robust? The Sensitive Nature of Repression to Globalization,” Journal of Peace Research 42.6 (2005): 679-698; Hafner-Burton, “Right or Robust?”; Wood, “‘A Hand upon the Throat of the Nation.’” 234 An additional approach to estimation has drawn on the growing literature on economic shocks to model changes in foreign aid distributions. See Samuel Bazzi and Christopher Blattman, “Economic Shocks and Conflict: The (Absence of ?) Evidence from Commodity Prices,” Center for Global Development Working Paper 274 Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, 2011; Ibrahim Elbadawi and Håvard Hegre, “Globalization, Economic Shocks, and Armed Conflict,” Defence and Peace Economics 19.1 (2008): 37-60; Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath, and Ernest Sergenti, “Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict: An Instrumental Variables Approach,” Journal of Political Economy 112.4 (2004): 725-753. Nielsen et al. contend that the shifts in power that follow dramatic increases or decreases in foreign aid alter the domestic status quo and can increase the likelihood of internal conflict. While they develop empirical tests for the relationship between foreign aid withdrawal (negative shocks) and conflict—Aid shocks are coded as [(aid/GDPt – aid/GDPt-i) + (aid/GDPt-1 – aid/GDPt-2)]/2—I examine the effect of foreign aid windfalls (positive shocks) on state coercion, which the authors identify as one potential mechanism for states to avoid the outbreak of open conflict. See, Richard A. Nielsen, Michael G. Findley, Zachary S. Davis, Tara Candland, and Daniel L. Nielson, “Foreign Aid Shocks as a Cause of Violent Armed Conflict,” American Journal of Political Science 55.2 (2011): 219-232.
97 In the standard estimation of all models, all independent variables are lagged by one year in consideration of the time lag in budgetary creation and to avoid reverse causality. In addition, I estimate the models with multiple lag structures in consideration of differing potential lagged effects.235 Additional robustness tests are discussed in the next chapter. All operations are conducted using STATA 11.
Case Study Structure
Drawing on the results of the quantitative analyses presented in Chapters 4 and 5, I engage in a case study of Indonesia and use process tracing to explore potential causal mechanisms linking foreign aid and state coercion.236 The case study draws on data from USAID, Indonesian and international human rights reports, U.S. archives, prior analyses of Soviet archives and other secondary material. The case study is designed to assess the degree to which multiple forms of foreign aid contributed to changes in military expenditure, force structure, and/or arms acquisitions in Indonesia. These factors are then assessed in relation to changes in coercive state behavior over time. A rough periodization is utilized to contextualize the analytical narrative. Additional cases are addressed in the concluding chapter of this study to provide further illustration of the multiple
235 See Davenport, “The Weight of the Past,” and Juha Auvinen and E. Wayne Nafziger, “The Sources of Humanitarian Emergencies,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 43.3 (1999): 267-290. 236 Process tracing identifies the intervening causal process connecting the independent and dependent variables through the use of primary and secondary materials and which is used to generate an analytical narrative of the causal relationship; see Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2005.
98 mechanisms underlying the coercive effect of foreign aid that I identify through the case study of Indonesia.
Conclusion
Given the substantial challenges associated with an empirical investigation of the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion, the statistical analyses and case studies which follow attempt to discern patterns in this relationship and to illustrate the potential causal mechanisms linking foreign aid with subsequent changes in the type or level of state coercion in aid recipient countries. While there continues to be progress in our understanding of the causes of civil war, mass killings, and rights repression, this study is a first step towards developing a holistic explanation of how international influences such as foreign aid interact with domestic conditions to affect state coercion.
The benefit of the mixed, quantitative and qualitative, approach taken in this study lies in the ability to ground broad cross-national analyses in a rich case study. The quantitative portion of the study uses data from a broad array of developing countries and covers both an extensive time period and all world regions. However, statistical assessments of this kind are inherently limited. The challenges of missing data, which plague researchers working on developing countries and in particular conflict-prone countries, are prominent in my analyses.
Additionally, clear causal relationships cannot be established through statistical methods that are designed to highlight associational relationships. As a result, any inferences regarding causality must be supported by the case study evidence. By
99 engaging in both types of analysis, this study contributes to our knowledge about international influences on state coercion by highlighting global trends as well as country-specific contexts.
100 Appendix
Table A3.1: Available Quantitative Measures of State Coercion
Concept Dates Definition Limitations Source Mass Killing Geno- 1955- Genocide, as outlined in the Focus is on violence Marshall, politicide 2009 UN Genocide Convention in against groups rather Gurr and addition to the killing of a than individuals: Only Harff political or economic group sustained episodes (2010); provided as a death that last six months or Harff magnitude score for the more are included. (2003) range of annual civilian deaths. Mass Killing 1945- The intentional killing of a Binary variable based Valentino, 2000 massive number of non- on Harff and Gurr Huth and combatants during war and data; Only countries Balch- equalling at least 50,000 experiencing war. Lindsay intentional deaths over the (2004) course of five or fewer years. Mass Killing 1820- The killing of a substantial Limited time period; Easterly et 1998 number of human beings, data not publically al. (2006) when not in the course of available. military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of essential defenselessness and helplessness of the victims. State Violence One-Sided 1989- The intentional and direct Limited time period; Eck and Violence 2008 use of force by the May be subject to Hultman government of a state or by a media reporting (2007). formally organized group biases and against civilians which results overrepresentation of in at least 25 deaths per year. countries experiencing civil war. Democide 1900- The intentionally killing of Limited time period; Rummel 1990(87?) people by government. data not publically (1998) available. State 1945- Deaths through internal Limited time period; Balint Victimization 1996 regime victimization in Only countries (1996) countries experiencing high experiencing war. intensity conflict. Atrocities 1995- The deliberate killing of non- Limited time period; Schrodt 2008 combatant civilians in the Dramatically (2009) context of a wider political underreports events conflict. Battle 1946- Number of direct deaths Explicitly excludes Lacina and Deaths 2008 from violence inflicted one-sided violence Gleditsch through the use of armed but includes civilian (2005). force by a party to an armed casualties of war. conflict during combat.
101 Repression Political 1976- The annual level of political May be subject to Gibney, Terror Scale 2009 violence in a country reporting biases. Cornett measured using a 5-point and Wood scale. (2010) CIRI Human 1981- 9-point scale of state May be subject to Cingranelli Rights Index 2009 violations of physical integrity reporting biases. and rights ranging from 0 to 8 and Richards coded so that higher values (2009) indicate greater repression Torture 1985- 5-point scale of torture which Limited time period; Hathaway 1999 includes a range of may be subject to (2002) behaviours from beatings, reporting biases; may prisoner or detainee abuse, be subject to coder psychological abuse and biases. summary executions. Ill- 1995- 5-point scale of level of Limited time period; (Conrad Treatment 2005 nationwide allegations of restricted to and Moore and Torture torture and ill-treatment nationwide practices. 2011) made by Amnesty International (AI). Complied by the Ill-Treatment & Torture (ITT) Data Project.
Table A3.2: State Coercion Summary Statistics
Variable Obs. Mean Std. Dev. Min Max Genocide 3641 0.032 0.177 0 1 Mass Killing 3641 0.044 0.206 0 1 State Killings 3641 0.058 0.234 0 1 State Violence 3641 0.123 0.328 0 1 Repression 3478 1.844 1.067 0 4 Torture 3002 0.492 0.500 0 1
102 Table A3.3: Summary Statistics of Explanatory and Control Variables
Std. Variable Obs. Mean Dev. Min Max Ln(US aid) 3532 2.931 1.959 0 9.200 Ln(econ aid) 3574 2.773 1.902 0 9.086 Ln(mil aid) 3432 1.030 1.606 0 8.252 Anocracy 3550 0.237 0.425 0 1 Dictator 3567 0.272 0.445 0 1 Ln(armed forces) 3525 3.820 1.668 0 8.466 Govt Share of GDP 3412 19.534 10.471 1.438 83.350 Rentier state 3641 0.296 0.457 0 1 Ln(US troops) 3433 2.526 2.163 0 11.918 Interstate War 3641 0.080 0.271 0 1 Civil War 3641 0.295 0.456 0 1 Ln(GDP) 3631 7.735 1.021 5.044 10.239 Ln(population) 3465 16.048 1.457 13.137 20.988
103 Chapter IV. A Cross-Country Analysis of the Coercive Effects of Foreign Aid, 1976-2005
Introduction
To what degree does bilateral foreign aid, as a source of direct government-to-government financial support to a state, contribute to the occurrence of coercive state behaviour? Anecdotes and allegations abound that leaders have misappropriated development funds in order to ensconce themselves in power through both force and other means. Dictators ranging from the
Philippines’ Marcos to Zaire’s Mobutu received billions of dollars of foreign aid from the United States while engaging in widespread repression and acts of state- led violence. At the same time, foreign aid has increasingly become tied to democratic progress and the respect for civil and political liberties in countries selected to receive aid.237 The purpose of this chapter, then, is to determine whether the available evidence can shed light on the veracity of competing claims regarding the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion.
To answer the question of whether foreign aid dollars are in effect funding state coercion, I conduct a series of statistical analyses based on cross-national trends in the relationship between bilateral U.S. foreign aid and state coercion over a period of three decades. The findings demonstrate that the coercive effects
237 At the moment, the weight of the evidence in numerous studies suggests that aid has been relatively unsuccessful in promoting long-term democratic transitions primarily because aid is most successful in achieving its developmental goals in an established democratic political context. See, for example, Peter Boone, “Politics and the Effectiveness of Foreign Aid,” European Economic Review 40 (1996): 289-329; Stephen Knack, “Does Foreign Aid Promote Democracy?” International Studies Quarterly 48 (2004): 251-266; and, Jakob Svensson, “Aid, Growth and Democracy,” Economics and Politics 11.3 (1999): 275-297.
104 of foreign aid are part of a pattern in North-South relations that has characterised international politics for decades. Foreign aid given by the United States has, on average, correlated with increased state coercion in the following year. While the characteristics of specific countries receiving aid certainly matter in determining the occurrence and prevalence of state coercion, foreign aid is demonstrated to have an independent effect on the internal conflict dynamics of countries. This effect persists even when competing domestic and international factors are taken into account.
These findings result from an explicit test of the hypotheses derived from the theory of the coercive effect of foreign aid. I employ a dataset of foreign aid obligations from the United States to 132 developing countries for the period of
1976 to 2005. Overall, I find a robust, positive relationship between U.S. bilateral foreign aid and multiple forms of state coercion. Foreign aid influences some forms of coercion more than others and the coercive effect of foreign aid is also contingent upon the type of aid that is received. This suggests that bilateral aid donors, such as the United States, may have considerable opportunity to reorient their foreign aid policies so as to mitigate the potential harmful effects of their foreign aid on the recipient country’s domestic politics.
Drawing on the theory developed in Chapter 2 and the data described in
Chapter 3, I first explore the relationship between foreign aid and a variety of forms of state coercion ranging from genocide to torture. Moving on from an initial bivariate analysis, I undertake multivariate statistical tests of the hypotheses. Next, based on further investigation into the obtained results, I
105 disaggregate U.S. foreign aid into bilateral military aid and bilateral economic aid in order to assess whether there is a differential effect on state coercion based on the dominant type of foreign aid that a country receives. In conclusion, I highlight the main findings of the analyses as well as some of the limitations inherent in quantitative investigations of complex social phenomena such as state coercion.
The subsequent chapter provides additional analysis of the data based on temporal and other trends.
Does Foreign Aid Facilitate State Coercion?
As described in the previous chapter, I broadly categorize state coercion in terms of three types of behaviour: mass killing, state violence, and repression.
Here, I operationalize these categories through several metrics summarised in
Tables A4.1 and A4.2 in the Appendix to this chapter. Although coercion varies both in severity and the degree to which its application is discriminant, I focus here on indicators of the severity of coercion in terms of the extent of bodily harm that is inflicted (i.e. death is worse than injury) and in terms of the pervasiveness with which the behaviour is applied. This approach does not speak to the particular victims of coercion and why they may have been targeted by the state.238 Rather, it focuses generally on the overall degree of coercion within the polity.
238 By focusing on political violence at the state level, the quantitative analysis fails to capture group or individual level dynamics. However, the case study of Indonesia presented in Chapter 6 demonstrates that group dynamics can shape where and against whom coercion is applied.
106 I have two indicators of massive episodes of state violence. The first, genocide, indicates country-years in which annual fatalities exceed 4000 deaths.
Mass killing is also operationalized through a binary indicator, coded 1 for country-years that feature 1000 or more state-caused fatalities. State killing refers to an annual per country total of more than 300 fatalities and is also a binary indicator. State violence refers to all country-years where state-caused fatalities were greater than 25.239 Lastly, I operationalize government repression using the
Political Terror Scale (PTS) dataset, which offers a categorical index of repression based on severity.240
Table 4.1: Correlation Matrix for State Coercion Indicators
Genocide Mass State State Repression Killing Killings Violence Genocide 1 Mass Killing 0.848 1 State Killings 0.736 0.868 1 State Violence 0.489 0.577 0.665 1 Repression 0.261 0.322 0.364 0.470 1
Table 4.1 provides a correlation matrix of these various measures of state coercion. There is a clear association between the measures for genocide, mass killing and state killings despite the fact that the data are drawn from multiple datasets. Table 4.1 also suggests that while state violence and repression are different behaviours, they are clearly associated with one another.
239 The state violence variable includes an additional 235 country-year observations where the number of fatalities from state-led violence lies in the range of 25-299 for a total of 447 country- year observations. 240 Mark Gibney, Linda Cornett, and Reed Wood, The Political Terror Scale, 1976-2010, data set, 2011, accessed 28 January 2012, http://www.politicalterrorscale.org.
107 The theory detailed in Chapter 2 posits that foreign aid should have a positive relationship with the various state coercion indicators, contingent upon the structural characteristics and conflict history of the recipient state. Preliminary evidence is provided in Table 4.2 for a correlation over time and across countries between foreign aid and different forms of state coercion, even when controlling for a country’s past history of coercion.241
Table 4.2: Foreign Aid and State Coercion, Ordered Logit (1976-2005)
Genocide Mass State State Repression Killing Killings Violence
Ln(US aid) t-1 1.013 1.025 1.024 1.107** 1.086*** (0.089) (0.067) (0.065) (0.051) (0.023)
Coercion t-1 623.935*** 229.094*** 155.751*** 30.708*** 9.240*** (310.719) (96.182) (57.739) (7.037) (0.720) cut1 5.140 4.528 4.173 3.127 0.296 (0.378) (0.280) (0.280) (0.202) (0.160) cut2 3.482 (0.145) cut3 6.265 (0.205) cut4 8.793 (0.272) N 3335 3335 3335 3335 3214 Pseudo R2 0.6379 0.5305 0.4992 0.3152 0.3141 Wald Chi2 168.39 170.70 186.67 230.62 866.28 Log pseudo- likelihood -179.655 -294.378 -386.075 -909.929 - 3194.231 Note: Odds ratios are reported with robust country-clustered (132) standard errors in parentheses. ***p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *p<0.10.
Odds ratios with country-clustered standard errors are reported in Table
4.2 based on ordered logistic regressions weighted by population.242 The null
241 Note that the coefficient labelled state coercion corresponds to a lagged version of each dependent variable noted at the top of the column. 242 An odds ratio of greater than one indicates a positive association between the variables while an odds ratio of less than one indicates a negative association.
108 results for genocide and mass killing are not unexpected given that episodes of mass killing are quite rare historically and influenced by a unique concatenation of events.243 The above results do, however indicate a positive, statistically significant relationship between the receipt of U.S. bilateral foreign aid and the occurrence of state violence and repression in the following year. The results also indicate that a country’s past history of coercion is an important influence on future behaviour, reflecting the high degree of path dependence previously noted in the literature. However, because state coercion becomes institutionalised over time and is therefore strongly related to other slowly moving structural variables such as political regime type and the size of the country’s armed forces, I omit lagged coercion from the subsequent analyses which include a variety of structural characteristics of the state.244
To fully capture the theory presented in Chapter 2, I include a variety of additional explanatory variables relating to the domestic political characteristics of countries as well as competing international influences on state coercion. To briefly review the discussion of these factors presented in Chapter 2, anocracy serves as a control for the degree of institutionalisation of a country’s political system while dictator refers to whether the country’s head of state is non-elected.
Both are coded as binary variables. I anticipate that both political regime type
243 The dataset identifies 118 country-years where state-led genocide occurs, that is, 3.24 % of the sample. Surprisingly, 20 countries are coded as having at least one year where state-caused fatalities exceeded 4000 persons. Despite this, genocide is strongly path dependent; of the countries that experience genocide, 78% will experience genocide in the following year. There is a slight difference between the genocide and mass killing indicators, with mass killing amounting to 4.45% of the sample. However, the transitions probabilities are similar with a 73% probability that countries experiencing mass killing will experience it in the following year. 244 The validity of the results based on this choice is discussed with reference to a series of robustness tests detailed in a subsequent section in this chapter.
109 variables will be positively correlated with state coercion; that is, I expect that all else being equal, state coercion will be more likely in countries with weakly institutionalised political systems or otherwise constrained political environments.
The institutional development of the state also plays an important role in shaping state-society relations. The size of the country’s military, measured by the logged number of armed forces personnel, is taken as an indicator of its coercive capacity. The percentage of the government share of GDP is a measure of government spending, which is employed here as a proxy for the extent of government service provision. Both military personnel size and government share of GDP serve as indicators of the state’s institutional strength and reach.
However, I anticipate that the former will be positively associated with state coercion while the latter will be negatively associated with coercion due to the role that public goods provision plays in coopting opposition to the state and thereby rendering coercion unnecessary.
The rentier state indicator identifies countries where natural resource rents from coal, oil, natural gas, or minerals, account for over 10% of the country’s annual GDP. The inclusion of the rentier state variable serves as an important theoretical control because natural resource rents provide a competing source of non-tax revenue to the state, which may have effects on the country’s budget similar to the receipt of foreign aid. Based on the theory developed here, it is unclear whether the availability of external revenue from natural resources would enable the state to promote increased service provision or the expansion of the state’s coercive capacity. This indicator therefore plays an important role in
110 ensuring that the obtained statistical effect of foreign aid is consistent with the state’s overall access to legitimate non-tax resources.
Various aspects of a country’s history of conflict may also condition the likelihood of state coercion. I include the logged number of U.S. troops present in a country as a measure of military ties with the United States. I anticipate that the presence of U.S. troops is a factor mitigating state coercion in a country by increasing external oversight of the state’s security apparatus. I also include binary indicators for whether a country was engaged in an interstate war or a civil war to assess the short-term impact of external and internal conflict on state coercion. I expect both of these factors to increase the likelihood of coercion.
Lastly, throughout the analyses, I control for a country’s level of economic development by employing the natural logarithm of GDP per capita.245 I also control for population size as a factor potentially affecting both the amount of foreign aid a country receives and the likelihood of political violence. Table 4.3 summarizes the expected direction of association for the explanatory variables.
Summary statistics and a correlation matrix can be found in Appendix Tables
A4.1 and A4.2.
Table 4.3: Theoretical Expectations for Explanatory Variables
Political State Strength Conflict Institutions and Reach History Anocracy (+) Armed Forces (+) U.S. Troops (-) Dictator (+) Government Share Interstate War (+) of GDP (-) Civil War (+) Rentier State (+/-)
245 Lower levels of per capita GDP are also widely seen as a risk factor for political violence.
111 The explanatory variables are used in combination with the measures of
U.S. bilateral foreign aid discussed in Chapter 3 to estimate a model of the international and domestic determinants of state coercion. By including numerous factors that affect state coercion, I obtain a better estimate of the independent effect of foreign aid on coercive state behaviour.
Table 4.4 (below) reports odds ratios for this model based on ordered logistic regressions with bootstrapped standard errors.246 All explanatory and control variables are lagged by one year in order to avoid reverse causality and in consideration of budgetary cycles. The results demonstrate a positive, statistically significant relationship between foreign aid and all three measures of state coercion, while controlling for a host of relevant international and domestic factors. Overall, the results suggest that receiving bilateral U.S. foreign aid increases the odds of state coercion in the following year. The initial positive association demonstrated in Table 4.2 is substantively important even when competing explanatory variables are considered. Furthermore, by lessening the risk of omitted variable bias, these results better reflect the association between foreign aid and the various forms of state coercion.
246 Bootstrapping is a statistical process by which the variance-covariance matrix is estimated by random sampling within the empirical distribution of the observed data. Bootstrapping is typically used when the sample size is insufficient for straightforward statistical inference or when the theoretical distribution is unknown. In this specific case, both of these conditions apply to varying degrees.
112 Table 4.4: Determinants of State Coercion, Ordered Logit (1976-2005)
State Killings State Violence Repression
Ln(US aid) t-1 1.124** 1.165*** 1.088*** (0.054) (0.046) (0.023)
Anocracy t-1 1.235 1.809*** 2.060*** (0.260) (0.222) (0.179)
Dictatort-1 2.565*** 2.104*** 2.844*** (0.474) (0.250) (0.278)
Ln(armed forces) t-1 0.944 1.025 1.366*** (0.083) (0.082) (0.075)
Govt Share of GDPt-1 0.993 1.006 0.993** (0.007) (0.005) (0.003)
Rentier statet-1 2.842*** 1.126 1.316*** (0.661) (0.188) (0.125)
Ln(US troops)t-1 0.860*** 0.789*** 1.033* (0.036) (0.029) (0.019)
Interstate war t-1 1.041 0.929 0.762 (0.374) (0.301) (0.155)
Civil war t-1 19.790*** 7.078*** 7.352*** (5.537) (0.956) (0.723)
Ln(GDP)t-1 0.566*** 0.843** 0.709*** (0.069) (0.066) (0.029)
Ln(population) t-1 1.441*** 1.750*** 1.345*** (0.161) (0.145) (0.065)
cut1 6.700 11.351 1.279 (2.015) (1.457) (0.802)
cut2 3.901 (0.814)
cut3 6.141 (0.815)
cut4 8.036 (0.826)
N 3040 3040 3001 Pseudo R2 0.3227 0.2683 0.1893 Wald Chi2 502.26 556.31 2687.01 Log pseudo- likelihood -459.112 -855.050 -3502.299 Note: Odds ratios are reported with bootstrapped standard errors in parentheses. ***p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *p<0.10.
113 While foreign aid is an important influence on state coercion as identified in Table 4.4, political institutions shape the broader social environment. Based on the above results, anocratic political systems are more likely to feature state violence and repression, while countries ruled by dictators have on average a more than two to one odds of suffering from some coercive state action in the following year in comparison with countries that are not dictatorships. These results reinforce the findings of the domestic democratic peace literature that democratic countries, ceteris paribus, are less likely to use force against their citizens.
Turning to the strength and reach of state institutions, the results show that the size of a country’s armed forces does not have a consistent effect on state coercion. Rather, larger armed forces are only associated with an increase in the likelihood of repression. While this finding initially seems counter-intuitive, it reflects evidence in the contentious politics literature that suggests that outright violence is less likely in countries with a high degree of coercive capacity due to the pervasiveness of the coercive threat (known at the inverted-U or the “more murder in the middle” hypothesis).247
Other state capacity measures also have inconsistent effects across the various state coercion indicators. Higher levels of government spending, measured as the government’s share of GDP, are associated with a subsequent
247 Scott Sigmund Gartner and Patrick M. Regan, “Threat and Repression: The Non-Linear Relationship between Government and Opposition Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 33.3 (1996): 273-287; Christian Davenport, “Multi-Dimensional Threat Perception and State Repression: An Inquiry into Why States Apply Negative Sanctions,” American Journal of Political Science 39.3 (1995): 683-713; Christian Davenport, “State Repression and the Tyrannical Peace,” Journal of Peace Research 44 (2007): 485-504.
114 reduction in repression. Thus, some initial support is found for the contention that increased government spending may have a cooption effect and dampen the state’s use of coercion.248 The rentier state variable, which reflects a reliance on natural resource rents, is positively associated with both state killings and repression. Given the findings of the resource curse literature,249 an association between natural resources and these forms of coercion is perhaps not surprising.
However, the combination of resource rents and high levels of foreign aid could be especially problematic for human rights.250
In addition to these factors, a country’s history of conflict plays a prominent role in determining the occurrence of state violence and repression. As predicted, the number of U.S. troops has a significant negative association with state killings and violence. This may suggest that the presence of U.S. troops in a country may limit state violence by providing international oversight and/or professionalization. Alternatively, U.S. troops may be the de facto coercive arm of the state in these countries, as has been the case with NATO troops in
Afghanistan throughout the 2000s. However, the positive association between the number of U.S. troops and state repression is puzzling. One potential explanation could be that repression is conducted primarily by the police and other internal security services which are not typically subject to U.S. training or oversight.
248 In a direct test of the cooption hypothesis, Taydas and Peksen find that only social welfare spending, not general government spending or military expenditure, decreases the likelihood of civil war onset. See Zeynep Taydas and Dursen Peksen, “Can States Buy Peace? Social Welfare Spending and Civil Conflicts,” Journal of Peace Research 49.2 (2012): 273-287. 249 Michael Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?” World Politics 53 (2001): 325-361. 250 Other non-tax sources of revenue, including remittances, may play an important role in the political economy of state coercion. See, for example, Faisal Z. Ahmed, “The Perils of Unearned Foreign Income: Aid, Remittances and Government Survival,” American Political Science Review 106.1 (2012): 146-165.
115 Across all of the state coercion metrics, civil war has a statistically and substantively important effect on subsequent coercion. Contrary to the overwhelmingly positive association between civil war and subsequent state coercion, interstate war is not associated with any form of coercion.251 Unlike civil war, interstate war draws the armed forces of a country outwards and generally creates a strong sense of national unity. Civil war may facilitate coercion by orienting the armed forces inward and by creating the very difficult challenge of separating insurgents from the civilian population. It is in this counterinsurgency context that much state violence against civilians occurs, as detailed in the case study of Indonesia presented in Chapter 6.
The inclusion of control variables also proves to be of substantive importance. Higher levels of GDP are associated with lower levels of state coercion, affirming previous findings regarding the relationship between level of development and political violence. In distinction, larger populations are positively associated with all forms of state coercion. This is likely due to the fact that both providing services and exerting control over a large population is often difficult for central governments and may lead to a greater reliance on coercive forms of control.
251 While Alexander Downes finds evidence that both democracies and non-democracies have employed civilian victimization strategies in interstate wars, his study focuses on the targeting of enemy non-combatants. See, Alexander B. Dowes, “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: The Causes of Civilian Victimization in War,” International Security 30.4 (2006): 152-195.
116 Table 4.5: Summary of the Determinants of State Coercion
State Killing State Violence Repression International Foreign Aid (+) Foreign Aid (+) Foreign Aid (+) Factors US Troops (-) US Troops (-) US Troops (+) Domestic Anocracy (+) Anocracy (+) Factors Dictator (+) Dictator (+) Dictator (+) Armed Forces (+) Govt. Share GDP (-) Rentier State (+) Rentier State (+) Civil War (+) Civil War (+) Civil War (+)
Table 4.5 summarizes the statistically significant determinants of state coercion according to whether the variables reflect international influences or the domestic characteristics of the country. The direction (positive or negative) of each coefficient is listed in parentheses. Most significantly, U.S. bilateral foreign aid has a consistent positive effect across the different indicators of state coercion even when other determinants of coercion are taken into account. The results support the study’s primary hypothesis that foreign aid contributes to increased state coercion in recipient countries.
A country’s political institutions also clearly affect state coercion.
Anocratic regimes, in the grey zone between consolidated democracies and autocracies, are more likely to employ both repression and state violence.
Countries led by dictators show an even stronger proclivity towards state coercion. To properly assess the study’s second hypothesis that foreign aid contributes to a greater increase in state violence in countries with anocratic regimes, I interacted U.S. foreign aid with anocracy and re-estimated the model for all forms of coercion (results not shown). The resulting interaction term was not statistically significant for any of the state coercion outcome variables.
117 Therefore, political regime type may be an important permissive factor despite the absence of an observable interaction effect with foreign aid.
Regarding the third hypothesis, that foreign aid contributes to a greater increase in state coercion in countries with limited state capacity due to the underdevelopment of the state’s institutional strength and reach, the results suggest that the strength and reach of state institutions primarily affect repression.
Only the rentier state variable was positively associated with subsequent state killings. To the degree that state coercion is more prevalent in states that have large natural resource revenues, mechanisms similar to that associated with foreign aid may be at work. To get more directly at how foreign aid may interact with state capacity, I created an indicator of military capacity based on the average number of national military personnel across the sample. The interaction between this variable and U.S. foreign aid was insignificant for all forms of state coercion (results not reported). How state capacity matters, independent of conflict and related factors, in the relationship between foreign aid and changes in state coercion remains an area for further investigation.
The fourth hypothesis raised in this study was that foreign aid contributes to a greater increase in state coercion in recipient countries with a history of armed conflict. Further investigation into the results presented above demonstrates that the results presented in Table 4.4 are robust to the inclusion of a two-year civil war lag as well as a five-year civil war lag. I therefore find that the shadow of civil war is long and as a result, a country’s involvement in a civil war may be part of a long-term structural change in state-society relations that affects
118 the overall conflict propensity of the country. As a direct test of the conflict hypothesis, I created interacted both the civil war and interstate war variables with foreign aid. Neither interaction term proved to be significant when included in the model presented in Table 4.4.
Does Foreign Aid Facilitate Torture?
The preceding discussion highlights some differences in the determinants of state killing, state violence and repression. However, repression is a concept that covers a wide variety of coercive state behaviours. Indeed, one way to assess the robustness of the coercive effect of U.S. bilateral foreign aid is to further examine the relationship between foreign aid and specific repressive behaviours. I therefore examine torture as a form of repression. Torture is defined in international law as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person…when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”252
Multiple sources of cross-national data on torture are presently available including data coded by Oona Hathaway, the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights
Dataset and the Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project.253 The
252 United Nations, Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, New York: United Nations, 1984. 253 Oona A. Hathaway, “Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?” The Yale Law Journal 111.8 (2002): 1935-2042; David L. Cingranelli and David L. Richards, The Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Dataset, data set, 2010, accessed 20 April 2010, http://www.humanrightsdata.org; Courtenay R. Conrad and Will H. Moore, “Country-Year (CY) Level of Torture Data,” The Ill-Treatment & Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project, data set,
119 temporal coverage of these quantitative torture indicators is limited, in part because they are traditionally hand-coded from U.S. State Department and
Amnesty International annual reports (and therefore also subject to the potential biases discussed in Chapter 3). However, due to the underlying similarity in sources, the datasets can be combined. Table A4.3 presents the correlation matrix for these torture indicators and demonstrates that the ITT data, which codes allegations of torture, is the least similar of the available torture measures and is therefore omitted from use. I employ a binary torture indicator based on the
Hathaway and CIRI data that covers the period of 1981 to 2005.
The results presented in Table 4.6 demonstrate that foreign aid has a positive association with torture in both of the measures that span 1981 to 2005.
The torture results are also consistent with the determinants of repression identified in Table 4.4. Overall, the results allow for even greater confidence that the observed relationship between foreign aid and the various forms of state coercion is substantively meaningful.
2011, accessed 28 January 2012, http://www.politicalscience.uncc.edu/cconra16/UNCC/Data.html.
120 Table 4.6: Determinants of Torture, Ordered Logit (1981-2005)
Hathaway CIRI Torture Torture (1985-1999) (1981-2005) (1981-2005) Ln(US aid) t-1 1.021 1.055** 1.139** (0.026) (0.029) (0.058)
Anocracy t-1 1.239* 1.913*** 1.698*** (0.145) (0.197) (0.252)
Dictator t-1 1.621*** 1.501*** 1.812*** (0.191) (0.160) (0.387)
Ln(armed forces)t-1 1.266*** 1.213*** 1.100 (0.081) (0.073) (0.099)
Govt share of GDPt-1 0.984*** 0.991** 0.979*** (0.005) (0.004) (0.006)
Rentier statet-1 1.934*** 1.109 0.883 (0.275) (0.106) (0.166)
Ln(US troops) t-1 1.063*** 0.940*** 0.969 (0.025) (0.020) (0.031)
Interstate war t-1 1.015 0.951 1.146 (0.230) (0.239) (0.626)
Civil war t-1 3.112*** 2.429*** 2.230*** (0.341) (0.264) (0.609)
Ln(GDP) t-1 0.715*** 1.034 1.105 (0.063) (0.063) (0.094)
Ln(population) t-1 1.371*** 1.442*** 1.642*** (0.010) (0.087) (0.181) cut1 0.473 4.624 6.932 (1.394) (1.108) (1.686) cut2 2.875 7.204 (1.398) (1.105) cut3 4.998 (1.398) cut4 6.677 (1.390) N 1554 2607 2649 Pseudo R2 0.1234 0.1173 0.1241 Wald Chi2 738.66 496.50 290.46 Log pseudo- likelihood -1940.261 -2156.381 -764.007 Note: Odds ratios are reported with bootstrapped standard errors in parentheses. ***p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *p<0.10.
121 To summarize the evidence presented thus far, the findings suggest that foreign aid has a consistent positive effect on a variety of forms of state coercion even when key international and domestic determinants of coercion are controlled for. The statistical evidence is consistent with the main hypothesis of the study.
The positive association between foreign aid and subsequent coercion persists when state coercion is disaggregated into state violence and repression and when repression is analysed in terms of torture as a specific repressive behaviour. The hypotheses regarding the conditional effects of political institutions, state capacity, and conflict history on the likelihood of foreign aid being channelled into state coercion are not supported by an interaction effects-based analysis.
Rather, these factors appear to independently affect the likelihood of coercion rather than mediate the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion.
Is All Foreign Aid Coercive?
While foreign aid clearly influences subsequent levels of state coercion, it remains to be determined whether a particular form of aid is driving the observed relationship. It is commonly thought that military aid affects state coercion by bolstering the coercive capacity of a state. The primary concern of this section is establishing whether economic aid may also have this effect, which is the major theoretical contribution of this study. To address whether different forms of bilateral foreign aid affect state coercion in distinct ways, I disaggregate U.S. bilateral foreign aid into two major categories: military aid and economic aid.254
254 The subcomponents of these aid categories are described in detail in Chapter 3.
122 Figure 4.1: U.S. Bilateral Military Aid to Developing Countries, 1976-2005
The annual amount of U.S. bilateral military aid allocated to individual countries is displayed in Figure 4.1 with major recipients identified.255 Figure 4.2 shows the distribution of economic aid for each country included in the sample, again with major recipients identified. The majority of countries are clustered along the bottom of the graphs, with a bilateral military aid average across the sample of $35.74 million per year and an economic aid average of about $79 million. However, the standard deviation of military aid is over $196 million dollars while that of economic aid is approximately $299 million. This reflects substantial variation in the distribution of both forms of aid. For military aid, divergence between countries is fairly consistent over time while for economic aid, fluctuations occur primarily in the 1990s and 2000s.
255 The data illustrated in these figures are the same as that used in analysis and which meet the population size and country income restrictions discussed in Chapter 3.
123
Figure 4.2: U.S. Bilateral Economic Aid to Developing Countries, 1976-2005
The amount of aid allocated to Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iraq has seen the most dramatic fluctuations over time in response to both regional and international security developments.256 Foreign aid to Egypt has been highly influenced by that country’s participation in the peace process with Israel.257 The amount of aid allocated to Afghanistan and Iraq was driven upwards by the
256 To mitigate the effect of these large fluctuations on the overall sample, I employ the natural logarithm of the amount of foreign aid in all analyses and conducted robustness tests which excluded these outliers. The results of the robustness tests are discussed below. 257 Note that Israel is excluded from the analysis due to the income threshold I impose. Israel is categorized as a ‘high income’ country by the World Bank throughout the period of analysis. In addition, Israel is the only country that could potentially be included in the sample that is engaged in a military occupation of a territory with a substantial population which has no direct influence on the political process within Israel proper. Both territories also receive bilateral foreign aid from the United States. These factors greatly complicate an assessment of the potential effect of foreign aid on state coercion as identifying the relevant geographic territory and subject population are difficult. Furthermore, the repression indices I employ are explicitly coded for Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza, which impedes the inclusion of Israel proper. The inclusion of the Palestinian Territories as a country is also problematic due to missing data and the fact that no state coercion metrics that I am aware of capture state coercion by the governments in those respective areas.
124 United States’ military engagements in both of these countries during the 2000s.
Iraq has received the single largest allocation of U.S. economic aid in a given year, receiving over $8.8 billion from the United States in 2005. Figures A4.1 and
A4.2, presented in the Appendix, omit these countries to show the scale of U.S. bilateral aid when these top recipients are excluded.
Table 4.7: Disaggregated Foreign Aid and State Coercion, Ordered Logit (1976- 2005)
State Killing State Violence Repression Torture (1976-2005) (1981-2005)
Ln(mil aid) t-1 1.238** 0.986 0.914 0.818*** (0.106) (0.055) (0.028) (0.039)
Ln(econ aid) t-1 1.051 1.135*** 1.165*** 1.355*** (0.074) (0.040) (0.031) (0.083) Controls Yes Yes Yes Yes N 3073 3073 3039 2624 Pseudo R2 0.3281 0.2724 0.1910 0.1391 Wald Chi2 410.54 851.86 1993.65 292.30 Log pseudo - likelihood -451.092 -867.413 -3532.684 -748.595 Note: Odds ratios are reported with bootstrapped standard errors in parentheses. Coefficients for other explanatory and control variables are not reported. ***p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *p<0.10.
To ascertain whether economic and military aid affect state coercion differently, I re-estimate the model initially presented in Table 4.4 using a disaggregated measure of U.S. bilateral foreign aid. Table 4.7 reports results that demonstrate that military and economic aid have distinct relationships with state coercion.258
Military aid is positively related to state killings but negatively correlated with torture. This may be because military aid provides the resources necessary
258 The results of the other explanatory variables and cut points are not reported in the interests of space constraints.
125 for the organization and execution of intense and widespread violence. The technology or force that the military is able to employ may be a more relevant factor that the size of the military. Recent events in Syria and Libya have demonstrated that national militaries can be harnessed in the perpetration of massacres and indiscriminate civilian targeting. At the same time, the resources provided by military aid may not filter down to the police and internal security apparatuses that are typically associated with torture, particularly within prisons.
The results for bilateral economic aid largely confirm the results obtained using the aggregate aid measure. The effect of economic aid is positive across three of the four state coercion indicators at statistically significant levels. By and large, this suggests that the coercive effect of bilateral foreign aid is attributable to economic, not military, aid. While the statistical results do not demonstrate that economic aid is more fungible than military aid, they do show a strong positive relationship between economic aid and multiple forms of state coercion.
Although I contend that the fungibility of economic aid and its provision as general budgetary support is the key factor linking bilateral foreign aid and state coercion, other mechanisms are possible. Because much military aid is tied to the provision or purchase of arms and weapons systems developed for interstate war, economic aid may provide resources that are more suitable in equipping the state’s security apparatus for internal security functions. This is especially true when foreign aid is directed towards developing a country’s security sector, as is the case with much post-conflict development assistance. Such aid is not typically
126 classified as military aid although the purposes of security sector assistance may be similar to that of military assistance.
Robustness Tests
In order to verify whether the findings discussed in this chapter are resilient to changes in the specification of the model, I undertake a series of robustness tests. When the top recipients of U.S. bilateral foreign aid are examined (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2), Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iraq appear as major outliers in terms of the overall amount of aid they received from the United States during the period of study. The first robustness test involved the exclusion of these three countries (panels) from the dataset. I then re-estimated the models presented in Table 4.4. For state killings, the aggregate foreign aid coefficient falls just below acceptable levels of statistical significance (p value of 0.110).
However, for state violence, repression, and torture, foreign aid remains statistically significant with very similar odds ratios (1.170, 1.092, and 1.147 respectively). The results for all other explanatory variables remained comparable. Overall, the results presented in Table 4.4 are robust to the exclusion of these outliers as well as the additional exclusion of Jordan.259
While the general results are robust to the changes in the overall sample, model specification is also an important consideration. Because government share of GDP may be a poor proxy for state service provision, I substitute the under-5 infant mortality rate as a proxy for the extent of healthcare provision. This is a
259 When Jordan is excluded in addition to Afghanistan, Egypt and Iraq, the coefficient for foreign aid reaches statistically significant levels with respect to state killings (odds ratio of 1.118).
127 more direct measure of the state’s service capacity, albeit limited to the healthcare sector. The results for this variable were of little substantive import despite being statistically significant (results not reported) due to the fact that infant mortality is highly correlated with GDP per capita. However, the results for foreign aid remained robust to this change.
The final robustness test was based on the idea that a country’s history of coercion, like its history of civil war, may become institutionalised over time and function as a structural attribute of the country. According to this logic, I omitted the lagged coercion variable from the analyses in this chapter. However, similar results are obtained when a lagged dependent variable is added to the model, as indicated in Table A4.4 of the Appendix. Again, the only substantive change is for state killing, where the observed odds ratio for U.S. foreign aid falls below acceptable levels of statistical significance. Aggregate foreign aid remains significant and with the same direction of relationship for the other three state coercion measures as reported in Table 4.4. In sum, the robustness tests demonstrate that the findings reported above are robust to changes in model specification and sample size, including the exclusion of potential outliers and the inclusion of a lagged dependent variable. The results of the robustness tests provide further confidence in the findings presented above.
Conclusion
This chapter opened with the question of whether foreign aid contributes to the occurrence of coercive state behaviour. The findings that I have presented
128 are consistent with the assertion that foreign aid has abetted state coercion in recipient countries and thereby contributed to the persistence of contentious state- society relations. There is a robust relationship between U.S. bilateral foreign aid and different forms of state coercion. The analysis has highlighted the importance of disaggregating state coercion into specific behaviours in order to better understand the nuances of this relationship. While there are important differences in the domestic determinants of state violence and repression, foreign aid is a consistent determinant of multiple forms of state coercion.
The statistical results also demonstrate that the positive association between foreign aid and state coercion is driven primarily by economic aid rather than military aid, as traditionally believed. Indeed, some evidence is provided that military aid may decrease the likelihood of torture although uncertainty remains regarding the possible mechanisms underlying this relationship. The overall implication of these findings is that the complicated policy (and moral) considerations associated with a country’s foreign aid policy extends beyond the
United States, the world’s main military aid provider, to all countries that give economic aid. While no direct evidence of the fungibility of aid can be provided with the method of analysis employed in this chapter, the results clearly show that foreign aid in general, and economic aid in particular, is associated with a variety of coercive state behaviours.
Despite these important findings, the depth of analysis I provide is constrained by limitations in the existing data. There is a notable absence of high quality, cross-national data on state-caused civilian fatalities, which prevents an
129 investigation into the relationship between foreign aid and the intensity of state killings. The difference in scale between the Cambodian genocide and state-led killings in Uganda in the late 1970s is simply not captured in the current analysis.
This limitation is due in part to a substantial divide among those collecting detailed information on civilian casualties, with the various individuals and organizations collecting data often working at cross-purposes.260 The data that is available is biased towards high intensity episodes of mass killing and state-led violence that occur in the context of civil wars. As a result, the existing data fails to offer complete temporal or cross-national coverage. While these challenges are not unique to this study, they do compel further case-based investigation into many of the relationships uncovered in this chapter.
Although the robustness tests and the consistency of the findings suggest a strong relationship between foreign aid and subsequent state coercion, the causal pathways linking foreign aid to civilian victimization may vary over time in ways related to the broader structural dynamics of the international system. The next chapter takes up an investigation of the temporal dynamics associated with the cross-national patterns highlighted here. In-depth consideration of the temporal dimension provides additional insight into the observed statistical results.
260 Jessica N. Trisko and Izabela Steflja, “Counting Bodies, Counting Lives: What We Learn from Documenting Civilian Casualties in Times of War,” Paper presented at the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence Speaker Series, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2011.
130 Appendix
Table A4.1: State Coercion Summary Statistics
Variable Obs. Mean Std. Dev. Min Max Genocide 3641 0.032 0.177 0 1 Mass Killing 3641 0.044 0.206 0 1 State Killings 3641 0.058 0.234 0 1 State Violence 3641 0.123 0.328 0 1 Repression 3478 1.844 1.067 0 4 Torture 3002 0.492 0.500 0 1
Table A4.2: Correlation Matrix for Explanatory and Control Variables
)
t armed Ln(US aid) Anocracy Dictator Ln( forces Gov share of GDP Ln(US aid) 1 Anocracy 0.033 1 Dictator -0.139 -0.130 1 Ln(armed forces) 0.0692 -0.045 -0.007 1 Govt share of GDP -0.014 0.088 0.050 -0.040 1 Rentier state -0.291 -0.043 0.201 0.172 -0.077 Ln(US troops) 0.307 -0.128 -0.071 0.367 -0.152 Interstate war -0.034 -0.019 -0.021 0.158 0.030 Civil war 0.109 0.139 -0.014 0.246 0.113 Ln(GDP) -0.155 -0.096 -0.201 0.166 -0.154 Ln(population) 0.257 0.020 -0.132 0.804 -0.127
131 Table A4.2: Correlation Matrix for Explanatory and Control Variables, cont.
op.)
p roops) Rentier state Ln(US t Interstate War Civil War Ln(GDP) Ln( Ln(US aid) Anocracy Dictator Ln(armed forces) Govt share of GDP Rentier state 1 Ln(US troops) -0.112 1 Interstate war 0.046 -0.004 1 Civil war 0.056 0.014 0.329 1 Ln(GDP) 0.056 0.296 0.056 -0.094 1 Ln(population) 0.000 0.311 0.167 0.249 -0.044 1
Table A4.3: Correlation Matrix for Torture Indicators
Hathaway CIRI Torture ITT Torture Hathaway 1 CIRI Torture 0.569 1 ITT 0.432 0.432 1 Torture 0.398 0.718 0.243 1
132 Table A4.4: Determinants of State Coercion with Lagged DV, Ordered Logit (1976-2005)
State Killings State Violence Repression Torture
(1976-2005) (1981-2005)
Ln(US aid) t-1 1.057 1.111** 1.062*** 1.111** (0.083) (0.049) (0.021) (0.060)
Coercion t-1 60.080*** 13.913*** 6.413*** 13.965*** (15.779) (2.145) (0.328) (2.449) cut1 4.593 10.254 1.669 5.208 (3.493) (1.479) (0.747) (2.282) cut2 5.074 (0.742) cut3 8.104 (0.746) cut4 10.695 (0.776)
N 3040 3040 2976 2550 Pseudo R2 0.5762 0.4020 0.3418 0.2824 Wald Chi2 291.70 1113.85 1804.94 430.47 Log pseudo- likelihood -287.288 -698.721 -2815.391 -559.432 Note: Odds ratios are reported with bootstrapped standard errors in parentheses. ***p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *p<0.10.
133 Figure A4.1: U.S. Bilateral Military Aid to Selected Countries, 1976-2005
Figure A4.2: U.S. Bilateral Economic Aid to Selected Countries, 1976-2005
134 Chapter V. The Dynamics of the Coercive Effect of Foreign Aid
Introduction
For many decades, foreign aid was considered to be a positive influence in recipient countries. Scholars and policymakers linked foreign aid to laudable goals such as economic growth, poverty alleviation, and the general improvement of the human condition. The findings presented in the previous chapter suggest that at least from the mid-1970s onwards, foreign aid has been associated with increased state coercion in recipient countries. This raises several questions for further consideration: Is this relationship consistent across world regions? What could explain variation over time in the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion? Are the observed relationships between foreign aid and various forms of state coercion simply the outcome of factors associated with recent changes in world politics? To answer these questions, I examine the temporal dynamics associated with the coercive effect of foreign aid and their connection to broader political dynamics that have shaped the history of the developing world. The objective of this chapter is to assess how the changing dynamics of the international system and U.S. foreign policy have, or have not, shaped the relationship between U.S. bilateral foreign aid and state coercion observed in
Chapter 4.
It is widely thought that the allocation of U.S. foreign aid globally has always been a political project. The United States has historically used foreign aid
135 to support allies and obtain political concessions.261 After World War II, foreign aid allocations were dictated by an extensive political and strategic concern – containing the Soviet Union and its expansionist drive by buttressing the strength of war-torn European nations. Later, U.S. foreign aid became a major tool in
American anti-Communist efforts throughout the so-called Third World.262 In this chapter, I examine whether the political considerations associated with the Cold
War had a systematic effect on the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion. The anecdotal evidence in this regard is mixed. Foreign aid was a key component in building stable democracies in Germany and Japan after the devastation of World War II. Yet, decades later, U.S. foreign aid was funnelled to repressive military regimes in Latin America and covert assistance was provided to violent non-state actors such as the Afghan mujahedeen who eventually came to lead a highly repressive regime in Afghanistan. Both during and after the Cold
War, dictators have historically been the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid263 and as the findings of the previous chapter suggest dictatorships are more likely to experience state coercion.
The evidence presented in this chapter shows that the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion was systematically different during the Cold War, but not for the reasons many would point to. The end of the Cold War made some countries, like Afghanistan, less strategically valuable but on the whole U.S.
261 Hans Morgenthau, “A Political Theory of Foreign Aid,” The American Political Science Review 56.2 (1962): 301-309. 262 Anne Boschini and Anders Olofsgård, “Foreign Aid: An Instrument for Fighting Communism?” The Journal of Development Studies 43.4 (2007): 622-648. 263 Daniel Yuichi Kono and Gabriella R. Montinola, “Does Foreign Aid Support Autocrats, Democrats, or Both?” The Journal of Politics 71 (2009): 704-718.
136 foreign aid policy did not change dramatically.264 The increases in aid aimed at promoting democracy in Eastern Europe and the successor states of the Soviet
Union were part of a general trend which saw the redistribution of aid towards relatively more developed countries experiencing political transitions to the detriment of sub-Saharan Africa and other areas of greater need. At the same time, overall foreign aid levels declined as part of a period of fiscal retrenchment following the excesses of the Reagan years.
Allegations of the strategic use of foreign aid for political purposes initially declined with the end of the Cold War, in part because the political purposes of aid became quite explicitly tied to democracy promotion.265 However, following the events of 9/11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the
United States government in some ways returned to an earlier model of foreign aid targeted at post-conflict construction and state-building.266 Massive amounts of military aid were devoted to security sector reform in Afghanistan and Iraq, with neighbouring countries receiving increased assistance for their cooperation in multilateral military operations.
264 David Dollar and Victoria Levin, “The Increasing Selectivity of Foreign Aid, 1984-2003,” World Development 34.12 (2006): 2034-2046; Seonjou Kang and James Meernik, “Determinants of Post-Conflict Economic Assistance,” Journal of Peace Research 41.2 (2004): 149-166; Mark McGillivray, “What Determines African Bilateral Aid Receipts,” Journal of International Development 17 (2005): 1003-1018. 265 Steven W. Hook, “‘Building Democracy’ through Foreign Aid: The Limitations of United States Political Conditionalities, 1992-96,” Democratization 5.3 (1998): 156-180. 266 Moss et al. find only minor changes in the allocation of US foreign aid after 9/11. These changes are concentrated in countries that were major players in the War on Terror or were slated for aid decreases prior to 9/11. See, Todd Moss, David Roodman and Scott Standley, “The Global War on Terror and US Development Assistance: USAID allocation by country, 1998-2005,” Center for Global Development Working Paper 62, Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, 2005. Also, Robert K. Fleck and Christopher Kilby, “Changing Aid Regimes? US Foreign Aid from the Cold War to the War on Terror,” Journal of Development Economics 91 (2010): 185-197.
137 Despite the exogenous shock of 9/11 on the U.S. foreign policy establishment, the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion actually became more consistent in the post-Cold War era. One major finding of this study is that economic aid is positively associated with all forms of state coercion.
Contrary to expectations, the robustness tests undertaken in Chapter 4 demonstrate that events in Afghanistan and Iraq are not driving this result.
Furthermore, the events of 9/11 did not produce a major shift in the influence that international actors have over political violence in other countries, in part because relatively few countries were affected by the changes in U.S. policy brought about by 9/11.
The chapter begins by first examining the proper modelling of temporal dynamics within the context of this study. I then move on to an explicit comparison of the dynamics of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras in order to highlight key similarities and differences across these periods. I discuss the potential effects of 9/11 as part of this comparison. Next, I relate the observed patterns to changes in U.S. foreign policy associated with different presidential administrations to assess whether the prerogatives of individual presidents had any substantive effect on the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion.
In conclusion, I discuss what the findings of this chapter suggest for current and future U.S. foreign policy goals.
138 Temporal and Regional Dynamics
The previous chapter established a consistent relationship between foreign aid and key coercive state behaviours in a sample of 132 countries for the period of 1976-2005. Using this same sample, I engage in a deeper investigation of the temporal dynamics associated with this finding. Figure 5.1 shows the aggregate allocation of U.S. bilateral foreign aid for the period of analysis and indicates three key temporal periods: the Cold War (1976-1990), the post-Cold War (1991-
2001) and the post-9/11 (2002-2005) periods.
Figure 5.1: Annual Distribution of U.S. Bilateral Foreign Aid, 1976-2005
As Figure 5.1 depicts, specific years saw major shifts in the total amount of foreign aid allocated by the United States. In this sample, total U.S. bilateral foreign aid prior to 9/11 peaked in 1985, when the United States provided a total of $32.63 billion in foreign aid. Of this, about $22.2 billion was provided as economic aid with an addition $10.4 billion in military aid. 1997 marked a low
139 point for U.S. foreign aid with only $18.34 billion provided that year due to
President Clinton’s fiscal retrenchment. Both economic and military aid amounts were just over half of their 1985 levels at $12.8 billion and $5.5 billion, respectively. By 2005, the picture was very different. The United States gave over
$14.4 billion in bilateral foreign aid with an overwhelming $32.7 billion provided as economic aid.267 While the fluctuations in total U.S. foreign aid are related to variation that is specific to certain countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq in the
2000s, the variation also reflects changes in U.S. budgetary pressures and preferences. With this in mind, I introduce a control variable indicating each year in the sample. The variable marks, for example, Indonesia in 1976, India in 1976, etc., to create year fixed-effects which control for any variation unique to that year thereby capturing any policy or budgetary changes made in a given year which broadly affected U.S. foreign aid policy.
As noted, some countries have acted as flashpoints for international conflict, attracting U.S. foreign aid both to themselves and neighbouring countries over time. Relevant examples would include the countries of Southeast Asia during Vietnam War as well as the effects of the recent war in Afghanistan for neighbouring countries in South and Central Asia. Therefore, year-specific effects may interact with political dynamics associated with world regions.268
267 All figures are reported in constant (2009) dollars for the sake of comparability. 268 Donald P.Green, Soo Yeon Kim, and David H. Yoon, “Dirty Pool,” International Organization 55.2 (2001): 441-468.
140 Figure 5.2: Annual Distribution of U.S. Economic Aid by Region, 1976-2005
Figure 5.3: Annual Distribution of U.S. Military Aid by Region, 1976-2005
141 The relevance of such dynamics to the allocation of foreign aid is reflected in Figures 5.2 and 5.3, which show the annual regional distribution of U.S. economic and military aid, respectively. While, on average, the Middle East has been the main recipient of economic aid, its level of priority has varied over time.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Middle East was the primary recipient of economic aid but aid levels declined considerably throughout the late 1980s and
1990s. Aid to Europe increased following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent Russian debt crisis. The declining trend in economic aid to the Middle
East was rapidly reversed with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Figure 5.3 illustrates that the Middle East has received the lion’s share of U.S. military assistance, even with the exclusion of Israel.269 During the height of the Vietnam War, countries in
Asia were receiving substantial amounts of military assistance. Military aid to
Asia was, however, dwarfed by the sheer scale of aid to the Middle East beginning in 1979 with the Egypt-Israel peace accords. Military aid to the Middle
East saw the same pattern of decline from the late 1980s onward as economic aid with the increase in aid following the invasion of Iraq also discernable in terms of military assistance.
Because regional dynamics may be influencing the results presented in
Chapter 4, I also include region-year fixed-effects by way of an interaction between the year control variable and each region (e.g., Asia in 1976, Asia in
269 The decline in military aid in 1980 was consistent across the Middle East, but had the greatest effect in Egypt where aid fell from $3.83 billion in FY1979 to $2 million in FY 1980. However, in FY 1980 military aid rebounded to $1.17 billion. Despite the massive drop in aid in 1980, the Middle East continued to receive more military assistance than any other region. United States Agency for International Development (USAID), US Overseas Loans and Grants: Obligations and Loan Authorizations, July 1, 1945-September 30, 2010, Washington, DC: USAID, 2011.
142 1977, Africa in 1976, Africa in 1977, etc.).270 This alleviates the possibility that the observed empirical results are the consequence of spurious temporal or spatial effects by controlling for other factors in particular parts of the world and particular years that may affect the results.
A further potential specification issue relating to temporal dynamics is determining the appropriate time lag for foreign aid. In Chapter 4, a one-year lag was employed in order to deal with reverse causality and in consideration of the lag between the creation of the U.S. budget and the allocation of aid. A two-year lag may be more appropriate in part because aid recipient governments may make their own budgetary decisions dependent upon the amount of foreign aid they will receive from the United States. In addition, it may take more than a year for foreign aid to translate into the specific capacity requirements necessary for coercion. At the same time, the case of Indonesia (discussed in the following chapter) demonstrates that many governments are proactive in their planning and push for the United States to meet their own budgetary requirements. Therefore, budgetary planning may be much more coordinated than previously thought.
As an empirical assessment of the appropriateness of the specifications employed in the previous chapter, Table 5.1 provides estimates with the one- and two-year lag specifications for foreign aid while including fixed-effects for year
(Y) and region-year (RY). Models I and IV have a one-year lag while models II and V have a two-year aid lag for each type of bilateral U.S. foreign aid. Models
III and VI include both the one- and two-year lag of each form of aid. Models I
270 I specify five world regions: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, including North Africa.
143 through III are estimated using the year fixed-effects while models IV to VI feature the region-year fixed-effect. The imposition of the year and region-year fixed-effects does little to alter the odds ratios in comparison with those reported in Chapter 4. The exception to this is the result for military aid when region-year fixed-effects are employed. Both the year and region-year fixed-effects are therefore retained for the remainder of the analysis to control for temporal trends and temporal trends specific to certain regions.
Table 5.1: Foreign Aid and Repression, Ordered Logit (1976-2005)
I II III IV V VI
Ln(mil Aid) t-1 0.927** 0.879** 1.002 0.933 (0.029) (0.054) (0.025) (0.054) Ln(mil Aid) t-2 0.935*** 1.032 1.006 1.053 (0.023) (0.052) (0.029) (0.053) Ln(econ Aid) t-1 1.151*** 1.067 1.072*** 1.029 (0.030) (0.055) (0.024) (0.052) Ln(econ Aid) t-2 1.158*** 1.105* 1.084*** 1.065 (0.032) (0.059) (0.029) (0.055) Controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Fixed Effects Y Y Y RY RY RY N 2922 2827 2777 2922 2827 2777 Pseudo R2 0.1952 0.1981 0.1999 0.2180 0.2214 0.2223 Wald Chi2 409.70 1904.97 1749.30 2385.24 3038.58 2336.16 Log pseudo- - - likelihood -3384.26 -3260.98 3197.35 -3288.47 -3166.47 3106.77 Note: Odds ratios with bootstrapped standard errors reported in parentheses. Cut points and coefficients for other explanatory variables are not reported. Similar results are obtained for Models III and VI when the year fixed effect is removed. ***p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *p<0.10
With regard to the appropriate temporal lag for the foreign aid variables, the results suggest that there is little difference between the one- and two-year lag specifications. Similar odds ratios with appropriate levels of statistical significance are obtained. The main difference is when the one- and two-year lags are combined in order to capture a multi-year dynamic. Model III shows that
144 military aid given in the previous year is negatively associated with repression while economic aid given two years prior is positively associated with repression.
While the direction of association is the same and the one- and two-year lags are significant when estimated separately, the combination of the two has unclear effects. As a result, model VI has no significant results for aid despite the positive result for economic aid seen in models IV and V. Because the use of a two-year foreign aid lag does not appear to have a notable effect on the results, I maintain the one-year lag in order to maximise the number of observations in the study.
Changes in the International System
While annual fluctuations may occasionally have significant implications for the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion, major changes in the structure of the international system can alter both the amounts and types of foreign aid being provided by the United States as well as the purposes for which recipients are given aid. Earlier studies of U.S. bilateral foreign aid policy sought to assess whether the security considerations associated with the Cold War were in decline relative to the promotion of economic or ideological goals in the post-
Cold War period.271 Such studies often dealt with a very limited number of years following the end of the Cold War and thus had tentative conclusions. This trend continued despite the increasing availability of data. For example, Brian Lai’s
2003 study only examines a limited range of years, from 1982 to 1996, while
271 James Meernik, Eric L. Krueger, and Steven C. Poe, “Testing Models of US Foreign Policy: Foreign Aid during and after the Cold War,” The Journal of Politics 60.1 (1998): 63-85; Hook, “‘Building democracy’ through foreign aid.”
145 Thad Dunning’s replication of Goldsmith’s article on aid to sub-Saharan Africa focuses on the slightly expanded period of 1975 to 1997.272 On the whole, prior research has concluded that the determinants of U.S. foreign aid policy and the effects of U.S. foreign aid on human rights practices have remained fairly constant over time despite rhetorical shifts among policymakers.273
In order to address the potential shift in foreign aid dynamics associated with the end of the Cold War, I estimate models of state coercion for the Cold
War (1976-1990) and post-Cold War (1991-2009) periods.274 Tables A5.1 and
A5.2 in the Appendix to this chapter provide the summary statistics for the key variables of interest during both of these periods. Notable differences between these periods include a higher average level of state violence and lower level of military aid in the post-Cold War period. In general, the results suggest that the positive relationship between economic aid and coercion found in the preceding analysis may be driven primarily by the post-Cold War period, which dominates the overall sample. In addition, the negative effect of military aid on state coercion appears only in the post-Cold War period.
272 Thad Dunning, “Conditioning the Effects of Aid: Cold War Politics, Donor Credibility, and Democracy in Africa,” International Organization 58.2 (2004): 409-423; Brian Lai, “Examining the Goals of US Foreign Assistance in the Post-cold War Period, 1991-96,” Journal of Peace Research 40.1 (2003): 103-128; Arthur A. Goldsmith, “Foreign Aid and Statehood in Africa,” International Organization 55.1 (2001): 123-148. 273 While human rights abusive regimes may be somewhat less likely to receive foreign aid, and may receive less of it, newly democratic countries are also less likely to be selected as aid recipients. See, Hook, “‘Building Democracy’ through Foreign Aid”; and, Lai, “Examining the Goals of US Foreign Assistance in the Post-cold War Period,” 119. These findings, combined with earlier work focused on US foreign aid policy during the Cold War, suggest that normative or humanitarian motivations in US foreign aid policy have at best been inconsistently applied and at worst have failed to affect foreign aid allocations. 274 Dunning chooses to split the sample into the Cold War period and post-Cold War period in 1987 (Dunning, “Conditioning the Effects of Aid”). Other authors use the year 1990 as the end point of the Cold War. See, Meernik, Krueger, and Poe, “Testing Models of US Foreign Policy”; Lai, “Examining the Goals of US Foreign Assistance in the Post-cold War Period.” I follow this convention and mark 1991 as the beginning of the post-Cold War period.
146 Table 5.2: Foreign Aid and State Coercion during the Cold War, Ordered Logit (1976-1990)
State State Violence Violence Repression Repression Torture Torture
Ln(mil aid) t-1 1.408*** 1.547*** 0.958 1.057 0.781** 0.934 (0.142) (0.177) (0.042) (0.045) (0.082) (0.120)
Ln(econ aid) t-1 1.051 1.004 1.201*** 1.081 1.331*** 1.184 (0.115) (0.093) (0.058) (0.052) (0.139) (0.124) Fixed Effects Y RY Y RY Y RY Controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes N 1251 1251 1222 1222 925 925 Pseudo R2 0.2998 0.3362 0.1815 0.2075 0.2779 0.3073 Wald Chi2 259.94 159.73 1086.47 1147.17 226.81 224.66 Log pseudo- - likelihood -268.876 -254.932 -1421.422 -1376.349 -305.351 292.932 Note: Odds ratios are reported with bootstrapped standard errors in parentheses. Cut points and coefficients for other explanatory variables are not reported. ***p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *p<0.10.
Table 5.2 presents the results of the state coercion model estimated for the
Cold War period. The models are based on those reported in Chapter 4 with the addition of the year and region-year fixed effects. The odds ratios for other explanatory variables are not reported for the sake of brevity. The association between military aid and state violence is the most consistent finding presented in
Table 5.2. The odds ratio is positive and statistically significant when both year and region-year fixed-effects specifications are employed. This is not the case for the other dependent variables, where the imposition of region-year fixed-effects pulls the statistical significance of the aid variables below traditional levels. When only year fixed-effects are employed, economic aid has a positive and significant relationship to repression and torture. Military aid has the same negative association with torture that was identified in the previous chapter.
147 Because Egypt stands out as a major outlier for this period (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2), I exclude Egypt and re-estimate the models shown in Table 5.2. Once
Egypt is dropped from the sample, the positive association of economic aid with both repression and torture reaches acceptable levels of statistical significance, even with the region-year fixed-effects. The results for the year fixed-effects remain unchanged. This suggests that the region-year fixed-effects are more sensitive to the presence of outliers as they are picked up at the region level. This is particularly true in the case of Egypt, which accounts for the bulk of foreign aid provided to the Middle East.
In general, the results for the Cold War largely mirror those presented in the previous chapter, particularly so when the outlier of Egypt is excluded. That these results persist even after the inclusion of year fixed-effects provides further evidence of the robustness of the previously reported findings. The main difference in results is that there is no observed relationship between economic aid and state violence when the sample is limited to the Cold War years.
The results for the post-Cold War period are presented in Table 5.3.
Economic aid has a consistent positive relationship with all three forms of state coercion, although the association with state violence falls below statistical significance when region-year fixed-effects are used. Military aid, on the other hand, is only associated with repression in the post-Cold War period and this finding falls below acceptable levels of statistical significance when the region- year fixed-effect is imposed. Economic aid therefore appears to be the key component of foreign aid associated state coercion in the contemporary period.
148 Table 5.3: Foreign Aid and State Coercion after the Cold War, Ordered Logit (1991-2005)
State State Violence Violence Repression Repression Torture Torture
Ln(mil aid) t-1 0.853 0.926 0.922** 0.969 0.944 0.964 (0.088) (0.101) (0.036) (0.038) (0.091) (0.108) Ln(econ aid) t-1 1.136* 1.065 1.150*** 1.111*** 1.320*** 1.267*** (0.077) (0.062) (0.039) (0.037) (0.100) (0.102) Fixed Effects Y RY Y RY Y RY Controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes N 1705 1705 1700 1700 1699 1699 Pseudo R2 0.3350 0.3450 0.2164 0.2377 0.1526 0.1672 Wald Chi2 331.99 434.22 1104.20 1373.75 86.91 171.26 Log pseudo- likelihood -496.510 -489.089 -1928.005 -1875.750 -349.789 -343.754 Note: Odds ratios are reported with bootstrapped standard errors in parentheses. Cut points and coefficients for other explanatory variables are not reported. ***p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *p<0.10.
As the results for the post-Cold War period are likely to be highly influenced by the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, I drop these cases and re- estimate the models. When Afghanistan and Iraq are excluded military aid becomes negatively associated with state violence at statistically significant levels. Afghanistan is reported as having episodes of state violence for almost the entire period of analysis, from 1978-1992 and from 1995-2002. State violence was recorded in Iraq from 1988-1996, 1999, 2001 and 2003-2005. Neither country received U.S. military assistance during the years in which state violence was reported prior to 2002. All other findings remain the same.
Table 5.4: Summary of Findings with Year Fixed-Effects
Military Aid Economic Aid Cold War State Violence (+) Repression (+) Torture (-) Torture (+) Post-Cold War Repression (-) State Violence (+) Repression (+) Torture (+)
149 Table 5.4 presents a summary of the findings based on the estimated year fixed-effects models and the full sample. Most significantly, the relationship between U.S. bilateral military aid and state coercion varies between the Cold
War and post-Cold War periods. The lack of consistency across temporal periods suggests that the relationship between military aid and coercion is less clear than the conventional wisdom suggests. While military aid may have been positively associated with state violence during the Cold War, there is evidence that it may currently work to mitigate government repression.
The difference in relationship between U.S. bilateral military aid and state coercion could be attributed to several factors. First, the nature of military aid has changed over time from grants and foreign military financing, forms of direct budgetary support, to loans and arms sales that are tied to the acquisition of U.S. goods. Second, there has been a shifting emphasis within the U.S. military establishment regarding the importance of military training and professionalization as part of military assistance. Third, the attention paid to torture as a form of government repression has increased in recent decades and may have resulted in greater oversight through Congress, human rights organizations, or other mechanisms. Because much of the anecdotal evidence from the Cold War associated military aid, and in particular U.S.-sponsored military training, with military regimes accused of widespread torture,275 it is
275 For example, Timothy J. Kepner, “Torture 101: The Case against the United States for Atrocities Committed by School of the Americas Alumni,” Dickinson Journal of International Law 19 (2000-2001): 475-530; Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, School of Assassins: Guns, Greed, and Globalization, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001; Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas, Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
150 possible that military aid has received greater oversight than economic aid with regard to this issue. Fourth, during the Cold War, the United States may have channelled foreign aid to countries that were generally more violent including those facing Communist insurgencies and which would have been more likely to engage in state killing in the context of a civil war given sufficient resources. I examine one such case, El Salvador, in the concluding chapter of this study.
The patterns linking economic aid and state coercion are much clearer.
Bilateral U.S. economic aid is consistently associated with increased levels of state coercion throughout the period of analysis, with the exception of state violence during the Cold War. The evidence strongly suggests that economic aid is the basis for the observed association between foreign aid and subsequent state coercion. Because economic aid is not subject to the same oversight or human rights conditionality as military aid, it is possible that such aid is both easier and more likely to be directed towards coercive purposes. For example, economic aid could potentially be used to acquire relevant instruments of coercion such as police and crowd control equipment because such items often fall outside of the purview of military aid. Economic aid can also support the construction of relevant state infrastructure, such as prisons, as part of broader state development initiatives.
The Post-9/11 Period
A further investigation of the temporal dynamics underlying the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion was conducted based on the
151 idea that the events of September 11, 2001 (9/11) were an external shock to the
United States and had several important repercussions for American foreign policy generally and more specifically for the global distribution of U.S. foreign aid.276 First, 9/11 clearly affected the amount of foreign aid that the United States gave as well as the countries that were designated as recipients of that aid. Both military and economic aid totals skyrocketed as indicated in Figure 5.1, in part due to America’s military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq. Countries that aligned with the United States in the War on Terror received increases in foreign aid, including Pakistan and lesser-known examples such as Uzbekistan. At the same time, a concern with so-called “weak states” emerged in U.S. foreign policy discourse. Foreign aid became a tool for preventing weak states from failing and collapsing into anarchy, thereby necessitating foreign intervention.277
In addition to changing aspects of U.S. foreign aid policy, the U.S. reaction to 9/11 may have had a significant impact on global patterns in state coercion. First, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan allowed many countries to reframe their own internal conflicts as part of the global War on Terror, which was interpreted as targeting radical Islamist movements.278 U.S. policies such as
“extraordinary rendition” 279 have also been seen as contributing to an
276 Only recently has scholarship emerged which looks at the effects of 9/11 and the War on Terror for US foreign aid policy (see Fleck and Kilby, “Changing Aid Regimes?”). 277 Robert Gates, “Helping Others Defend Themselves: The Future of US Security Assistance,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2010), accessed 1 February 2012, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66224/robert-m-gates/helping-others-defend-themselves. 278 Jessica N. Trisko, “Coping with the Islamist Threat: Analysing Repression in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan,” Central Asian Survey 24.4 (2005): 373-389. 279 Extraordinary rendition is defined as “a hybrid human rights violation, combining elements of arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, forcible transfer, torture, denial of access to consular officials, and denial of impartial tribunals. It involves the state-sponsored abduction of a person in one country, with or without the cooperation of the government of that country, and the
152 international climate where the use of state coercion is often accepted as a justified extension of state sovereignty.280
Given the number of potential ways that 9/11 may have affected the relationship between U.S. bilateral foreign aid and state coercion, there are several ways to conceptualise its effects. I first employed a 9/11 dummy variable indicating the year 2002, which was the first annual observation following the events of 9/11 and the initial period in which changes in the distribution of U.S. foreign aid would have been recorded. When included in the models for the post-
Cold War sample, this variable was significant only for the torture measure
(results not shown). The second 9/11 impact variable indicated the years 2002 and
2003 to capture a broader 9/11 effect which included the major military operations in Afghanistan. This variable was significant only for state violence
(results not shown). The final specification I employed was a dummy variable for the entire post-9/11 period (2001-2005). The results are presented in Table 5.5.
subsequent transfer of that person to another country for detention and interrogation.” See, David Weissbrodt and Amy Bergquist, “Extraordinary Rendition: A Human Rights Analysis,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 19 (2006): 127. 280 See, for example, Leila Nadya Sadat, “Ghost Prisoners and Black Sites: Extraordinary Rendition under International Law,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 37 (2005/2006): 309-342; Naureen Shah, “Knocking on the Torturer's Door: Confronting International Complicity in the US Rendition Program,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 38.3 (2007): 581-660.
153 Table 5.5: Foreign Aid and State Coercion with 9/11 Impact, Ordered Logit (1976-2005)
State State Violence Violence Repression Repression Torture Torture
Ln(mil aid) t-1 1.031 1.118* 0.932** 1.008 0.866** 0.957 (0.051) (0.069) (0.027) (0.035) (0.053) (0.053)
Ln(econ aid) t-1 1.087** 1.036 1.152*** 1.072*** 1.270*** 1.169*** (0.041) (0.062) (0.031) (0.028) (0.062) (0.060) September 11 0.627* 0.605** 0.773** 0.771** 0.872 0.824 (0.150) (0.151) (0.087) (0.086) (0.284) (0.330) Fixed Effects Y RY Y RY Y RY Controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes N 2956 2956 2922 2922 2624 2624 Pseudo R2 0.3071 0.3231 0.1957 0.2185 0.2135 0.2298 Wald Chi2 519.27 541.57 1785.93 1846.01 548.87 517.07 Log pseudo- likelihood -793.67 -775.31 -3381.95 -3286.18 -683.92 -669.75 Note: Odds ratios are reported with bootstrapped standard errors in parentheses. Cut points and coefficients for other explanatory variables are not reported. ***p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *p<0.10.
The results suggest that, when the entire sample is considered, the post-
9/11 period does seem systematically different with regard to state violence and
repression. What is most noticeable, however, is the absence of an association
between the post-9/11 period and torture. When Afghanistan and Iraq are omitted
from the sample, the only substantive change from the results reported in Table
5.5 is that the relationship between economic aid and state violence falls below
acceptable levels of statistical significance. The September 11 variable remains
insignificant for torture, which suggests that despite allegations associated with
the policy of extraordinary rendition, the post-9/11 years have not been
characterised by systematically different patterns in the use of torture.
While it remains uncertain whether the events of 9/11 had as major an
impact on U.S. foreign policy as the end of the Cold War did, it is clear that the
154 association between foreign aid and state coercion has persisted despite these shifts in the international system. The results presented above provide consistent evidence of a positive relationship between foreign aid and state coercion. In particular, bilateral U.S. economic aid is positively associated with all forms of state coercion considered in this study. These findings should serve as caution to those who argue that high levels of U.S. (and Soviet) military aid drove the patterns of state coercion seen during the Cold War. This issue is further investigated in the case studies presented in the next two chapters.
Changes in American Foreign Policy
It is possible that the differences between the Cold War, post-Cold War, and post-9/11 periods described above could be attributed in part to important shifts in U.S. foreign policy brought about by changes in the executive branch of government. Even though Congress largely determines foreign aid policy, the case evidence presented in the next chapter strongly suggests that members of the executive have petitioned the relevant committees and Congress based on the needs or expectations of individual countries with which the administration had strong relationships. Therefore, substantial room exists for the U.S. executive not only to determine the broad strokes of U.S. foreign aid policy, but also to intervene in the aid allocation process with regard to specific countries.
Many have emphasised the differing foreign policy orientations of the
Carter and Reagan administrations and assessed whether these differences translated into distinct foreign aid policies with differing effects on human rights
155 practices.281 The findings largely suggest that despite the human rights rhetoric associated with President Carter, few differences can be discerned between the foreign policies of these particular administrations with regard to human rights conditions abroad. Such analyses deserve to be revisited in the post-Cold War period. While George H. W. Bush’s presidency continued trends established under Reagan, President Clinton has typically been thought of in a light similar to
Carter given his use of foreign aid as a tool of democracy promotion.
Furthermore, many contend that the United States, after the events of 9/11, has adopted a more geo-strategic foreign policy reminiscent of the Cold War era.
While the effects of President George W. Bush’s neo-conservative (alternatively, neo-Reaganite) foreign policy are indistinguishable from the broader post-9/11 period, the degree to which his foreign policy echoed earlier Republican administrations is a valid point of analysis.282
Republican administrations clearly dominated the Cold War portion of the sample addressed in this study (10 out of 15 years), and make up approximately half of the post-Cold War period (7 out of 15 years). To capture some of the political dynamics discussed above, I created dummy variables for the democratic administrations within these periods: the Carter administration (1977-1980) and
281 James Lebovic, “National Interests and US Foreign Aid: The Carter and Reagan Years,” Journal of Peace Research 25.2 (1988): 115-135; Steven C. Poe, “Human Rights and Economic Aid Allocation under Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter,” American Journal of Political Science 36.1 (1992): 147-167; Michael Stohl, David Carleton, and Steven E. Johnson, “Human Rights and US Foreign Assistance from Nixon to Carter,” Journal of Peace Research 21.3 (1984): 215-226. 282 While Daalder and Lindsay argue that George W. Bush’s foreign policy was “revolutionary” and Gaddis claimed that it could come to represent one of the most sweeping changes since the end of the Cold War, as Leffler points out, Bush’s foreign policy had numerous historical precedents, including commonalities with Clinton. See, Ivo H. Daadler and James M. Lindsay, American Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2003; John Lewis Gaddis, “A Grand Strategy of Transformation,” Foreign Policy 133 (Nov.-Dec. 2002): 50-57; Melvyn P. Leffler, “Bush's Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy 144 (Sep.- Oct. 2004): 22-28.
156 the Clinton administration (1993-2000). These variables were then added to the standard model of state coercion developed in the previous chapter to determine whether these administrations were systematically different. The results are presented in Table 5.6, which is based estimates models of state violence based on ordered logistic regressions and reports odds ratios.
Table 5.6: Foreign Aid and State Violence with Democratic Presidential Administrations, Ordered Logit (1976-2005)
Cold War Post-Cold War I II III IV
Ln(mil aid) t-1 1.440*** 1.570*** 0.853* 0.926 (0.154) (0.164) (0.0731) (0.074)
Ln( econ aid) t-1 1.046 1.007 1.136** 1.064 (0.107) (0.095) (0.068) (0.058) Carter Presidency 2.709** 2.737** (1.263) (1.378) Clinton Presidency 0.973 0.980 (0.177) (0.174) Fixed Effects Y RY Y RY Controls Yes Yes Yes Yes N 1251 1251 1705 1705 Pseudo R2 0.3068 0.3428 0.3350 0.3450 Wald Chi2 269.53 183.52 305.65 328.58 Log pseudo- likelihood -266.22 -252.37 -496.50 -489.08 Note: Odds ratios are reported with bootstrapped standard errors in parentheses. Cut points and coefficients for other explanatory variables are not reported. ***p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *p<0.10.
Most notably, the indicator for the Carter years is statistically significant and highly positively associated with subsequent state violence. This result is found with both year and region-year fixed-effects. During Carter’s presidency, state violence was recorded in twelve countries, often for multiple years.283 When
283 The countries are Afghanistan, Angola, Argentina, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Uganda.
157 Carter came to power in 1977, the Cambodian genocide was at its height.284 At the same time, Ugandan President Idi Amin was nearing the end of his campaign to purge the country of political opponents and the Indian (Asian) ethnic minority.285 President Suharto of Indonesia was engaged in a military occupation of East Timor that resulted in tens of thousands of Timorese civilian casualties in the first five years, as discussed in depth in the following chapter.
While the scale of this violence is not captured in the simple binary measure employed here, whether President Carter’s foreign aid policies actively contributed to the extent of violence during this period, or whether the association found here is the product of decolonization or other systemic processes that coincided with the Carter administration is an important subject for future study.
The evidence at hand suggests that while President Carter oversaw important reforms in U.S. foreign aid policy, foreign aid to certain human rights abusive
284 Only in April 1978 did President Carter acknowledge that the Khmer Rouge was engaged in massive human rights violations, three years into the violence. Despite this acknowledgement, the United States gave approximately $89.9 million in bilateral economic aid to the Khmer Rouge government in 1980 after Vietnam’s 1979 invasion. A further $30.2 million was given in 1981. At the same time, President Carter himself worked to enable the Khmer Rouge government to maintain their seat at the United Nations despite the establishment of a Vietnamese-backed government in Cambodia, which was responsible for ending the genocide. 285 Levels of US bilateral foreign aid to Uganda varied throughout Idi Amin’s presidency. In 1971, when Amin came to power through a military coup, the United States had allocated Uganda $15 million in economic aid. This increased to $24 million in 1972 before dropping to just under a million in 1974 where it remained for the rest of Amin’s rule. Given the political controversies and increasing diplomatic isolation of Amin’s regime—the United States closed its Embassy in Kampala in 1973—it is notable that the United States continued to provide financial support for Uganda in other ways. In 1977, coffee exports to the United States amounted to 44% of coffee sales, which in turn accounted for almost all of Uganda’s exports. The Ugandan military received substantial American support, albeit from US corporations such as Page Airways, which acted as a third party for military hardware sales to Uganda. During Congressional investigations in the late 1970s, evidence was also uncovered that Ugandan police pilots were receiving advanced flight training in Connecticut, Florida, and Texas. However, only the Ugandan military possessed the helicopters that the pilots were being trained for. See, Ralph D. Nurnberger, “The United States and Idi Amin: Congress to the Rescue,” African Studies Review 25.1 (1982): 49-65.
158 regimes clearly increased during his time in office with, based on the results presented thus far, detrimental effects on human rights in those countries.
The positive effect of military aid during the Cold War period seen in
Table 5.6 is consistent with the other findings reported in this chapter. The effect of military aid differs somewhat in the post-Cold War period when the Clinton years are controlled for. The negative association between military aid and state violence reaches an acceptable level of statistical significance although the
Clinton variable itself is not significant. This is despite the fact that state violence was also widespread during Clinton’s presidency. Overall, then, the results suggest that the Carter years were systematically different from the Republicans administrations that followed. However, contrary to popular perspectives on
Carter’s presidency, U.S. foreign policy during this period may have negatively affected global levels of state violence.
In sum, the observed association between foreign aid and state coercion is driven by economic aid, which is positively associated with subsequent repression and torture throughout the sample and additionally positively correlated with state violence in the post-Cold War period. All of the robustness checks and changes in model specification reflect the consistency of this finding.
Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated that economic and military aid have distinct effects on state coercion. While military aid was positively associated with state violence during the Cold War, more significant are the negative findings relating
159 to military aid. U.S. bilateral military aid is negatively associated with torture in the years 1981-1990 and with repression in the post-Cold War period. Given these findings, this chapter raises several additional questions regarding the changing relationship between military aid and coercion including, what are the potential mechanisms through which bilateral military aid may decrease torture in recipient countries? While several potential explanations for the different effect of military and economic aid have been proffered, this issue should be the subject of further research for both scholars and policymakers.
The findings presented in this chapter also raise important questions about why the relationship between foreign aid and state coercion may have differed during the Cold War. Is this attributable to the specific restrictions placed on particular forms of aid in the post-Cold War period or related to the types of states
(U.S.-allied, anti-Communist) that received financial support from the United
States during the Cold War? Was donor oversight more limited during the Cold
War—a sin of omission—or was the supposed principle of “do no harm” ranked second to geopolitics? These questions are not easily answered in the cross- national context of the foregoing analysis. Therefore, the following chapter presents a detailed analysis of the linkages between U.S. bilateral foreign aid and patterns of state coercion in Indonesia both during and after the Cold War to identify the potential causal mechanisms underlying the broader statistical results presented in this, and the previous, chapter.
160 Appendix
Table A5.1: Summary Statistics for the Cold War Sample (1976-1990)
Variable Obs. Mean Std. Dev. Min Max State Violence 1630 0.089 0.285 0 1 Repression 1532 1.872 1.021 0 4 Torture 1056 0.830 0.375 0 1 US Military Aid 1505 48.457 228.432 0 3834.8 US Economic Aid 1602 78.849 246.403 0 4372.8
Table A5.2: Summary Statistics for the post-Cold War Sample (1991-2005)
Variable Obs. Mean Std. Dev. Min Max State Violence 2011 0.150 0.357 0 1 Repression 1946 1.822 1.101 0 4 Torture 1945 0.908 0.288 0 1 US Military Aid 1927 25.799 166.229 0 1923 US Economic Aid 1972 79.703 335.678 0 8825.8
161 Chapter VI. Aid, Arms and Abuses in the Indonesian Archipelago
“Although Indonesian aggression in East Timor has been dependent upon U.S. military aid, and although tens of thousands of East Timorese have been killed by weapons supplied by the U.S., we have faith in the generosity, humanity and goodness of the American people…”
-Mari Alkatiri, FRETILIN representative.286
Introduction
Indonesia has been plagued by political violence since its inception as an independent nation. The colonial legacies of the Dutch and Japanese, combined with intrastate conflict during the early history of the republic, institutionalized certain forms of state violence as acceptable modes of governance. The continual threat of civil war resulted in an inward orientation of the military while external supplies of resources, limited oversight, and substantial political power made the military a powerful actor in Indonesian society. Though much of this violence is rooted in the unique social and political history of the country, international actors have also played an important role by providing both material and political resources to Indonesia.287
In this chapter, I identify two mechanisms linking the provision of foreign aid with subsequent state coercion. The first relates to the use of military aid for
286 Mari Alkatiri, “Statement Submitted by Mari Alkatiri,” East Timor: Five Years After the Indonesian Invasion, Testimony Presented at the Decolonization Committee of the United Nations’ General Assembly, October 1980, Cambridge, MA: Cultural Survival, Inc. 1980, 9. 287 Robinson argues that international actors are responsible for much of the violence seen in East Timor primarily because they failed to use their leverage over Indonesia to stop military operations. (See, Geoffrey Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die:” How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, 62). The argument that I make in this chapter is different in its mechanisms, though not necessarily in its conclusions.
162 internal coercion. Because of the dominant political role played by the Indonesian armed forces, foreign military assistance provided by the United States for military financing or arms sales was easily translated into increased Indonesian military capacity. This heightened coercive capacity was used in bellicose foreign policy moves to expand Indonesian territory. The military occupation of these newly acquired territories led to substantial increases in state coercion as the military employed pacification techniques against inhabitants. This dynamic was aided by the military’s traditional role in governance and the subordination of the police to the military, which resulted in state coercion being used to maintain control of these territories. Second, I demonstrate that U.S. economic aid, and in particular food aid, provided general budgetary support for the central government that was harnessed to support the high levels of military expenditure necessary to maintain stability in the Indonesian archipelago. Military aid alone was not sufficient to sustain the country’s military spending in the 1960s and
1970s. In the absence of economic aid, it is very likely that the limited resources devoted to development would have been channelled to the military.
I begin my analysis of Indonesia in 1949 with the formal independence of
Indonesia. Beginning in 1949, rather than 1976,288 allows me to examine the full history of the United States’ aid relations with Indonesia. Second, the extended time frame captures pivotal events including the transition from President
Sukarno to Suharto, which ushered in a new era of U.S.-Indonesian relations. The
288 The rationale for beginning the cross-national analysis in 1976 was based on the availability of the various coercion metrics as well as changes in the structure of US foreign aid. Because I focus on a broader array of evidence in this chapter, including qualitative accounts of political violence, these concerns are no longer applicable. Changes in the structure of US foreign aid to Indonesia are discussed explicitly in this chapter.
163 transition also altered Indonesia’s economic relations with the rest of the world.
Under Sukarno, Indonesia became heavily indebted and the Suharto administration was faced with the renegotiation of existing debt as well as the need to secure new sources of fiscal support. This need, in large part, drove the close relationship between Indonesia and the United States that developed in the early 1970s.
To understand the Indonesian context, I briefly outline the political development of Indonesia, the evolution of the country’s military and other state institutions, and its history of domestic conflict. After discussing the implications of Indonesia’s unique characteristics for the theory of the coercive effect of foreign aid, I turn to a fine-grained analysis of patterns of U.S. bilateral foreign aid and state coercion in Indonesia. To facilitate the analysis, I divide the discussion into four historical periods: the Sukarno era (1949-1966); the early years of the Suharto regime (1967-1985); the decline of the Suharto regime
(1986-1998); and, the post-Suharto democratic period (1999-2008).
This chapter demonstrates that the financial support provided by the
United States, as well as other bilateral aid donors, allowed for an initial build-up of Indonesia’s coercive capacity during the Sukarno era and the early years of
Suharto’s rule that resulted in substantial increases in state coercion. The continued receipt of U.S. foreign aid in the 1980s allowed for Indonesia to expand its military personnel and maintain a high level of military spending, even when resource constraints were pressing. This created an enduring capacity for violence in the country’s inward-oriented armed forces, the Tentara Nasional Indonesia
164 (TNI).289 As a result, the central government came to consistently use violence as a tool of governance in the newly occupied territories of Papua and East Timor and the separatist province of Aceh. While both domestic and international conditions combined to bring the downfall of Suharto in 1998, an increase in foreign aid in the 2000s allowed subsequent presidents to continue employing violent tactics as part of an effort to quell unrest and maintain the territorial integrity of the Indonesian archipelago.
Indonesia: Background
Indonesia’s tumultuous political history has been keenly affected by the intervention of outside powers. Spanning 5150 kilometres and composed of some
17,000 islands unified under Dutch rule in the late 1800s, the intense use of repression characterised Dutch governance in the first half of the twentieth century. 290 Dutch rule was interrupted by a brief but oppressive Japanese occupation of Indonesia from March 1942 until September 1945, during which existing political and social institutions were utilized to support the war effort.
New coercive institutions such as the civilian militia were created, which strongly influenced the political dynamics of the post-war period. In many ways, the political history of Indonesia has been shaped by the fact that, “Indonesia
289 Until 1999, when the police became institutionally separate from the military, the armed forces of Indonesia were known as the Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia (ABRI). I use the more recent designation as the Indonesian National Defence Forces or TNI for the entire period as this has become the conventional terminology. 290 In 1926 over 13,000 Indonesians were arrested and 1,300 sent to prison camps in response to a Communist rebellion in what constituted the most impressive exercise of Dutch authority. See M.C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, c. 1300 to the Present, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981.
165 inherited from the Dutch and Japanese the traditions, assumptions and legal structure of a police state.”291
Indonesia’s independence was itself borne of an armed struggle against the
Dutch attempt at reoccupation following the end of World War II. The 1945 declaration of independence by Sukarno and Hatta was followed by four years of anti-colonial warfare. Although Indonesia became a parliamentary democracy upon formal independence in 1949, on 14 March 1957 President Sukarno dissolved parliament and declared martial law throughout the country in response to a series of regional rebellions and coup attempts. The foundation of democratic governance in Indonesia was further undermined through a series of constitutional changes that culminated in a 5 July 1959 presidential decree dissolving the country’s Constituent Assembly and beginning Indonesia’s period of “Guided
Democracy” during which Sukarno ruled with the backing of the armed forces.
Under Sukarno, Indonesia emerged as a leader of the non-aligned movement. This political agnosticism, combined with his success in achieving independence, gave Sukarno a high degree of credibility within the developing world and leverage over the United States and the Soviet Union. However,
Sukarno’s position became increasingly precarious as multiple challenges to his rule and to the country’s territorial integrity were launched. In 1966, Sukarno turned over emergency powers to Major General Suharto following an abortive coup, allegedly led by Communist sympathizers. Suharto, who became President of Indonesia in March 1967, conducted an extensive anti-Communist purge in response, which resulted in tens of thousands of political prisoners and
291 Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 225.
166 widespread violence against Communist sympathisers.292 These events served to eliminate the only remaining organised form of political opposition in the country.
Suharto was able to consolidate his power domestically through a political system marked by: 1) a single political ideology of Pancasila that rejected ideological alternatives, particularly those associated with Communism and political Islam; 2) unrepresentative elections that ensured his continued rule; and,
3) heavy reliance upon the military for legitimacy and support. While the military played an important balancing role vis-à-vis Sukarno, under Suharto’s “New
Order” and the doctrine of dwifungsi or dual-function, the TNI came to be a central part of the political process and a guarantor of internal stability. In addition to defending the country against external threats, the TNI became a social and political force within Indonesia through mechanisms such as guaranteed parliamentary seats.293
Throughout the three decades of Suharto’s rule, both the President and his family increasingly became the targets of criticism regarding corruption and the substantial power of the TNI within the Indonesian economy. This, combined with the economic shocks of the Asian financial crisis, led to the rapid erosion of popular support for Suharto. Widespread public protests in 1998 led to Suharto’s eventual resignation and the appointment of Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie as
292 Leonard C. Sebastian, Realpolitik Ideology: Indonesia’s Use of Military Force. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006, 375. Almost a decade later, in 1976, reports concluded that approximately 35,000 remained imprisoned. See, “Document 160: Memorandum of Conversation,” 29 June 1976, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1969-1976, Vol. E- 12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969- 76ve12/d160. 293 Ikrar Nusa Bhakti, Sri Yanuarti, and Mochamad Nurhasim, “Military Politics, Ethnicity and Conflict in Indonesia,” CRISE Working Paper No. 62, Oxford, UK: Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity, University of Oxford, 2009, 9.
167 president. Habibie remained in power for a little over a year before Abdurrahman
Wahid was elected to the Presidency in a vote that Habibie did not contest. In July
2001, the People’s Consultative Assembly removed Wahid from power.
Megawati Sukarnoputri, Sukarno’s daughter who was acting Vice President at the time, came to power. Megawati served out the remainder of the presidency only to face electoral defeat in 2004 to the current president, Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono, a retired Army officer. Yudhoyono was subsequently re-elected in
2009 with a majority of votes in the first round, marking Indonesia’s full transition to a democratic political system.
Colonial Legacies and State Institutions
Like the country’s political system, the structure of state institutions is deeply related to the colonial history of Indonesia. By the end of the Japanese occupation during World War II, over 25,000 Indonesian youths had received basic training as Japanese auxiliary forces while 57,000 took part in an Indonesian volunteer army known as Peta (Pembela Tanah Air, Protectors of the Fatherland).
In addition, 80,000 had received guerrilla training as part of the Barisan Pelopor
(Vanguard Column) and 50,000 were trained as part of Barisan Hizbullah (God’s
Forces).294 Thus, when Sukarno declared the independence of Indonesia in August
1945, the Japanese had created so substantial a military capacity amongst the
Indonesian populace that the Indonesian Republican forces were able to wage a successful war of independence against the Dutch. Indeed, by mid-1947
294 Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 192-196.
168 Republican forces amounted to approximately 350,000 regular troops and an additional 470,000 irregulars among a population numbering between 73 and 74 million.295
Map 6.1: Indonesia’s Komando Daerah Militer Post-2002
During this early post-independence period the Republican forces that later became the TNI played a key role in state building by ensuring the territorial integrity of Indonesia. The heavy involvement of the TNI in state building led to an inwardly oriented command structure best illustrated through Indonesia’s
Kodam (komando daerah militer) or regional military command areas. Kodam are the highest level of military command and group the country’s provinces into approximately 12 regions as illustrated in Map 6.1.296 This command structures is deeply related to the TNI’s “Doctrine of Territorial Warfare,” which emphasises that the Indonesian armed forces must be able to return to guerrilla warfare with
295 Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 216. 296 Angel Rabasa and John Haseman, “Origins and Institutional Development of the Indonesian Armed Forces,” The Military and Democracy in Indonesia: Challenges, Politics, and Power, Santa Monica, C.A: RAND Corporation, 2002, 13.
169 the full support of the population in response to a potential invasion.297 The colonial experience and resistance to Dutch re-occupation heavily influence the doctrine. Thus, both the structure and the doctrine of the TNI emphasise an inward organizational orientation.
Due to the politicization of the armed forces, the TNI was allowed to engage in economic activities ranging from the operation of hotels and banks to shipping, real estate, and logging in order to generate revenue to meet constant shortfalls in the annual budget regarding operational expenses.298 While some argue that these unofficial taxes were purely driven by self-interest, others contend that the TNI’s involvement in business was simply a means to an end and that without engaging in extensive business activities the TNI would not have been able to sustain itself given the country’s budgetary constraints.299 The combination of the TNI’s dual-function role and its revenue-generating activity has shaped the nature of the economy and governance since the mid-1960s.
The overwhelming strength of the TNI as a state institution is most clear when compared to the relative weakness of other institutions. As Indonesia pursued economic development in the 1970s, the erosion of “tradition-sanctioned economic relationships and procedures” destabilized rural society and led to such
297 For further details on the Doctrine of Territorial Warfare, including the history and structure of the Kodam, see Sebastian, Realpolitik Ideology, 177-216, and Salim Said, Legitimizing Military Rule: Indonesian Armed Forces Ideology, 1958-2000, Trans. Toenggoel P. Siagian, Jakarta, Indonesia: Pustaka Sinar Harapan, 2006. 298 Damien Kingsbury and Lesley McCulloch, “Military Business in Aceh,” Verandah of Violence: The Background of the Aceh Problem, ed. Anthony Reid, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2006. 199-224. 299 For more details, see Damien Kingsbury, “The Political-Economy of Cross-Border Relations: The TNI and East Timor,” South East Asia Research 11.3 (2003): 274-277, and Bilveer Singh, “The Indonesian Military Business Complex: Origins, Course and Future,” Working Paper No. 354, Canberra, Australia: Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, 2001.
170 a high degree of rural-urban migration that employment opportunities were exceeded and social services became strained.300 The limited provision of social welfare services stemmed from a number of factors. First, some of the TNI’s economic activity became linked to the provision of social services through yayasans, charitable foundations linked to TNI-holding companies, which provided subsidies for housing and medical facilities to members of the TNI and their families.301 Thus, the TNI, which served as the power base for the regime, was not dependent upon state-provided services to the same degree as the general public.
Second, engagement in the economy allowed the TNI to levy clandestine taxes on imports and exports through their control of sea-lanes. In addition to undermining governance, the effect of such unofficial taxes was to channel revenue directly to the TNI rather than provide funds that could be used to create strong institutions for the provision of public services at the national level. Lastly, these problems were compounded by the fact that until 1985 oil revenues were providing well over 10% of the country’s GDP. The Indonesian budget was therefore highly susceptible to changes in the international oil market.
Although foreign aid was intended to alleviate the budgetary pressures on the Indonesian state, population growth continually expanded the country’s developmental needs. In 1960, the country had a population of about 91.9 million
300 “Document 123: National Intelligence Estimate 55-1-75,” 30 June 1975, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969- 76ve12/d123. 301 Dennis C. Blair, Indonesia Commission: Peace and Progress in Papua, New York, NY: Council on Foreign Relations, 2003, 62; Stanley A. Weiss, “Send the Military Back to Business School,” International Herald Tribune, 19 September 2002, accessed 13 February 2012, http://stanleyweiss.net/091902_IHT.htm.
171 but by 1980, the population had risen to 150.8 million. As of 2010, the population exceeded 239.8 million. 302 Despite some positive developments such as increasing primary enrolment rates in the late 1970s and early 1980s, labour participation rates saw limited growth under Suharto, moving from 63% in 1980 to 68% in 2000. Per capita public health expenditure also remained extremely limited, totalling $44.71 in 1995 and $66.22 in 2005.303
Since the fall of Suharto, reforms have led to a weakening of the military, including the separation of the police from the armed forces command structure.
Both economic and political reforms have been aimed at removing the TNI from governance. However, the TNI remain directly subordinate to the president and retain much of their status thanks to on going conflict within the country. “The reality is that the military remains an organization with unmatched institutional reach and political influence in a country where state capacity remains limited,” writes Beeson.304
The Long Shadow of Conflict
The TNI has historically been chiefly concerned with eliminating separatist movements in the country. This dynamic began with President
Sukarno’s struggle to gain political control over the archipelago following the
302 All figures were obtained from the World Bank, “Net Bilateral Aid Flows from DAC Donors,” World Development Indicators, Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2012. 303 This can be compared to neighbouring countries such as the Philippines, which had a per capita public health expenditure of $66.70 in 1995 and $106.69 in 2005. Malaysia provides an even more drastic comparison with expenditures of $221.25 in 1995 and $486.51 in 2005. All figures from the World Bank, “Net Bilateral Aid Flows.” 304 Mark Beeson, “Civil-Military Relations in Indonesia and the Philippines: Will the Thai Coup Prove Contagious?” Armed Forces & Society 34.3 (2008): 474-490.
172 Japanese withdrawal but continues today as the conflict between the Javanese,305
Jakarta-based centre and the outlying periphery. While there have been numerous episodes of religious conflict306 and ethnic violence between indigenous groups and migrants, 307 the intrastate conflicts associated with the secessionist and autonomy movements in Papua, East Timor and Aceh have drawn the attention.
Initially known as Irian Jaya or Dutch New Guinea, the territory now divided into the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua remained a colonial possession of the Dutch after the independence of Indonesia. The
Netherlands intended for the region to remain autonomous after it ceded control.
However, American and Indonesian pressure through the United Nations eventually led to a 1962 agreement for a phased handover to Indonesia. When it became clear in 1969 that the popular referendum for Papuan integration into
Indonesia, known legally as “the Act of Free Choice,” was not going to provide any choice to the local people, local Papuan elites launched the Free Papua
Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, OPM). In the decades that followed,
305 The Javanese are the largest ethnic group in Indonesia, amounting to approximately 42% of the population according to the 2009 census. 306 Indonesia has also witnessed episodes of religious violence between Christians and Muslims in Central Sulawesi and the Moluccas, with estimates of over 5,000 people killed and 500,000 displaced. Indeed, as recently as February 2011, the severity of religious violence in Indonesia continued to attract significant international attention. See, Philip J. Crowley, “Religious Violence in Indonesia,” Press Statement, 9 February 2011, Washington, DC: US Department of State, 2011, accessed 12 February 2012, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/02/156238.htm. 307 Suharto’s transmigration program laid the foundation for episodes of ethnic violence in Papua in the late 1990s and in Kalimantan, where the indigenous Dayak people clashed with migrants from the island of Madura in 2001. See, BBC News, “Aceh Rebels Sign Peace Agreement,” BBC News, 15 August 2005, accessed 13 January 2012, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia- pacific/4151980.stm.
173 violent conflict occurred between OPM and the TNI but had largely died down by the mid-1980s.308
Like Papua, East (Portuguese) Timor was integrated into Indonesian territory though annexation following decolonization. Shortly after the Portuguese began their withdrawal in 1975, a civil war broke out among competing Timorese political factions, which prompted requests from Portugal for “the immediate intervention of international forces, designated from one or more countries in the area.”309 The Indonesian government had been undertaking covert operations to bolster pro-unification movements in East Timor since late 1974 (including support for an August 1975 coup attempt)310 but only in late 1975 did it officially intervene with 32,000 Indonesian troops.311
The annexation of East Timor was substantially more brutal than the relatively peaceful takeover of Papua, due in part to armed resistance by
FRETILIN (Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente, Revolutionary
Front for an Independent East Timor), which claimed Portuguese-trained
308 According to the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset, civil war between OPM and the TNI occurred from 1967-1969, 1976-1978, in 1981 and 1984. See, Lotta Themnér and Peter Wallensteen, “Armed Conflict, 1946-2011,” Journal of Peace Research 49.4 (2012): 565-575. 309 Michele Turner, Telling East Timor: Personal Testimonies 1942-1992, Kensington, Australia: New South Wales University Press, 1992; United Nations General Assembly, 30th Session, Letter dated 23 August 1975 from the Charge d’affaires a.i. of the Permanent Mission of Portugal to the United Nations addressed in the Secretary-General, (A/10209 s/11313) 25 August 1975, New York: UN Official Record, 1975. 310 Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 34-38. 311 On 6 December 1975, the Indonesian House of Representatives called upon the government to take steps to restore peace and security in the region following an influx of refugees into the neighbouring Indonesian territory of West Timor. By November of 1975, the Indonesian government claimed that over 40,000 refugees had spilled over into the western half of the island of Timor, part of the Indonesian province of Nusa Tenggara Timur, requiring the government to spend about 100 million rupiah on their care. See, Republic of Indonesia, Department of Foreign Affairs, The Question of Portuguese Timor, Jakarta, Indonesia: The Department of Information, Republic of Indonesia, 1975, 24.
174 personnel of approximately 2,500 troops and 7,000 militia.312 By late 1976, the
Catholic Church estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 Timorese had died as a result of the conflict with Indonesia.313 Approximately 18,600 of those civilian deaths are directly attributable to disappearances and murder, which constitute the main forms of state coercion witnessed in East Timor.314
Despite its integration into the Republic of Indonesia on 17 July 1976 as the province of Timor Timur, the occupation in East Timor did not normalize until
1980 due to continuing episodic violence involving FRETILIN forces.315 The eventual resolution of the conflict in East Timor stemmed largely from international intervention. After President Suharto left office, Portugal and
Indonesia undertook discussions mediated by the UN, which led to a decision to create a referendum on East Timor's future status. An UN-sanctioned regional peacekeeping force arrived in September 1999 and on the 31st of that October, the last Indonesian soldiers left the territory. In the interim period, violence surged.
On 20 May 2002, Timor-Leste became an independent state and the UN peacekeeping mission subsequently concluded on 20 May 2005. The UN
312 The Portuguese colonial army (Tropas) had both local volunteers and conscripts with all Timorese men required to do thirty days of military service. By the early 1970s, approximately 2,000 Timorese were serving in the colonial army with a “great many” deserting and joining the militias of political parties during decolonization. See, Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 25-26. 313 Ben Kiernan, “War, Genocide, and Resistance in East Timor, 1975-99: Comparative Reflections on Cambodia,” War and State Terror: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Selden and Alvin Y. So, Lanham, MD: Routledge, 2003, 199-233. See also, Robert Cribb, “How many deaths? Problems in the statistics of massacre in Indonesia (1965-1966) and East Timor (1975-1980),” Violence in Indonesia. Ed., Ingrid Wessel and Georgia Wimhöfer, Hamburg: Abera, 2001. 82-98. 314 Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação de Timor-Leste (CAVR), Chega! The Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in Timor-Leste, Dili, Timor- Leste: CAVR, 2005. 315 UCDP/PRIO records Indonesian and FRETILIN as engaging in civil war from 1975-1989, in 1992, and from 1997-1998. See, Themnér and Wallensteen, “Armed Conflict, 1946-2011.”
175 Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste emerged as a peacekeeping operation in
August 2006 following a major security crisis in the country.
Unlike the other cases, Aceh’s claim to independence extends to the pre- colonial period, when an independent Sultan ruled Aceh.316 The belief that agreements with the Dutch did not extend to the newly independent Indonesian state served as the basis for the Darul Islam rebellion led by Daud Beureueh, which resulted in Sukarno granting Aceh a special status with autonomy over customary law, religion and education.317 When new natural gas reserves were discovered in Aceh, the special status instituted under Sukarno was no longer sufficient to quell further demands for sovereignty.318 In 1976, Teungku Hasan M. di Tiro founded the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, GAM) and declared an independent Aceh in December of that year. The organization was largely crushed by 1979 but in 1989, GAM re-emerged to launch a civil war that prompted the establishment of the Aceh DOM (Daerah Operasi Militar), an area of military rule that lasted from 1989 until 1998. In 1996, the government declared that GAM had been eliminated but by 1999 the organization had begun renewed military efforts.
Despite a series of peace talks, only after the December 2004 Indian
Ocean tsunami, which devastated the region, did the two sides agree to a memorandum of understanding. The August 2005 agreement stipulated the
316 Armed resistance to Dutch rule persisted in Aceh from 1873 until 1904 under the leadership of Tengku Omar who led a holy war against the Dutch. 317 See Nazaruddin Sjamsuddin, The Republican Revolt: A Study of the Acehnese Rebellion, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1985. 318 Michael L. Ross, “Resources and Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia,” Understanding Civil War, ed. Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis, Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2005, 35-58.
176 demobilization and disbandment of GAM's troops, restrictions on the presence of the TNI in the region, a general amnesty, and the release of political prisoners and detainees.319 Elections in December 2006 resulted in victories for candidates associated with the former GAM and have thus far sealed the conflict’s resolution.
State Coercion in the Indonesian Context
The three main conflicts described in the preceding section have provided the context in which the majority of state coercion has occurred. This aids the analysis presented here in two ways. First, it necessitates the analytical distinction between civil war violence and state coercion.320 Second, Indonesia’s extensive history of civil war allows us to examine variation in state coercion, holding civil war largely constant.321 Episodes of state coercion, including mass killings and torture, often had little to do with the on-the-ground dynamics of the civil wars and it is this violence that forms the focus of this study, not the armed confrontation between the military and insurgents.
State coercion in Indonesia has taken three main forms: discriminant or targeted violence against opposition leaders and their supporters; mass violence
319 Themnér and Wallensteen, “Armed Conflict, 1946-2011.” 320 In Table 1, the periods of civil war refer to direct military engagement between the TNI and the various armed separatist factions. State coercion, on the other hand, captures the state’s use of violence against civilians in the context of these intrastate conflicts and independent of them. 321 In the immediate post-independence period, the newly institutionalised Indonesian armed forces engaged in conflict with the breakaway Republic of South Moluccas. The armed forces were also responsible for suppressing the Darul Islam rebellion in the 1950s. For more details, see Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia; Sjamsuddin, The Republican Revolt; Nils Petter Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946-2001: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 39.5 (2002): 615-637.
177 against demonstrations; and, indiscriminate violence in the context of a perceived national threat. Various forms of repression and torture have also been widely practised, independently and in combination with other forms of state coercion.
Targeted state violence, including political assassinations, has typically been directed against suspected supporters of insurgents or oppositional political movements. Although the government restricted access by the media and NGOs in areas under martial law, reports suggest that government forces pursued individual or small group executions in these areas.322 For example, the 2001 murder of a high-profile Papua politician, Theys Eluay, was eventually linked to seven soldiers belonging to the elite Kopassus (Komando Pasukan Khusus) unit of the TNI.323
The second type of state violence has been associated with anti- government demonstrations and was particularly common in response to demonstrations demanding independence. In many of these incidents, the
Indonesian military took up positions surrounding the demonstrators before opening fire on the crowd, often causing dozens of deaths. In February of 1996, a
TNI officer was sentenced for giving the order to his subordinates “to shoot local people who tried to escape” during one such event.324 Similar instances involve local military chiefs ordering troops to shoot “rioters” on sight. Such acts often prompted subsequent protests as seen in March 2000 near Jayapura, the capital of
322 Themnér and Wallensteen, “Armed Conflict, 1946-2011.” 323 Bruce Vaughn, “Papua, Indonesia: Issues for Congress,” CRS Report for Congress RL33260, Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2006. 324 Minorities at Risk Project, Chronology for Papuans in Indonesia, College Park, MD: University of Maryland Center for International Development and Conflict Management, 2010. The “Chronology” series complied by Minorities at Risk are summaries of local and international media reports relating to human rights violations against particular groups. The citations for specific reports can be found in the chronologies.
178 Papua, when the fatal shooting of a civilian by the TNI’s mobile brigade prompted thousands to protest and led to four additional deaths and eighteen injuries as police opened fire on the protestors.325
The last major form of state coercion, indiscriminate violence in the context of a perceived national threat, was first seen in Suharto’s anti-Communist purges. This form of violence is primarily associated with intense periods of TNI counterinsurgency operations and includes group executions, house-to-house searches, and occasionally house demolitions. 326 Although this violence is allegedly directed at members or supporters of the various separatist organizations, this is not violence that occurs during combat between armed individuals. Rather, the nature of the violence suggests that there has been a general targeting of the ethnic minority populations within the separatist regions rather than a specific focus on active participants in the insurgencies.
In addition to these three main forms of state violence, rapes and other forms of sexual violence have been periodically reported, particularly since the late 1990s.327 Much more consistent, however, have been reports of torture by the
TNI, ranging from excessive beatings while in detention to recent evidence of
325 Minorities at Risk Project, Chronology for Papuans. 326 For example, see Brad Simpson, ed., “Suharto: A Declassified Documentary Orbit,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 242, Washington, DC: The George Washington University, 2008, accessed 6 January 2012, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB242/index.htm. 327 The CAVR report focuses on sexually-based human rights violations for the period of 1974- 1999, but testimonial evidence related to these acts is limited to their particular sample of interviewees in East Timor. Other studies have focused on the 1998/1999 violence in East Timor and demonstrated that this was an exceptional period for sexual assault (See, Michelle Hynes et al., “A Determination of the Prevalence of Gender-based Violence among Conflict-affected Populations in East Timor,” Disasters 28.3 (2004): 294-321). Given the currently limited nature of information on wartime or conflict-related sexual violence in Indonesia for the period under study, I focus on alternate forms of coercion. A systematic understanding of wartime sexual violence in Indonesia remains a compelling area of study.
179 genital mutilation.328 Political imprisonments of individuals accused of separatism have also been common in response to alleged secessionist plots and acts such as raising ethno-national flags in place of the Indonesian flag.329
In the analysis below, I distinguish between these various forms of state coercion in order to highlight how changes in the TNI’s capacity, brought about through foreign aid, contributed to specific patterns of human rights abuses in
Indonesia. Foreign assistance and the military equipment that it provided were employed in counterinsurgency and counter-protest strategies that targeted the country’s civilian population rather than protecting it.
Aiding and Abetting State Coercion in Indonesia
Given the various features of the Indonesian context described above, what factors identified in the theory of the coercive effect of foreign aid are most relevant to this case? In previous chapters, civil war was identified as a major correlate of state coercion and has been relatively constant in Indonesia’s post- independence history. While the separatist conflicts have played a key role in determining where much of the state coercion has occurred, the presence of these intrastate conflicts cannot fully explain what enabled the Indonesian state to use
328 Amnesty International, Indonesian Authorities Urged to Investigate Papua “Torture Video,” 18 October 2010, accessed 12 January 2012, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and- updates/indonesian-authorities-urged-investigate-papua-torture-video-2010-10-19; Jeff Waters, “Torture in West Papua: the Video Verdict is in,” ABC The Drum, 27 October 2010, accessed 13 February 2012, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/27/3049854.htm; Kai Shing Wong, “INDONESIA: Video of the Military Torturing Indigenous Papuans Surfaced,” Asian Human Rights Commission, 17 October 2010, accessed 22 October 2010, http://www.ahrchk.net/pr/mainfile.php/2010mr/786/. 329 According to Human Rights Watch, over 100 political prisoners remained in Indonesia as of 2010. See, Human Rights Watch, Prosecuting Political Aspiration: Indonesia’s Political Prisoners, New York, NY: Human Rights Watch, 2010.
180 coercion throughout the far flung archipelago nor the types of coercion that were employed.
Non-democratic regimes have also been another almost constant feature of
Indonesian history. Dictatorships and anocracies are associated with higher levels of political violence in the statistical analysis. While Suharto’s regime does not fit the exact definition of dictatorship used in the prior analysis, Indonesia’s political structures created a government that was highly insulated from popular pressure and yet required the consent of major elements of the population in order to govern. The nature of this electoral autocracy gave the Suharto regime substantial liberty in its allocation of budgetary resources. Variation in terms of Indonesia’s political regime is seen with Suharto’s resignation and the ensuing transition to a multiparty electoral democracy after years of single-party rule. The shift from autocracy to democracy that began in 1998 is examined here as a potential mitigating influence on state coercion, while the earlier political system is assumed to have facilitated state coercion by empowering both the President and the armed forces.
Other potentially relevant factors identified in the cross-national analysis provide little leverage in the Indonesian case. Although Indonesia was a rentier state until 1985, the presence of oil rents did not provide significant resources to the state given its large debt burden. In addition, when oil prices skyrocketed during the 1979 energy crisis, Indonesia’s oil production was used as a justification for decreasing foreign aid. This suggests that additive effects are likely to be limited in this case. The presence of U.S. troops in the archipelago has
181 been extremely limited, ranging from 21 to 81 officers. Any potential professionalizing role that the U.S. military may have played is therefore constrained to the training of Indonesians in American staff colleges—a component of U.S. military aid that is discussed further below. In addition,
Indonesia has not engaged in an overt interstate war, despite political tensions and limited armed action against Malaysia during the Konfrontasi period of the mid-
1960s.330
I therefore focus on variation in both the amount and type of foreign aid provided by the United States as the most significant factor explaining variation in the intensity of coercive state behaviour in Indonesia. Foreign aid from the United
States has typically constituted over one third of the total net official bilateral assistance to Indonesia, in addition to being the main provider of military assistance.331
330 The invasion of East Timor is not counted as an interstate war due to the low number of battle deaths on the Indonesian side. 331 During the period of study, Indonesia also received aid from other bilateral sources including the world’s second largest bilateral aid donor, Japan, and Indonesia’s former colonial master, the Netherlands. However, in numerous conferences on Indonesia’s foreign aid and in government communication, US policymakers note that they were often forced to pressure other states to meet their obligations in the 1:3 ratio of bilateral foreign aid provision. That is, that United States openly agreed to meeting one-third of Indonesia’s foreign aid burden but in many years took on a greater share. See, USAID, “Country Report (historical dollars) for Indonesia, 1967-2008,” US Overseas Loans and Grants: Obligations and Loan Authorizations, July 1, 1945-September 30, 2010, Washington, DC: USAID, 2012.
182 Figure 6.1: U.S. Bilateral Aid to Indonesia, 1949-2010
Figure 6.1 demonstrates that the amount of aid provided by the United
States has fluctuated dramatically over time, ranging from a low of -13.17 million in 1952 due to debt repayment to a high of over $1.17 billion in 1969.332 Over a
62 year period, Indonesia received on average $279.86 million in economic aid and $35.83 million in military aid per year from the United States. However, as the graph demonstrates, the relative amounts of economic and military aid provided to Indonesia have varied over time. Economic aid peaked in 1969 at
$1.14 billion while military aid peaked in 1976 at $201.89 million.
In addition to the aid provided by the United States, numerous other bilateral aid donors provided Official Development Assistance (ODA) to
Indonesia. Table 6.1 lists the mean, minimum and maximum annual amounts of
ODA provided by the top five ODA donors to Indonesia while Figure A6.1 in the
332 All amounts are reported in 2010 constant dollars and provided by USAID unless otherwise reported.
183 appendix illustrates the annual amount of ODA given by these donors from 1960 to 2010, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD). 333 As Figure A6.1 also indicates, multilateral aid to
Indonesia was paltry in comparison with bilateral aid. For example, various
United Nations programmes provided less than $10 million in aid prior to 1961.
Table 6.1: Top Five OECD ODA Donors to Indonesia, 1960-2010
Mean ODA Min ODA (Year) Max ODA (Year) Japan $734.27 -$533.63 (2009) $1816.5 (1999) USA $235.24 -$76.14 (1996) $986.75 (1971) Netherlands $157.58 -$86.27 (1996) $491.19 (1962) Australia $147.98 $10.24 (1966) $423.07 (2009) Germany $127.20 -$119.52 (1996) $418.96 (1981) Note: Reported in Millions of (2010) U.S. dollars. Source: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), OECD.StatExtracts, data set, 2012, accessed February 12, 2012, http://stats.oecd.org/.
Given that Japanese aid to Indonesia has been substantially greater than that provided by the United States, why focus on the latter donor? The overwhelming majority of Japanese ODA to Indonesia has taken the form of loans.334 As Figure 6.2 depicts, the grant portion of Japanese ODA amounted to a steady average of about $200 million for the period of study while the loan portion greatly exceeded that amount. Unlike the United States, Japan has no military assistance program. Rather, Japanese aid to Indonesia began with a 1958 reparations agreement for the provision of $223 million over a twelve-year period
333 The OECD defines Official Development Assistance as provided by official agencies, including state and local governments, or b their executive agencies, each transition of which meets the following tests: 1) it is administered with the promotion of economic development and welfare of developing countries as its main objective; and 2) it is concessional in character and conveys a grant element of at least 25 per cent. Thus, ODA explicitly excludes direct military assistance. See, OECD, OECD.StatExtracts. 334 Approximately 30% of Japanese aid takes the form of grants while the remainder is concessional loans. See, OECD, OECD.StatExtracts.
184 in addition to the promise of $400 million in loans and $177 million in cancelled trade claims.
Figure 6.2. Japanese ODA to Indonesia, 1960-2010
As the Japanese aid program evolved, it became project-based with long- term concessional loans given directly to governments or Japanese corporations for overseas investment projects tied to Japanese procurement. The overall economic impact of the Japanese approach has been profound. Figure A6.2 illustrates the relative balance between ODA and external debt as a percentage of gross national income (GNI) for Indonesia. Largely as a result of the extraordinary amount of loans extended by Japan, Indonesia rapidly became a heavily indebted country. Given these major differences in the structure and effects of bilateral aid, focusing on the United States and in particular its ability to furnish military assistance provides a better test of the theory of the coercive effect of aid in the Indonesian context.
185 In addition to the OECD donors, the Soviet Union was a significant alternative supplier of aid during the Sukarno years as is discussed further below.
With the assumption of power by Suharto, Soviet support rapidly dwindled as successive U.S. administrations declared their political and financial support for the regime. During Suharto’s rule, there was a downward trend in U.S. bilateral aid that can be attributed to several factors including the end of conflict in
Indochina as well as the end of the Cold War. Aid increased in the 2000s due to the resolution of the East Timor conflict as well as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which led to a sharp spike in economic aid the following year.
In the sections that follow, I demonstrate that the foreign aid received by
Indonesia, particularly during the country’s first decades, was used to increase the capacity and size of the country’s armed forces—a factor associated with repression and torture in the cross-national analysis. American, as well as Soviet, aid enabled Indonesia to obtain arms used to acquire and occupy Papua and East
Timor. Furthermore, foreign aid allowed Indonesia to increase the size and training of its armed forces, which led to a tactical shift towards counterinsurgency operations, and increased levels of state coercion in the separatist regions in subsequent decades.
186 The Sukarno Years, 1949-1966
During the struggle for independence against the Dutch, Sukarno and his supporters had few allies. The United States was focused on the reconstruction of
Western Europe through the Marshall Plan while the Soviet Union turned inward in the face of grave losses of life and materiel. The situation changed with the launch of President Truman’s Point Four Plan in 1949, which marked the beginning of the United States’ modern foreign aid program. This coincided with the official independence of Indonesia and the establishment of a central government under the leadership of Sukarno.
Figure 6.3: Types of U.S. Bilateral Economic Aid, 1949-1966
Figure 6.3 outlines the distribution of the five major components of U.S. bilateral economic aid as well as loans extended by the American Export-Import
(EXIM) bank. The latter are not traditionally included in official aid calculations
187 (refer to Figure 6.1), but nevertheless serve as an important source of extra- budgetary resources. Indonesia received a burst of economic aid from 1949-1951 averaging $275.78 per year. In 1952, American economic aid flows to the country were negative for the first and only time as a result of loan repayments. After this exceptional year, economic aid averaged $167 million per year for the remainder of the 1950s. USAID loans were fairly minimal and focused on infrastructural development, particularly in port areas, while the substantial amounts of food aid were intended to enable Indonesia to purchase foodstuffs, cotton, and tobacco from the United States without using foreign exchange.335 USAID programs during this period included a campaign to eradicate malaria as well as the provision of American technical experts in the fields of education, transportation and public health.336 Other forms of economic support, including loans from the
EXIM bank also surged in 1950 with the launch of the Point Four Plan. Large
EXIM bank loans were extended again in 1959 and 1960 but were otherwise extremely limited during the Sukarno era in part due to Sukarno’s hostility towards international financial institutions, which was strongly demonstrated by his August 1965 withdrawal from the IMF and the World Bank.337
In addition to the aid received from the United States, Sukarno actively sought support from other sources including the Soviet Union. The profile of
Indonesia as a potential non-Communist aid recipient was raised in April 1955 with the Bandung (Afro-Asian) conference. Just over a year later, Sukarno
335 Donald Hindley, “Foreign Aid to Indonesia and Its Political Implications,” Pacific Affairs 36.2 (1963): 112. 336 Hindley, “Foreign Aid to Indonesia,” 111. 337 Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 268.
188 travelled to Moscow to meet with the Soviet leadership. The result of this effort was the extension of a $100 million loan to Indonesia.338 Over the next decade,
Indonesia received a series of grants and loans from a variety of Eastern Bloc countries, summarized in Table 6.2. 339
Table 6.2: Foreign Loans to Indonesia from Eastern Block Donors in Millions of U.S. Dollars, 1955-1965
Soviet Czecho- GDR Romania Poland Hungary China Total Union slovakia 1955 9.2 (7) 2 11.2 1956 100 1.6 15 116.6 1957 0.8 0.8 1958 6 (?) 39.1 20 65.1 1959 19 (9) 14 5 36.5 1960 250340 (?) 33.8 283.8 1961 450 50 30.1 29.6 30 589.7 1962 (?)341 0 1963 0 1964 0 1965 3 3 Note: Combined economic and military loan figures are reported in historical (current) dollars. Parentheses report the lower bound of disputed amounts.
The vast majority of foreign assistance provided by Communist countries to the Sukarno government was in the form of loans.342 For the Soviet Union, the
338 This loan, agreed to in September 1956 but not ratified by Indonesian parliament until February 1958, featured a 2.5% interest rate and a twelve year term. (Guy J. Pauker, “The Soviet Challenge in Indonesia,” Foreign Affairs (1961-1962): 613; Ragna Boden, “Cold War Economics: Soviet Aid to Indonesia,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10.3 (2008): 115.) 339 Not included in the table is $5 million from Bulgaria and $25 million in loans from Yugoslavia. Hindley, “Foreign Aid to Indonesia,” 108-109. 340 Guy Pauker reports that in March 1960 Sukarno stated that “Premier Khrushchev had granted him $700 to $800 million, of which $250 million in economic credits were specifically publicized.” Of this amount, military credits were expected to be from $450 to $550 million. Ricklefs notes that the $450 million for arms was extended after a January 1961 trip by the head of the army to Moscow. See Pauker, “The Soviet Challenge in Indonesia,” 614; Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 257. 341 In March 1962, the Soviet Union “gifted” a 300-bed hospital to Indonesia. The amount of funds required to build the hospital are not available. Pauker, “The Soviet Challenge in Indonesia,” 613; Hindley, “Foreign Aid to Indonesia,” 109.
189 loan to grant ratio was an outstanding 14 to 1.343 In comparison, the loan to grant ratio for U.S. economic aid from 1949-1966 was closer to 1 to 4 (see Figure
6.2).344 It soon because evident that despite the reasonable rates associated with these loans, Indonesia was not going to be able to repay the loans on schedule. In
August 1956, Sukarno repudiated 85 percent of Indonesia’s debt to the
Netherlands as the country’s cost of going to war with Indonesia.345 This was followed in December 1957 by a wave of nationalization of Dutch companies, including what became the state oil company Pertamina, which were then turned over to the army for management.346 At the same time, the rupiah was being maintained at artificially high exchange rates.347 Inflation was rampant with the government rapidly expanding the amount of money in circulation while facing massive budget deficit increases.348 Between 1950 and 1957, the cost of living in
Indonesia rose over 100 percent and by 1964 inflation had reached 134 percent.349
There was an extremely low rate of completion (11 percent) for projects funded by foreign assistance from Communist countries, with the notable
342 One major exception to this was the turnover of the assets (of unknown value) of the Bank of China in Jakarta to the Indonesian government in November 1964. See, Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 265. 343 Boden, “Cold War Economics,” 117. 344 Author’s calculations. From 1950-1956 and 1964-1966 only economic grants were provided. Only in 1958 did the amount of economic loans provided by the United States exceed the grant amount to Indonesia. The sources for the table include Hindley, “Foreign Aid to Indonesia”; Pauker, “The Soviet Challenge in Indonesia”; Boden, “Cold War Economics”; James Richard Carter, “Appendix A: Soviet Aid,” The Net Cost of Soviet Foreign Aid, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971, 109. 345 Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 239. 346 Ibid, 249. 347 Ibid, 226. 348 Pauker, “The Soviet Challenge in Indonesia,” 617. 349 Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 227, 263.
190 exception of the Senayan sports complex in Jakarta that cost $12.5 million.350 A growing understanding of the development situation in Indonesia, combined with an increasingly bellicose foreign policy, led to the sharp drop off in assistance seen in 1962. The Soviets made it clear that they had no intention of competing with the United States in providing large-scale economic aid to Indonesia.351 As relations between the Soviet Union and Indonesia grew strained, Moscow completed scheduled deliveries and was forced to reschedule existing Indonesian debt, but refused to provide further assistance or credits.352 After 1965, the role of the USSR and its satellites as a supplier of foreign assistance to Indonesia had effectively ended.
Changes in Military Capacity
The United States provided an average of $23 million per year in military aid during the Sukarno era. Such aid was initially authorized under Section 401 of the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1949.353 While $27 million in military grant aid was provided in 1950, major military assistance did not being until the early 1960s. Section 503 of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) gave the
President authorization, “to furnish military assistance on such terms and conditions as he may determine, to any friendly country or international
350 Amount reported in historical dollars. Boden, “Cold War Economics,” 118-119; Hindley, “Foreign Aid to Indonesia,” 111. 351 Franklin B. Weinstein, Indonesian Foreign Policy and the Dilemma of Dependence: From Sukarno to Soeharto, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976, 300. 352 Mott, Soviet Military Assistance. 353 Section 401 reads in part that, “Military assistance may be furnished under this Act, without payment to the United States except as provided in the agreements concluded pursuant to section 402, by the provision of any service, or by the procurement from any source and the transfer to eligible nations of equipment, materials, and service.” United States, “Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1949,” The American Journal of International Law 44.1 (1950): 29-38.
191 organization, the assisting of which the President finds will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace…by…acquiring from any source and providing (by loan or grant) any defense article or defense service…assigning or detailing members of the Armed Forces of the United States and other personnel of the Department of Defense to perform duties of a noncombatant nature, including those related to training or advice.’’354
Figure 6.4: Types of U.S. Military Aid, 1949-1966
The majority of military aid (82 percent) given by the United States during the Sukarno years took the form of Military Assistance Program (MAP) grants, indicated in dark grey in Figure 6.4. These grants provided direct budgetary support to the military. Other major components of the American military aid
354 This section was amended in 1973. See Dianne E. Rennack, “Foreign Assistance Act of 1961: Authorizations and Corresponding Appropriations,” CRS Report for Congress R40089. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2010.
192 program were International Military Education and Training (IMET) 355 and
Excess Stock Transfers, the heavily subsidized sale of used American military equipment. Military aid given between 1959 and 1963 totalled over $375 million.
The distribution of this aid across various categories is shown in Figure 6.5.
Many have suggested that the surge in American military aid in the early
1960s was to counterbalance the growing Communist influence in the country.
Indeed, 1959 and 1960 saw the largest commitments of foreign assistance from
Communist donors (see Table 6.2). Yet, others suggested at the time that “this aid not only permits the modernization of the armed forces (that is, increases their firing power and manoeuvrability) but it also fosters increased cohesion within the armed forces” which was seen as vital to the maintenance of the Indonesian government because the armed forces acted as a constraint on the power of
Sukarno.356 IMET played a key role in achieving this latter goal by providing for the training of Indonesian officers in U.S. staff colleges. Between 1958 and 1962, approximately 4000 members of the TNI were trained in the United States.357
In the years immediately following the initial build-up of U.S. military aid
(1959-1961), President Sukarno began to push for territorial control of Papua as part of the Dutch decolonization process. A Supreme Operations Command
(Kota, Komando Opersai Tertinggi) for the liberation of Irian Jaya was
355 IMET provides training on a grant basis to students from allied and friendly nations. In addition to improving defense capabilities, IMET training exposes foreign students to US professional military organizations and procedures and the manner in which military organizations function under civilian control. See, United States Department of State and United States Agency for International Development. US Foreign Assistance Reference Guide. Washington, DC: Department of State, 2005, 33. 356 Hindley, “Foreign Aid to Indonesia,” 113. 357 Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 264.
193 established with Sukarno as commander.358 Evidence suggests that the Soviet
Union encouraged Indonesia to settle the dispute with force.359 In preparation,
Indonesian military expenditures rose to an estimated 37.8 percent of the budget in 1960 and almost half of the budget in 1961.360 The size of the military also increased to 330,000 by late 1962.
Figure 6.5: Indonesian Arms Imports, 1960-2010
Figure 6.5 illustrates the rapid increase in Indonesian arms imports that occurred in the early 1960s. 361 Investigations of classified Soviet Gosplan
358 Ibid, 258. 359 Pauker, “The Soviet Challenge in Indonesia,” 613. 360 Hindley, “Foreign Aid to Indonesia,” 111; Pauker, “The Soviet Challenge in Indonesia,” 616. 361 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, Solna, Sweden: SIPRI, 2012; World Bank, “Net bilateral aid flows from DAC donors,” World Development Indicators, Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2012. According to the World Bank definition, arms imports “cover the supply of military weapons through sales, aid, gifts, and those made through manufacturing licenses. Data cover major conventional weapons such as aircraft, armored vehicles, artillery, radar systems, missiles, and ships designed for military use. Excluded are transfers of other military equipment such as small arms and light weapons, trucks, small artillery, ammunition, support equipment, technology transfers, and other services.” As a result of these exclusions, arms imports do not capture the entirety of US military assistance to Indonesia.
194 documents suggest that almost 90% of Soviet assistance given to Indonesia was used for military purposes (701 million rubles as of January 1965).362 Indonesia acquired amphibious tanks and artillery, MIG-15 fighter planes, MIG-21s, and
TU-16 bombers as well as IL-28 bombers from the Soviet Union. Surface to air missiles may also have been provided.363 According to Mott, “by 1965, Indonesia had built ‘a navy containing at least twenty submarines, two cruisers, four destroyers, and several motor torpedo boats. In addition, [the Indonesian] air force
[included] at least ninety MiG-15s and MiG-17s plus an undisclosed number of
MiG-19s along with some bombers and helicopters.’”364 Other estimates contend that the navy held six destroyers.365 Given this substantial increase in equipment,
Soviet trainers were dispatched to Indonesia to provide technical expertise and training.
The linkages between the provision of military and economic aid and changes in Indonesian military capacity were observed early on. Writing in 1963,
Donald Hindley noted that, “non-military aid increases the general amount of foreign currency available to the central government, and enables the government to spend on the armed forces more of the foreign currency obtained from non-aid sources,” while the benefits of military aid accrued directly to the military.366
Even food aid was devoted to subsidizing the military during this period.
American rice would be sold to the military for one rupiah per litre while the free
362 Boden, “Cold War Economics,” 120. 363 Pauker, “The Soviet Challenge in Indonesia,” 615. 364 Mott, Soviet Military Assistance. 365 Pauker, “The Soviet Challenge in Indonesia,” 615. 366 Hindley, “Foreign Aid to Indonesia,” 114.
195 market price in Jakarta was over 60 rupiahs per litre, thereby freeing up additional military expenditures.367
Given the limited resources of the Indonesian state in the aftermath of
World War II and the war for independence, the level of military acquisitions that occurred from 1960-1962 would not have been possible without the aid and loans extended by the United States and members of the Communist Bloc. Even with these additional resources, military expenditures were consuming over half of the government’s annual budget. The result changes in military capacity were clear: by early 1962, the TNI had developed the capacity to infiltrate Papua and engage in naval battles with the Dutch over that territory.368
Patterns in State Coercion, 1949-1966
The ability to succeed in a potential armed confrontation with the Dutch was essential in winning Papua as Indonesian territory. A modern army and navy were required to project power to the island of New Guinea. Although the dispute over Papua was settled through UN-supported negotiations, the Indonesian military presence made the integration of the territory into Indonesia a reality. It was acknowledged that “the Russians had rendered important military and diplomatic support to Indonesia’s campaign for West Irian.”369 At the same time, members of Congress expressed concern about American support for Indonesia’s actions in Papua. The House Foreign Relations Committee voted to cut off aid to
367 Ibid, 114. 368 Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 258. 369 Weinstein, Indonesian Foreign Policy, 85.
196 Indonesia unless the President declared the aid to be in the United States’ national interest.370
The Indonesian acquisition of Papua set the stage for violent interactions between the Indonesian state and local Papuans that persist today. While a circumstantial case can be made that the military build-up funded by American and Soviet foreign assistance contributed to Indonesia’s ability to successfully pressure the Netherlands to give up Papua, it is clear that establishing Indonesian control over the territory has had long term effects on state-society relations in the region. These tensions came to a head in the early years of Suharto’s presidency when state coercion was employed against those supporting Papuan autonomy.
In addition to developments in Papua, the increased capacity of the
Indonesian armed forces was used to openly target the Communist Party of
Indonesia (PKI) and its supporters in 1965 and 1966. Army reprisals following a coup attempt on 30 September 1965, combined with mass violence encouraged by the army, are thought to have resulted in about 500,000 deaths although no clear evidence regarding this estimate exists. 371 Twelve years later, over 100,000 political prisoners were still held as a result of the crackdown on the PKI. The sheer scale of this period of state coercion is difficult to imagine in the absence of the increased resources of the TNI in the early 1960s through foreign assistance.
370 Chicago Tribune Press Service, “House Committee Votes to Cut Off Aid to Indonesia,” The Spokesman-Review. 26 July 1963. 81st year. No. 73. Page 3. 371 Ricklefs notes, “no one knows how many died in late 1965 and early 1966, for no one counted.” See, Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 274.
197 The Early Suharto Years, 1967-1985
The first decade of Suharto’s presidency was characterised by a heavy reliance on the United States for budgetary support, food aid, and military assistance. Given the recent coup attempt and purges, Suharto placed a great deal of emphasis on military training and made repeated requests for greater U.S. military assistance to shore up loyalty within the armed forces.372 An August 1967
National Security Council report anticipated that the new regime would make continuing unreasonable requests for foreign aid given “a tendency, particularly on the military side, to look for easy solutions in an outpouring of large quantities of American assistance.” 373 Nevertheless, substantial amounts of aid were forthcoming from the United States.
Following Suharto’s accession to power in 1967, total U.S. bilateral foreign aid to Indonesia jumped from approximately $130 million in 1966 to almost $510 million by 1968. In 1972, aid reached an all time high of $1.17 billion before entering a period of relative decline to about $270 million per year in the mid-1980s (see Figure 6.1). The overwhelming majority of this aid was provided as economic assistance, which is illustrated in detail in Figure 6.6. For example, 97.7% of the aid given in 1969 was classified as economic. The vast majority of aid given during this period took the form of Department of
Agriculture food aid. However, from the mid-1970s onwards, loans provided by
372 “Document 290: Memorandum from President Nixon to his Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” 21 April 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d290. 373 “Document 241: Paper Prepared in the Department of State for the National Security Council,” 4 August 1967, FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXVI: Indonesia; Malaysia-Singapore; Philippines, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v26/d241.
198 the American EXIM bank to Indonesia played an increasingly prominent role as
Indonesia’s economic recovery progressed thanks in part to increasing oil prices.
Though not included in the calculations of official bilateral aid, the EXIM bank loans assisted Indonesia by providing much-needed foreign exchange.
Figure 6.6: Key Types of Economic Aid to Indonesia, 1967-1985
By 1971, economic aid comprised just over 83% of total bilateral foreign aid with food aid constituting 40% of economic aid as illustrated in Figure 6.6.374
The fungibility of different forms of economic aid, and food aid in particular, was noted explicitly in several U.S. government communications regarding
Indonesia.375 Specifically, the United States provided cotton to Indonesia with the
374 USAID, “Country Report (Historical Dollars) for Indonesia, 1967-2008”; “Document 317: Memorandum from the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon,” N.d., FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d317. 375 For example, a memo to Kissinger notes that, “Suharto recently wrote the President asking for 150 thousand tons of PL 480 rice prior to March 1973 (when the Indonesian elections occur). We
199 knowledge that it would be sold internationally in order to provide the government with needed foreign exchange. Although the cash was intended by the United States to purchase foodstuffs, there was no way for the United States to guarantee what the cash would be spent on.
The role of oil revenue in supporting the Indonesian state became increasingly complicated during this period. The decline in economic assistance, which occurred from 1974 onwards, resulted in part from partisan opposition between President Nixon and Congress and changes in the global oil market which made it infeasible for the United States to meet Indonesia’s growing aid requests given its OPEC member status.376 Despite increases in natural resource production, a large portion of the increases was consumed domestically due to the country’s rapid population expansion.377 The government's assumption in 1975 of the army-run Pertamina oil company’s $10 billion in debt curtailed its ability to devote budgetary resources to the military and eliminated substantial extra- did not have the rice, or so we thought then, and arranged to provide Indonesia with extra PL 480 cotton which could be sold and hence provide funds to purchase the rice commercially from countries such as Pakistan or Thailand.” See “Document 322: Editorial Note,” N.d., FRUS, 1969- 1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d332. 376 “Document 110: Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon,” N.d., FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d110. For more details, see also “Document 101: Memorandum from Charles A. Cooper of the National Security Council Staff to Secretary of State Kissinger,” 24 November 1973, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d101; “Document 102: Memorandum from Charles A. Cooper of the National Security Council Staff to Secretary of State Kissinger,” 4 December 1973, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d102; “Document 107: Telegram 47882 from the Department of State to the Embassy in Indonesia,” 9 March 1974, FRUS, 1969- 1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d107. 377 Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, 227.
200 budgetary support (ex. subsidised fuel) which the company had provided to the armed forces.378 This created a concern in the U.S. that “a loss of grant military assistance as well as Pertamina support could help lead military elements to demand a reassessment of national budget priorities and ultimately perhaps a change in the government's economic development orientation.” 379 Increased
EXIM bank loans were provided but Indonesian government resources were extremely constrained during this period.
The heavy emphasis in American policy on providing economic aid in the early Suharto years was based on two rationales. The first was that the political stability of Indonesia was then, as now, tied to the central government’s ability to extend its control over the entire territory. As a result, much emphasis was placed on developing Indonesia’s outlying regions and tying them both institutionally and economically to the Javanese centre. Even before Papua’s formal annexation to Indonesia was completed in 1969, U.S. assistance was requested for a special development fund for the region.380 Second, requests by members of the Suharto government for U.S. military assistance were often directly framed in terms of
Indonesia’s economic development needs.
378 “JAKART 16378,” 20 December 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park. 379 “JAKART 16378.” 380 To justify this request, Foreign Minister Malik argued that, “after the act of free choice the GOI will be carrying a major responsibility in West Irian. Only a small part of external aid to Indonesia now goes to West Irian and Malik said the GOI wishes to establish a substantial development fund for West Irian after the act of choice is finished... Malik said he would welcome special US assistance for West Irian.” See, “Document 272: Telegram from the Embassy in Indonesia to the Department of State,” 29 July 1969, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d272.
201 Both Suharto and the TNI leadership presented themselves as self- sacrificing in the interest of national economic development.381 General Sumitro argued that, “in speeding up the rebuilding of the Indonesian Armed Forces,
Indonesia needed time to develop since its training facilities were limited and its management very bad. There was an additional principle: military development should not interfere with the Indonesian five-year plan. Not one penny could be expected from this plan, or it would fail.”382 By stressing the importance of economic development, the TNI leadership created a situation whereby the potential diversion of resources away from economic development became a continual threat used to secure additional foreign assistance for the military.383
The threats worked.
381 Ambassador Galbraith notes that, “Suharto spoke of the priority given economic development in the Indonesian budget and of the austerity imposed on the armed forces which receive only a small part of total budget resources, barely enough for upkeep. Suharto said it was hoped and expected that in another few years and with economic development promising to gain some momentum, additional budget resources could be made available for the development of the Indonesian armed forces. He said Indonesia's armed forces understood and agreed to this approach.” See “Document 329: Telegram from the Embassy in Indonesia to the Department of State,” 4 February 1972, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d329. 382 “Document 308: Memorandum of Conversation,” 1 July 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d308. 383 Ambassador Galbraith notes that “Suharto spoke of the priority given economic development in the Indonesian budget and of the austerity imposed on the armed forces which receive only a small part of total budget resources, barely enough for upkeep. Suharto said it was hoped and expected that in another few years and with economic development promising to gain some momentum, additional budget resources could be made available for the development of the Indonesian armed forces. He said Indonesia's armed forces understood and agreed to this approach.” See “Document 329” and “Document 275: Memorandum from John H. Holdridge of the National Security Council Staff to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” 30 October 1969, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d275.
202 Figure 6.7: Types of U.S. Military Assistance to Indonesia, 1967-1985
Figure 6.7 illustrates the changing structure of U.S. military aid to
Indonesia during the early years of Suharto’s rule. 384 By June 1970, the
Indonesian Ministry of Defense and the U.S. Defense Liaison Group in Jakarta reached a general understanding on the 1971 military aid program, which was “to be increased almost threefold over the current annual level” in order to meet specific requests by the Indonesian Air Force and Navy.385 President Nixon himself authorized an increase in MAP grants to Indonesia from around $21 million to $66 million for 1971.386 Further discussions included the “possibility of
384 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), “Country Report (Historical Dollars) for Indonesia, 1967-2008.” 385 “Document 303: Memorandum of Conversation,” 28 May 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d303. 386 In historical (1970) dollars, the increase was from around $4.5 million to $18 million. See, “Document 314: Memorandum from John H. Holdridge and Richard T. Kennedy of the National Security Council Staff to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” 18 November 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US
203 supplying light combat items wanted and required by Indonesia for helping to meet its internal security needs.”387
While some expressed concern over the impact of “the huge rupiah outlay required to receive, use and maintain the equipment we might give
[Indonesia],”388 President Nixon believed that “it was essential that...a developing country such as Indonesia, with thousands of miles of coastline, a strong military influence and an essentially military leadership had to have a substantial military capability if political stability was to be assured.”389 The overall goal of U.S. military assistance to Indonesia—maintaining a stable non-Communist government in Indonesia—did not change.390
In 1973, Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants for the acquisition of
U.S. defense equipment, services, and training, were established in lieu of MAP
Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d314. 387 “Document 318: Memorandum from the Executive Secretary of the Department of State (Eliot) to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” 23 December 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d318. 388 “Document 311: Letter from the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (Green) to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” 10 August 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d311. 389 “Document 321: Memorandum for the President’s File,” 14 September 1971, FRUS, 1969- 1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d321. 390 According to Section 4 of the 1976 Arms Export Control Act, “Defense articles and defense services shall be sold or leased by the United States Government under this Act to friendly countries solely for internal security, for legitimate self-defense, to permit the recipient country to participate in regional or collective arrangements or measures consistent with the Charter of the United Nations, or otherwise to permit the recipient country to participate in collective measures requested by the United Nations for the purpose of maintaining or restoring international peace and security, or for the purpose of enabling foreign military forces… to engage in other activities helpful to the economic and social development of such friendly countries.”
204 grants that were not tied to U.S. sales.391 Over $13 million in FMF grants was offered to Indonesia in 1974. This introduced some tension in U.S.-Indonesian relations as “President Suharto...attached major importance to grant military assistance, both as means of lessening degree to which he must divert other funds to military purposes and as indication [of] U.S. support for Indonesia.”392 As military assistance became increasingly tied to arms sales, the pressure to divert funds away from economic development to support for the military intensified and was openly acknowledged by Indonesian officials.393 By 1979, MAP funding to Indonesia had been replaced by FMF grants.
A major change in U.S. military assistance policy occurred in 1974 when
Congressional amendments to the FAA introduced human rights conditionality.
Section 502B of the act read that, “It is the sense of Congress that except in extraordinary circumstances, the President shall substantially reduce or terminate security assistance to any government which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; prolonged detention without charges; or other flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person.’’ In 1976, the section was amended to specify that it was a
391 “Document 104: Memorandum of Conversation,” 22 January 1974, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E- 12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d104. 392 “Document 116: Backchannel Message 179 from the Ambassador to Indonesia (Newsom) to W.R. Smyser of the National Security Council Staff,” 13 January 1975, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d116. 393 Suharto’s statement that grant military assistance lessens the degree to which funds must be diverted for to military purposes reflects a finding identified in the defence economics literature that developing countries often prioritize meeting their defence burden when faced with severe resource constraints.
205 policy of the United States “to promote and encourage increased respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Annual human rights reporting to
Congress was instituted with restrictions on security assistance394 mandatory for countries deemed to have “gross violations.”
Given the potential for Congressional restrictions on military aid, the fungibility of economic aid into Indonesian military expenditure came to be openly acknowledged as a potential avenue for continued support to Suharto.
Kissinger argued that while “the MAP levels are now being reviewed following
Congressional appropriation action and may not permit much military aid, so we will need to rely heavily on economic aid ties.”395
Changes in Military Capacity
The transition from Sukarno to Suharto brought about important changes in military technology based on the need to modernize the armed forces and replace Soviet equipment that was largely in a state of disrepair.396 The bulk of
Indonesian arms imports occurred in the early 1980s following the aid surge in
394 Security assistance was defined as military assistance, security supporting assistance, and military education and training. See, Rennack, “Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.” 395 “Document 122: Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Ford,” 7 May 1975, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d122. 396 Requests included B-52s as well as the US replacement of all Soviet equipment in Indonesia and the provision of the amphibious or airlift requirements for at least a brigade of Indonesian troops so that their power could be projected into trouble-spots. See “Document 309. Memorandum from the Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (Haig) to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger),” 7 July 1970, FRUS, 1969- 1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d309, and “Document 310: Memorandum of Conversation,” 8 July 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d310.
206 the mid-1970s. The lag between aid commitments and arms imports is due to the fact that the data represented in Figure 6.5 are based on the delivery, not the purchase, of arms. As the archival data described below indicates, requests for arms began in earnest with the accession of Suharto to power.
The American government was responsive to Indonesian needs and proposed “‘to give [Indonesia] assistance which contributes to the priority mission of maintaining internal security,’ including 18 T–37 aircraft, 20 C–47 aircraft, 10 patrol craft, 12 light landing craft, and initial equipment for 9 infantry battalions, which estimated would cost $75 million over 5 years.”397 The provision of ten C-
47s occurred as a direct result of meetings between the American and Indonesian presidents.398 While a request for forty T-37 jets was immediately rejected by the
United States, alternative transport-type aircraft that could be converted to gunships were suggested in order to meet the TNI’s desire for combat equipment.399 The suggestion to provide convertible equipment reflects a tacit acknowledgement that the resources provided to Indonesia were intended for coercive purposes, in violation of Congressional restrictions on the combat use of arms and materiel procured through MAP grants.
During the first half of the 1970s, the naval strength of Indonesia increased greatly. A no-cost lease arrangement for naval vessels was concluded
397 Amount reported in historical dollars. See, “Document 310.” 398 “Document 281: Memorandum for the Record,” 22 January 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d281. 399 “Document 288: Memorandum of Conversation,” 17 April 1970, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. XX: Southeast Asia, 1969-1972, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v20/d288.
207 with the United States,400 while President Nixon himself agreed to Indonesian requests for three Claud Jones-class destroyer escorts in addition to the one previously provided by the United States.401 The strength of Indonesia’s naval forces was vital in terms of external power projection but also served important domestic functions such as maintaining control of waterways and access between the country’s numerous islands. The naval build-up during this period was necessary to integrate Papua into Indonesian territory and later played a significant role in acquiring in East Timor.
The Ford administration was as forthcoming in terms of military support for the Suharto government as the Nixon administration had been. Arms sales from the United States to Indonesia quintupled between 1974 and 1975.402
Recommendations for U.S. military assistance included “special efforts (1) to obtain FMSCR for a second C-130 and (2) to locate some C-7s from Vietnam or elsewhere” and approval of the expansion of the OV-10 fighter program.403
Requests were also made for U.S. approval of the transfer of F-86’s to
400 “Document 329.” 401 “Document 97: Memorandum of Conversation,” 15 May 1973, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d97; and “Document 98: Letter from President Nixon to Indonesian President Suharto,” 12 July 1973, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d98. These naval ships were in operation by the United States for 14 years before being sold to Indonesia. 402 Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 59. 403 “Document 114: Memorandum of Conversation,” 21 November 1974, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 12 November 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969- 76ve12/d114.
208 Indonesia. 404 Over $115.64 million in transfers of excess stock took place between 1968 and 1976.
The debate in the United States over whether to provide Indonesia with military aid changed with Indonesia’s December 1975 invasion of East Timor.
The humanitarian crisis associated with the invasion was used as a reason for requesting increased U.S. aid allocations.405 Following the declaration of East
Timor as the 27th province of Indonesia on 17 July 1976, no further transfers of excess articles from the United States took place. Rather, Indonesia acquired sixteen helicopters and sixteen OV-10 ground attack aircraft from the United
States as part of the foreign military sales program.406 In December 1976, Sioux helicopters were transferred from Australia to Indonesia with U.S. consent.407 In
1977, $23.1 million of U.S. FMF credit was earmarked to fund helicopters (S-
61N, S-61R, and UH-1H) and patrol craft, while $22.4 million in military grants were also given to provide modern equipment for key military units.408 Additional military assistance provided for helicopter pilot training was extended until
September 1978.409
404 “JAKART 0934,” 16 July 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park; “STATE 18009,” 21 July 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park. 405 “Document 142: Telegram 14947 from the Embassy in Indonesia to the Department of State,” 6 December 1975, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d142. 406 “JAKART 0675,” 21 May 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park. 407 “STATE 30718,” 20 December 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park. 408 Amounts reported in historical (1976) dollars. See, “JAKART 01308,” 29 January 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park; “JAKART 01463,” 2 February 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park. 409 “JAKART 11093,” 25 August 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park; “STATE 28963,” 25 November 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park.
209 Members of the Ford administration, and in particular Kissinger, continued to push for greater aid to Indonesia,410 which rose to more than $129 million in 1978, the same year as a “deadly encirclement and annihilation campaign” was on going in East Timor.411 That same year, the Senate foreign assistance committee voted down a ban on military grant aid to Indonesia that its subcommittee had recommended on human rights grounds.412 The United States
“accepted the annexation” and, as a result, “there was ‘no prohibition on use of
US arms’ in East Timor” based on existing Congressional restrictions.413
Arms imports reached a high in 1980, as indicated in Figure 6.8. That year, Indonesia purchased sixteen used Israeli A-4E Skyhawk fighter aircraft from the United States for $26 million.414 Subsequent purchases from the United States included twelve transport aircraft (C-130H Hercules),415 seventeen helicopters
(Bell-212/UH-1N and Bell-412), 60 armoured reconnaissance vehicles and multiple training aircraft.416 Indonesia also made smaller arms purchases from other countries including Australia and France. Over the course of the early
1980s, Indonesia also built up a fleet of BAE Hawk Mk-53 trainer jets purchased from the United Kingdom in deals worth well over $83 million.
410 “Document 160.” 411 Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 62. 412 Bradley R. Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right:’ The United States, Indonesia, and the Ranking of Human Rights by the Carter Administration, 1976-1980,” The International History Review 32.4 (2009): 809. 413 Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right,’” 807. 414 SIPRI, SIPRI Arms Transfers Database. 415 The Hercules C-130 were reportedly used to transport Indonesian military casualties from East Timor to Java. See, Alkatiri, “Statement Submitted by Mari Alkatiri.” 416 SIPRI, SIPRI Arms Transfers Database.
210 Figure 6.8: Indonesian Armed Forces Personnel, 1968-2010
In addition to changes in the technological capacity of the TNI, its force structure also underwent some changes. Demobilization in the early 1970s helped to eliminate some budget overruns but the overall force size remained large with a substantial police component, as shown in Figure 6.8.
Patterns of State Coercion, 1967-1985
In its evaluation of human rights abuses, the Timor-Leste Commission for
Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e
Reconciliação de Timor-Leste, CAVR) finds that “U.S. supplied weaponry was crucial to Indonesia's capacity to intensify military operations from 1977 in its massive campaigns to destroy the Resistance in which aircraft supplied by the
211 United States played a crucial role.”417 Historian Geoffrey Robinson, citing research by Bradley Simpson and others, contends, “roughly 90 percent of the military equipment used in the invasion [of East Timor] was supplied by the
United States.”418
As early as January 1975, Ambassador Newsom noted the potential complications of a unilateral Indonesian military action in East Timor given the heavy reliance of the TNI on U.S. arms. Due to Congressional restrictions, the
“use of MAP equipment could automatically involve [the] U.S. in [an] embarrassing problem” which could potentially result in the termination of
Indonesia’s foreign aid program.419 Stated in even more blunt terms, there was a
“virtual inevitability that, if Indonesia uses military force in acquiring Timor, some U.S. grant military equipment will be involved” given the sheer amount of arms that had been provided.420 By February 1975, this risk was confirmed when
417 Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação de Timor-Leste (CAVR), The Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation. 418 Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 59. 419 “Document 116.” See also “Document 117: Telegram 026805 from the Department of State to the Embassy in Indonesia,” 6 February 1975, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d117. Similar statements were made by the State Department in August 1975: “Non-violent occupation following after period of internecine conflict within Timor should provoke little disapproval. However, if US-supplied equipment were used in a manner contrary to the restrictive provisions of sections 502, 505(a) and 505(d) of FAA and sections 3(a), 3(c) and 4 of fmsa, we would be obliged to terminate all security assistance. Even if this were not so, those in congress who now oppose military and economic aid to Indonesia might well gain sufficient additional support to force serious curtailment or even termination of all or at least military aid.” See,“Document 128: Telegram 194779 from the Department of State to the Embassies in Indonesia and Australia,” 16 August 1975, FRUS, 1969- 1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d128). 420 “Document 119: Telegram 2022 from the Embassy in Jakarta to the Department of State,” 19 February 1975, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d119.
212 potential plans for an Indonesian invasion in the summer were identified.421
Ambassador Newsom explicitly ignored requests in January 1976 for additional equipment for the Indonesian Air Force since meeting these requests would supply “emergency equipment to complete [the] mop up of Timor.”422
The direct role that U.S. equipment played in abuses of the civilian population in East Timor is still hotly contested despite the existing evidence.
While the provision of U.S. military assistance to Indonesia “denied East Timor’s right to self-determination” according to the views of some scholars,423 the condition placed on the transfer of the OV-10 planes to Indonesia was that they not be used in counterinsurgency mode (i.e. that the airplanes not be used to shoot at people). However, interviews with Timorese who lived through the conflict specifically refer to the use of OV-10s in bombing operations.424 In my interviews with former U.S. Defense attachés to Indonesia, there was an unwillingness to acknowledge the role of these particular planes in the invasion and occupation.425
Nevertheless, officials in the State Department at the time knew that American
421 “Document 117.” 422 “Document 151: Telegram 1250 from the Embassy in Indonesia to the Department of State,” 28 January 1976, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973- 1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d151; “JAKART 01463,” 2 February 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park. 423 Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right,’” 789-799. 424 Turner, Telling East Timor, 113. Robinson provides additional support for this view. See, Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 40. 425 One interviewee stated that, “I can’t say yes or no whether they were using them in East Timor. NGOs reported that the Timorese were being bombed by OV-10s, but OV-10s can’t drop bombs.” (11 October 2011, phone interview with the author). Regarding Vietnam-era OV-10s, the aircraft featured four machine guns, a centerline station for a 20-mm cannon and could carry up to 2,400 pounds more of rockets, bombs or missiles. See, William E. Burrows, “Legends of Vietnam: Bronco’s Tale,” Air & Space (March), Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2010, accessed 12 January 2012, http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/Legends-of-Vietnam-Broncos- Tale.html?c=y&page=1.
213 equipment was being used, including the U.S. destroyers used to shell the capital city of Dili in the first days of the invasion.426
The vast majority of civilian fatalities in East Timor occurred immediately after the invasion as the TNI swept inland. Kiernan recounts reports of up to 2,000 people killed in the first few days of the invasion.427 Between 1975 and 1984, large-scale non-combatant killings broadly tracked with the movements of the invading Indonesian military.428 The United States was aware at the time that
“accusations about the murder of innocent civilians during the capture of Dili” would occur.429 Episodes of torture, sexual violence, and rape in addition to well- known incidents of mass killings have been documented through interviews with
Timorese from Balibo and Dili.430
The political benefits of continued U.S. assistance were widely acknowledged in spite of negative human rights developments in East Timor.
“Because the armed forces are the political base of the current government, grant military assistance has facilitated us access to all levels of government on a number of important matters little related to defense,” argued the U.S. Embassy in
Jakarta.431 When concerns over human rights issues were raised, Ambassador
426 “Document 147: Minutes of the Secretary of State’s Staff Meeting,” 23 December 1975, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d147. 427 Kiernan, “War, Genocide, and Resistance in East Timor, 1975-99,” 210. 428 CAVR, The Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation, 16-17. 429 “Document 143: Memorandum from Thomas J. Barnes of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Scowcroft),” 9 December 1975, FRUS, 1969-1976, Vol. E-12: Documents on East and Southeast Asia, 1973-1976, Washington, DC: US Department of State, accessed 5 January 2012, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d143. 430 Turner, Telling East Timor. 431 “JAKART 16378,” 20 December 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park.
214 Newsom defended the Suharto regime by arguing that “the GOI is not engaged in quote a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights end quote,” a status which would require the curtailment of military assistance under the FAA. Rather, “termination of security assistance...would not only drastically reduce U.S. influence but could cause the GOI to turn for assistance to countries with less concern for human rights.”432 However, despite the vast amount of U.S. foreign aid that had been given to the country “there
[were] no current aid programs specifically aimed at the promotion of human rights in Indonesia.”433
As the occupation began to normalize in the 1980s, the TNI switched from a focus on civilian punishment through aerial bombardment to more targeted counterinsurgency operations in East Timor: in Taipo, Mt. Matebian, Lakluta,
Malim Luro, and Kraras.434 During the September 1981 operation in Lakluta, it is alleged that the TNI were under orders to kill all supporters of FRETILIN leader
Xanana Gusmão.435 Between 70 and 500 fatalities resulted from this operation.436
In September 1983, Indonesian troops allegedly made a “clean sweep” of the area surrounding Kraras, resulting in between 300 and 500 deaths over a period of several days.437 Declassified American documents corroborate these reports.
432 “JAKART 13695,” 20 October 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park. 433 “JAKART 13695.” 434 Kiernan, “War, Genocide, and Resistance in East Timor, 1975-99,” 221. 435 Turner, Telling East Timor, 120-121. 436 Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 56. 437 Kiernan, “War, Genocide, and Resistance in East Timor, 1975-99,” 221; Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 57.
215 Figure 6.9: Excerpt from Telegram 14397, September 9, 1983
Figure 6.9 shows an excerpt of a telegram from the U.S. Embassy in
Jakarta to the State Department describing events in the Viqueque area, according to a secret source.438 The telegram goes on to detail house-to-house searches for
FRETILIN supporters. In addition to these counterinsurgency tactics, there was extensive use of targeted (or selective) repression including “the selective detention, interrogation, and torture of alleged members of the resistance.”439
Kiernan argues that this period was characterised “by ‘alternative forms of violence,’ such as increasing Indonesian use of East Timorese combat ‘teams.’”
However, as the document indicates, indiscriminate violence by the TNI began to be used against entire villages.
The Decline of the Suharto Regime, 1986-1998
President Carter, despite his appeal to human rights, took no steps to reduce foreign aid to Indonesia during his time in office even though violence in
438 Brad Simpson, ed., “Suharto: A Declassified Documentary Orbit,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 242, Washington, DC: The George Washington University, 2008, accessed 6 January 2012, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB242/index.htm. 439 Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 69.
216 East Timor was at its peak. Only in 1988, under President Reagan, did U.S. foreign assistance to Indonesia enter into a period of significant decline as part of broader dynamics associated with the end of the Cold War and the reorientation of U.S. security concerns. Indonesia’s role as a frontline state countering
Communist expansion in Asia was no longer relevant to the United States’ evolving global security strategy.
Figure 6.10: Types of U.S. Economic Assistance to Indonesia, 1986-1998
Figure 6.10 shows that bilateral economic aid continued to be given to
Indonesia in the late 1980s and 1990s, but at substantially lower levels than the preceding decades. Food aid, in particular, declined in importance as the country’s level of development increased. Instead, EXIM bank loans aimed at expanding trade dominated foreign assistance to Indonesia. Aid levels grew in 1998 with the increased provision of USAID grants and food aid during the economic instability
217 that preceded the Asian financial crisis. However, contrary to prior years, no
EXIM bank loans were extended.
Figure 6.11: Types of U.S. Military Assistance to Indonesia, 1986-1998
Figure 6.11 illustrates the changes in military aid for the same period.440
Total military aid dropped from over $36 million in 1986 to $2.76 million in
1990. The provision of a $37.17 million grant through the FMF program in 1991 defies the general trend of declining military assistance in the waning years of the
Cold War. Prior FMF grants were $33.71 in 1986 and $6.65 in 1988. The specific details of these grants remain unclear due to the continued classification of U.S. documents related to this period. However, they are likely related to specific arms deals.
Congress formally restricted military aid to Indonesia from 1993 onwards in response to pressure regarding human rights abuses by the TNI. From 1993 to
440 USAID, “Country Report (Historical Dollars) for Indonesia, 1967-2008.”
218 1995, no military aid was given. IMET was resumed in 1996 but less than $1 million was provided each year. Despite the restrictions on military aid, economic aid continued to flow to Indonesia but at levels substantially less than the previous decades. In 1994, total aid to Indonesia reached its lowest level since Suharto came to office, totalling a paltry $33.76 million in a country of over 196 million people.
Changes in Military Capacity
As military aid trailed off in the late 1980s, arms imports also began to decline and reached a low of $11 million in 1991. As EXIM loans expanded in the mid-1990s, arms imports picked up again reaching a period high of $525 million in 1994 as shown in Figure 6.5.441 In general, the annual average of $250 in arms imports for 1986 to 1998 is in line with the overall average for Indonesia of
$248.75 million.
The provision of military aid in 1991 boosted Indonesia’s overall aid levels after a three-year period of decline. This burst of aid coincided with a period of rapid expansion of the Indonesian police and paramilitary. As shown in
Figure 6.9, force levels for the police and paramilitary increased from 115,000 to
215,000 between 1990 and 1992. Much of the increase occurred in the outlying territories. In 1993, forces in East Timor were expanded to include 3,844 auxiliaries.442 1997 and 1998 also saw a rapid increase in active duty military personnel. In East Timor alone, up to thirteen paramilitary groups ranging in size
441 World Bank, “Net Bilateral Aid Flows from DAC Donors.” 442 Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 75.
219 from 200 to 4,000 members existed. By August 1998, TNI troops in East Timor amounted to 21,600 in addition to the paramilitary forces and militias.443 TNI
Commander Wiranto acknowledged tactical control of militias of about 1,100 people with 546 weapons and 11,950 members of “resistance organizations.”444
The expansion of the TNI through the militias was the key change in military capacity during this period. In the lead up to the 1998/1999 in violence,
Indonesian military intelligence organized and recruited armed militias in a concerted effort to discourage the population from voting for independence.445
The formation of the militias in East Timor was largely government directed and funded, with a substantial supporting role played by the TNI. In fact, it was often hard to distinguish between the two groups, as they were often “one and the same person in different uniforms.”446 The connection between the TNI and the militias is strongly evidenced by the financing of militia activities, which was derived from the annual regional budget allocated by Jakarta.447 The headquarters of most of the militia groups were located on Kodim or Koramil premises and the militias
“often used military vehicles for their patrols, if they were not patrolling together with military personnel.”448 Although some militias had rudimentary weapons such as homemade firearms and knives, military officials supplied others with
443 Kiernan, “War, Genocide, and Resistance in East Timor, 1975-99,” 223. 444 Hamish McDonald et al., Masters of Terror: Indonesia’s Military and Violence in East Timor in 1999, Canberra, Australia: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, 2002, 8. 445 The KPP-HAM report and others claim that the militias were the legacy of the 1975 invasion and were maintained throughout the entire period of occupation. See, Douglas Kammen, “The Trouble with Normal: The Indonesian Military, Paramilitaries, and the Final Solution in East Timor,” Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia, Ed. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program, 2001, 156-188; McDonald et al., Masters of Terror, 7. 446 Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 103. 447 Sebastian, Realpolitik Ideology, 121. 448 McDonald et al., Masters of Terror, 9.
220 modern firearms. 449 This low-tech approach did not require increased arms imports, as had the invasions of Papua and East Timor.
Patterns of State Coercion, 1986-1998
Beginning in 1989, the TNI undertook a series of counterinsurgency operations known as Jaring Merah¸ or “Red Net.” Kirsten Schulze writes that,
“during the first four years of Jaring Merah scores of guerrillas and civilians were killed, tortured and disappeared. Kidnap victims spoke of being forced to bury people shot by the military; women related accounts of sexual assault and rape.”450 Such operations provide evidence of how civil war can influence the location and extent of state coercion but also how ostensibly military operations can be a way of indiscriminately targeting a civilian population that supports the insurgency. The effects of these operations on the civilian population were devastating. As early as November 1990 mass graves were being discovered in
Aceh,451 with estimates of disappeared varying from about 500 to 5,000.452
Investigations have revealed that between 1989 and 1998 between 1,258 and
2,000 people were killed and 3,439 tortured in the region.453 Others contend that up to 12,000 deaths were caused by the conflict during the DOM years.454
449 Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 104. 450 Kirsten E. Schulze, “Insurgency and Counter-insurgency: Strategy in the Aceh Conflict,” ed. Antony Reid, Verandah of Violence: Aceh's Contested Place in Indonesia, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2006, 257). 451 Minorities at Risk Project, Chronology for Acehnese in Indonesia, College Park, MD: University of Maryland Center for International Development and Conflict Management, 2010. 452 Schulze, “Insurgency and counter-insurgency,” 257. 453 Schulze, “Insurgency and counter-insurgency,” 257. 454 Patrick Barron, Samuel Clark, and Muslahuddin Daud, Conflict and Recovery in Aceh: An Assessment of Conflict Dynamics and Options for Supporting the Peace Process, Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2005, 58.
221 Throughout this period, Indonesia continued to receive fairly substantial levels of economic aid despite the congressional restrictions on military assistance.
A key episode of state violence in East Timor occurred in response to pro- independence agitation on 12 November 1991.455 A funeral procession from the
Santa Cruz Cemetery in Dili devolved into a pro-independence demonstration as approximately 2,000 locals marched through the capital. The demonstrators were met with active fire from the TNI, who characterised the event as “a violent riot.”456 The alleged victims of the massacre total 271 fatalities, 278 wounded and
270 disappearances. 457 By the mid-1990s, the human rights violations had declined. Such incidents show that idiosyncratic developments clearly influence patterns of state coercion. In Aceh, reports for this period mainly consist of political imprisonments for separatist activity. Episodes of state coercion continued to sporadically occur during the mid-1990s, including Indonesian forces firing on protestors in Papua in April 1995 with approximately 37 fatalities.458 This suggests that the restrictions imposed on U.S. military assistance may have had an important normative effect since the restrictions would have had little impact on the capacity of the armed forces at this time.
The real turning point in this period occurred in 1998, which marked both the downfall of the Suharto regime and the eruption of violence throughout the
Indonesian archipelago. Both of these developments are attributable to the
455 See, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Kliping Tentang Peristiwa Dili, Timor Timur, 12 November 1991, Jakarta: Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 1992; Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 66-68. 456 Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 66. Despite the breadth of the CAVR report, this incident is notably absent. 457 East Timor Action Network, “The Santa Cruz Massacre: 12 November 1991,” ETAN.org, 2012, accessed 10 January 2012, http://www.etan.org/timor/SntaCRUZ.htm. 458 Minorities at Risk Project, Chronology for Papuans.
222 regional economic crisis and the weakness of the central government. Violence occurred in response to mass protests against the Suharto regime in Jakarta and other population centres, leaving an estimated 2,000 dead. Although pro- independence rallies in Papua were regularly met with violence from the TNI, the scale of the violence sharply increased in July 1998 with the mass arrest of 180 protestors in Biak following the raising of the Papuan flag.459 The subsequent discovery in August of at least 28 bodies dumped off the coast of Biak was linked to the arrests and reported number of fatalities from the incident eventually reached 112.460 In Aceh, additional mass graves were discovered in August
1998.461 Between the repeal of the Aceh DOM in August 1998 and the beginning of December 1999, 534 people were killed and 144 went missing.462 Retaliatory killings also occurred in response to attacks by GAM.463
Most striking, however, were the waves of indiscriminate violence that occurred in East Timor in 1998 and 1999. A severe campaign of state-led violence occurred in the lead-up to and during the UN-organized referendum proposed by
President Habibie. The CAVR report attributes 83.9 percent of total killings in
1999 to Timorese auxiliaries acting alone or in combination with the TNI. 464
459 Danilyn Rutherford, “Waiting for the End in Biak: Violence, Order, and a Flag Raising,” Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia, ed. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program, 2001, 189-212. 460 Minorities at Risk Project, Chronology for Papuans. 461 Minorities at Risk Project, Chronology for Acehnese in Indonesia. 462 Edward Aspinall, “Violence and Identity Formation in Aceh under Indonesian Rule,” Verandah of Violence: The Background of the Aceh Problem, ed., Anthony Reid, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2006, 163. 463 Aspinall, “Violence and Identity Formation in Aceh,” 164. It is worth noting that this pattern is also discussed in reference to the 1983 Kraras killings in East Timor. 464 Elsewhere in the report, the Timorese auxiliaries are referred to as “Timorese collaborators of TNI.”
223 Violence was largely concentrated in April and September of that year.465 The most common form of state violence was mass killing at places of shelter such as churches. 466 Second, specific individuals were targeted for murder and disappearance. 467 Third, torture was employed against pro-independence supporters and those who refused to join pro-Indonesia militias.468 Lastly, sexual violence was reported extensively.469 The main targets of the violence were students and pro-independence activists.
The argument forwarded here cannot explain the timing of specific violent acts. Instead, I argue that foreign aid provided the capacity for the initial invasion and subsequent occupation of East Timor. The acquisition of this territory created the political conditions necessary for the use of state coercion as a means to maintain control over the civilian population. Episodes of state violence occurred in response to changing local conditions, but the high level of coercive capacity enabled by the provision of foreign aid was a key necessary structural condition for this violence to occur.
465 KPP-HAM, “Full Report of the Investigative Commission into Human Rights Violations in East Timor,” Masters of Terror: Indonesia’s Military and Violence in East Timor in 1999, ed. Hamish McDonald et al., Canberra, Australia: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, 2002, 30. 466 On 6 April 1999, at least 30 were killed in the Liquica church as a result of militia violence. Their bodies were subsequently disposed of by members of the military (McDonald et al., Masters of Terror, 12). In addition, the 6 September 1999 attack on the Nossa Senhora de Fatima Church in Suai is said to have resulted in between 40 and 200 fatalities. The attack was a combined army, police and militia operation aimed at refugees sheltering in the church. See, Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die,” 167; McDonald 2002, 6-7. 467 From April 12-13 1999, six suspected supporters of Timorese independence were subjected to torture before being murdered in an extrajudicial killing attributed to the Bobonaro military district commander (McDonald et al., Masters of Terror, 12-13). 468 KPP-HAM, “Full Report of the Investigative Commission into Human Rights Violations in East Timor,” 31. 469 KPP-HAM, “Full Report of the Investigative Commission into Human Rights Violations in East Timor,” 32.
224 According to the KPP-HAM report, “the violence generally showed support from the military civil apparatus involving financial aid taken from the official regional budget, facilities of command headquarters and coordination, and infrastructure of various levels. The pattern of violence showed that the military apparatus and the local bureaucracy controlled the perpetrators on the ground.”470
Although direct evidence of American support for the stark violence that occurred in East Timor is limited, in part due to the continued classification of relevant documents, the evidence linking the militias to the TNI and the provincial budget demonstrates that the economic aid being provided to Indonesia during this period is likely to have filtered down into the militias.
The Transition to Democracy
With the downfall of the Suharto regime in 1998, many thought that state- society relations in Indonesia would undergo a period of rapid change. While the political system did indeed transform into a vibrant multi-party democracy over time, many of the traditional patterns in state violence have persisted while intercommunal violence has worsened. The establishment of the United Nations
Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) at the end of 1999 and East
Timor’s official independence in 2002 did little to change overall aid levels to
Indonesia. Economic aid averaged about $284 million a year, similar to the
$279.86 million average for the entire post-independence period.
470 KPP-HAM, “Full Report of the Investigative Commission into Human Rights Violations in East Timor,” 51.
225 Figure 6.12: Types of U.S. Economic Assistance to Indonesia, 1999-2010
Figure 6.12 illustrates the fluctuations in economic aid that occurred in the post-Suharto period. After an increase in aid, which began in 1998 and ended a period of decline, aid levels again began to shrink in 2001. In 2004, they reached a relative low of $177 million. The devastation wrought by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami resulted in a major spike in total economic aid, which jumped to $644.27 million in 2005. The majority of this increase came from USAID’s special
Tsunami Recovery and Reconstruction Fund for the region.
Although U.S. bilateral aid receipts hovered around the $300 million mark following Suharto’s resignation, military aid continued to be heavily restricted during the democratic transition period as reflected in Figure 6.13.471 The events of 9/11 and Indonesia’s participation in the global War on Terror did little to affect the amount of military aid flowing to the country. The 2002 Bali bombings
471 USAID, “Country Report (Historical Dollars) for Indonesia, 1967-2008.”
226 by Jemaah Islamiyah, which resulted in the deaths of over 200 people, also had no effect despite the United States’ commitment to combat such movements.
Figure 6.13: Types of U.S. Military Assistance to Indonesia, 1999-2010
When U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice certified the resumption of military aid for Indonesia in 2005, existing restrictions that made assistance available only if the government was prosecuting, punishing, and resolving cases involving members of the TNI credibly alleged to have committed human rights violations in East Timor and elsewhere, were waived.472 IMET-funded training resumed, albeit at low levels, and FMF grants were reinstituted. For the 2008 fiscal year, $41.7 million in military aid was requested for the Indonesian military and police to fight terrorism, combat weapons proliferation and other
472 Thomas Lum, “US Foreign Aid to East and South Asia: Selected Recipients,” CRS Report for Congress RL31362, Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2008.
227 transnational crimes, monitor strategic waterways, and cooperate with the United
States armed forces.473
Changes in Military Capacity
Arms imports were relatively constrained in the early 2000s before fluctuating dramatically in the latter part of the decade as illustrated in Figure 6.5.
Due to U.S. military aid restrictions, Indonesia diversified in terms of its arms suppliers. In 2000, 4 unmanned aerial vehicles were obtained from France along with 11 infantry fighting vehicles from Slovakia. Russia supplied armed helicopters and infantry fighting vehicles in 2005 and 2008. In 2009, South Korea provided 10 amphibious assault vehicles.474
The main change in terms of the force structure of the TNI was the increase in paramilitary and police forces that occurred in 2004. Police and paramilitary jumped from 195,000 to 280,000 raising overall armed forces personnel to 582,000. In addition, the withdrawal of TNI forces from East Timor allowed for the deployment in 2003 of an additional 51,000 soldiers and police officers to Aceh.475
Patterns of State Coercion
An assessment of the independent effects of U.S. foreign aid on state coercion in the 2000s is particularly difficult because the dynamics of the separatist conflicts became increasingly related as troops who had been stationed
473 Lum, “US Foreign Aid to East and South Asia.” 474 SIPRI, SIPRI Arms Transfers Database. 475 Themnér and Wallensteen, “Armed Conflict, 1946-2011.”
228 in East Timor were redeployed elsewhere. Because U.S. foreign aid levels were very stable throughout the period of transition in East Timor, I focus on the massive influx of foreign aid associated with the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami.
As noted above, this period also marks the resumption of military aid to
Indonesia.
Table 6.3: Reported Human Rights Violations in Aceh, May 2003 to March 2005
19 May 2003 to 19 Nov. 2003 to April 2004 to Total 19 Nov. 2003 19 April 2004 March 2005 Murder 67 316 23 406 Pembunuhan Torture 168 89 62 319 Penyiksaan Disappearance 63 63 3 129 Penghilangan paksa Arrest 81 166 20 267 Penangkapan Rape 18 1 - 19 Pemerkosaan Sexual Harassment 7 1 - 8 Pelecehen seksual Intimidation 3 2 3 8 Intimidasi Note: “-“ indicates no reported data. Source: Nashrun Marsuki and Adi Wardisi, eds., Facta Bicara: Mengungkap Pelanggaran HAM di Aceh 1989-2005, Banda Aceh, Indonesia: Koalisi NGO HAM Aceh, 2011.
Until May 2005, Aceh province was virtually cut off from independent media coverage due to the expulsion of NGOs and independent observers from the region. However, data regarding human rights violations was collected by local NGOs such as Koalisi HAM Aceh (Aceh Human Rights Coalition). Table
6.3 summarises their reported data for the period of 19 May 2003 to March 2005.
Of the 111 violations reported for the April 2004 to March 2005 period, 52 were directly attributed to the TNI while 4 were attributed to the police (no longer
229 under TNI control) and 4 to GAM. Unlike East Timor, TNI-funded militias did not significantly contribute to state coercion in Aceh. 476 It is nevertheless extremely difficult to know for certain the number of individuals affected by state coercion during this period.477
The aftermath of the tsunami saw the resumption of direct military cooperation between the United States and Indonesia, as the United States utilized its military to deliver and distribute disaster relief aid. As Aceh was severely affected by the tsunami’s devastation, the GAM leadership decided to set aside their demands for independence in favour of greater autonomy. In return for
GAM’s demilitarization, the Indonesian government promised to withdraw all non-local military and police units and disarm the approximately 10,000 pro-
Indonesian militia members in Aceh.478 By the close of 2005, over 30,000
Indonesian police and army personnel had left the province.479 While disaster aid may have helped contribute to peace in Aceh by creating a U.S. military presence in the region and introducing international oversight, the peace agreement was successful in getting potential human rights abusers out of the region.
The Aceh peace agreement allowed the TNI to redeploy 15,000 troops to
Papua. The transferring of TNI personnel between the various conflict hot spots
476 See Patrick Barron, Samuel Clark, and Muslahuddin Daud, Conflict and Recovery in Aceh: An Assessment of Conflict Dynamics and Options for Supporting the Peace Process, Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2005, 24-26. 477 For example, Amnesty International reported that, “according to local human rights organizations, during the Civil Emergency period alone (May 2004-May 2005) 80 civilians were killed: three died as a result of torture; 64 were assassinated; six were abducted and killed; and seven were killed during shootings.” Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 2006— Indonesia, 23 May 2006, accessed 15 August 2012, http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/447ff7aa2f.html. 478 BBC News, “Aceh Rebels Sign Peace Agreement,” BBC News, 15 August 2005, accessed 13 January 2012, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4151980.stm. 479 Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 2006—Indonesia.
230 has likely contributed to increased levels of coercion in Papua due to local changes in military capacity. Amnesty International documented in 2008 that “an army official who had been indicted for crimes against humanity in Timor-Leste, but had yet to face trial, was nominated as military commander in the Papuan capital, Jayapura.”480 Reports of extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, torture and excessive use of force in Papua have increased in the late 2000s.481
Conclusion
The evidence provided in this chapter demonstrates that foreign assistance facilitated state coercion in Indonesia through several different channels. First, foreign aid played a direct role in facilitating state coercion through a capacity- building mechanism. Foreign military assistance enabled the country to purchase arms and equipment that were directly involved in the invasion of East Timor and the subsequent occupation of that territory. The introduction of FMF made the purchase of equipment with military aid a requirement. In addition, U.S. military assistance financed increases in the country’s military capacity through IMET-
480 Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 2008—Indonesia, n.d., accessed 15 July 2010, http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/indonesia/report-2008. 481 Some of these allegations were confirmed when, on 17 October 2010, the Asian Human Rights Commission posted footage of Indonesian soldiers allegedly torturing indigenous Papuan481 civilians from the Tingginambut area. Threats, beatings and even attempted genital mutilation were inflicted upon individuals who stood accused of involvement in separatist activities. This video generated a widespread response by international human rights organizations and led some to call for President Yudhoyono to be held personally accountable for his troops’ actions. See, Human Rights Watch, Prosecuting Political Aspiration: Indonesia’s Political Prisoners, New York, NY: Human Rights Watch, 2010; Waters, “Torture in West Papua.” What is particularly surprising in this instance of abuse is that on 22 October 2010, the Indonesian Coordinating Minister for Security and former Commander-in-Chief of the TNI, Djoko Suyanto, admitted that the military was responsible for the actions depicted in the footage and took steps to prosecute those responsible. See, Karishma Vaswani, “Indonesia Confirms Papua Torture,” BBC News, 22 October 2010, accessed 15 July 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11604361.
231 funded officer training. Second, both military and economic aid contributed to the use of coercion through an income effect. The receipt of foreign aid provided more resources to the Indonesian state than were otherwise available. The economic cushion provided by foreign aid allowed the Indonesian state greater leeway in acquiring and governing Papua and East Timor in spite of existing economic constraints and popular pressure for increased services.
The case of Indonesia also suggests that improvements in military capacity brought about through foreign aid may endure beyond temporary reductions or cut-offs of aid.482 The U.S. military aid cut-off from 1993 to 2005 did not prevent human rights abuses in Indonesia or in the punishment of many of the perpetrators. By that point in time, the role of the TNI in maintaining internal security and the impunity with which members of the TNI violated human rights had been established. In this case, maintaining economic aid in the face of military aid restrictions may have also been counterproductive because it eliminates direct military-to-military ties, support for military professionalization and other oversight mechanisms that are the result of military cooperation.
Indeed, the “franchising of violence” to civilian militias was at its height during the period of restricted military aid.483
It is important to note that foreign aid was not the only external resource available to the government of Indonesia. EXIM bank loans provided by the
482 In a summary of a Congressional hearing on Indonesia held in April 1976, Secretary Kissinger records Professor Don Emerson as stating that, “cutting military aid…will not free political prisoners.” See “STATE 089481,” 14 April 1976, NARA, College Park, MD: National Archives at College Park. 483 Schulze attributes the reliance on militias with creating less trained and less disciplined fighters in addition to blurring the line between combatants and non-combatants. Schulze, “Insurgency and Counter-insurgency,” 263.
232 United States as well as military and economic loans extended by the Communist bloc during the Sukarno era also contributed to the state’s resources, as did increased world oil prices. Furthermore, the TNI itself was directly engaged in the economy, in large part to make up the shortfall between the funds allocated by the central government and its day-to-day operational requirements.
While the degree to which the TNI penetrated the Indonesian economy is not likely to be found in other cases, it raises important questions regarding external sources of funding for national militaries more broadly. Foreign aid, elicit revenue from smuggling or trafficking, and direct taxation of local populations are all potential sources of military funding that are not dependent upon the state’s tax revenue. With the exception of foreign aid, these resources are extremely difficult to manipulate by external actors. The role of other forms of military revenue on changes in coercive capacity and human rights abuses is therefore a valuable area of future inquiry identified in this study.
233 Appendix
Figure A6.1: Main Bilateral ODA Donors to Indonesia, 1960-2010
Figure A6.2: Indonesia’s External Debt and ODA as a Percentage of Gross National Income, 1967-2010484
484 World Bank, “Net Bilateral Aid Flows from DAC Donors.”
234 Chapter VII. Conclusion
Introduction
This study has challenged the traditional views held about the domestic effects of bilateral foreign aid. The cross-national statistical evidence presented in this study demonstrates that greater levels of bilateral foreign aid from the United
States are associated with the occurrence of various forms of state coercion in subsequent years. This fairly robust relationship persists even when changes in the international system and changes in American political leadership are taken into account. The theory of the coercive effect of foreign aid helps to explain the seemingly puzzling finding that foreign aid is associated with a variety of forms of state coercion in recipient countries. Rather than contributing to a country’s capacity for public service provision, foreign aid can be channelled into the state’s coercive capacity, which includes the armed forces, police, and intelligence services as well as the infrastructure or tools required for these actors to work effectively. This coercive effect of foreign aid is most likely to appear in countries that are non-democratic and in which the armed forces or security services are a dominant social actor. Foreign aid, combined with a history of intrastate conflict, can contribute to an institutionalized capacity for state coercion by creating security sector institutions that are inwardly oriented.
The purpose of this concluding chapter is twofold. First, as a preliminary test of external validity, I provide additional evidence regarding the coercive effect of foreign aid from a variety of cases. The additional case studies, though
235 brief, add to both the quantitative results and the case study of Indonesia by highlighting specific conditions shared by countries that have displayed the coercive effect of aid. I discuss the multiple mechanisms through which the coercive effect of foreign aid may operate as well as additional relevant factors identified through these cases that can affect if, and when, aid is translated into state coercion. To conclude the study, I discuss the implications of the study from three perspectives: first, from an international human rights perspective; second, from a critical perspective; and, third, from a policy perspective. The conclusion I offer emphasises that while the coercive effect of foreign aid varies across countries and historical periods, it should remain an important consideration for aid donors regardless of whether or not their goal is to promote human rights through foreign aid. The finding that U.S. bilateral foreign aid is associated with increased political violence should caution all aid donors to re-evaluate their aid policies and strive to ensure that aid does not fuel the fire of civil conflict because the presence of state coercion is likely to affect many of the policy goals of foreign aid donors.
Beyond Indonesia: Assessing the Validity of the Coercive Effect of Aid
The case study presented in the previous chapter identifies some potential mechanisms behind the coercive effect of foreign aid. In the case of Indonesia, foreign aid worked through both a capacity-building mechanism and an income effect to contribute to episodes of state coercion. The evidence demonstrates that the income effect of foreign aid played an essential role in making the Indonesian
236 military build-up in the mid-1970s possible by increasing the overall resources available to the Suharto government. While military aid allowed for the direct purchase of arms and equipment from the United States and other suppliers485 and therefore contributed to state coercion through a capacity-building mechanism, the economic aid that Indonesia received helped to support a weak and highly indebted economy thereby reducing the economic pressure of a costly 25-year occupation of East Timor. The longer-term consequences of the coercive effect of aid are also evident in this case. Subsequent violence in East Timor, as well as
Aceh and Papua, grew out of the coercive skills that the TNI developed during the occupation of East Timor. IMET-funded training of elite units within the TNI facilitated the acquisition of these skills.
While the general story gleaned from the cross-national results presented in Chapters 4 and 5 reflects the combined historical experience of a wide variety of countries over a 30-year period, the case study of Indonesia demonstrates the utility of focusing on specific periods relevant to the history of political violence in a particular country. This section therefore examines the role of foreign aid in specific episodes of state coercion in several cases. I focus first on El Salvador where a capacity-building mechanism underpinned the relationship between the high levels of U.S. bilateral foreign aid and subsequent state coercion in the context of internal conflicts. I then turn to the case of South Korea where episodes of state violence were relatively limited due to both domestic and international
485 As Kiernan succinctly concludes regarding Indonesia’s actions in East Timor, “more than $1 billion in military equipment, supplied to Indonesia mostly by the United States, but also by Britain, France, and Australia, had made this genocide possible.” See, Kiernan, “War, Genocide, and Resistance in East Timor, 1975-99.”
237 constraints in spite of sustained high levels of U.S. foreign aid for several decades. These cases allow for the further refinement of the theory presented in this study by specifying when bilateral foreign aid plays an important role in the processes driving state coercion and political violence and when aid is secondary to other factors.
El Salvador
The mechanism underlying the coercive effect of foreign aid in El
Salvador is very similar to the direct capacity-building mechanism identified in the case of Indonesia. Like Indonesia, El Salvador’s government has historically been dominated by the military. In the period between 1933 and 1980, only one of the country’s presidents was a civilian. Regular elections occurred under these dictatorial regimes but only limited political competition took place. Furthermore, much of the political violence in El Salvador occurred in the context of an ongoing civil war. From 1981 until 1992, the country’s armed forces fought the
Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). This civil war provided a political cover for the Salvadoran state’s targeting of members and supporters of the FMLN and of organized political opposition more generally. In the context of the Cold War and an explosion of leftist movements throughout
Latin America, the United States choose to support successive non-democratic leaders in El Salvador in much the same way as it aligned with General Suharto in
Indonesia as a result of his anti-Communist stance.
238 Violence in El Salvador also had significant structural dimensions. The mass violence of 1932, known as La Matanza, has been linked to a longstanding system of collaboration between the country’s oligarchy and military.486 Some have argued that given the economic and political influence of the country’s agricultural elites, governments had historically been forced to resort to repression in order to avoid land reforms as a means of satisfying popular demands.487
However, the scale of violence that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s cannot be explained solely as a result of these domestic pressures. During the peak of violence, from 1978 through 1983, government forces were responsible for the deaths of 42,171 individuals amongst a population of about five million.488 The country’s leftist political opposition and peasantry were the main targets of the violence, which took the form of targeted killings as well as indiscriminate massacres. Rape was common and torture was used extensively as evidenced by bodies recovered from roadsides or the El Playon lava field near San Salvador.489
During this period, state repression escalated into widespread violence.
As I detail further below, the financial resources provided by U.S. foreign aid helped sustain state-led violence in El Salvador throughout the 1980s. Direct support in the form of military and security sector training and the provision of
486 Michael McClintock, The American Connection, Vol. 1: State Terror and Population Resistance in El Salvador, (London: Zed Books, 1985), 112-116; William Stanley, The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War in El Salvador, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 43-55. 487 Charles D. Brockett, “Sources of State Terrorism in Rural Central America,” State Organized Terror: The Case of Violent Internal Repression, ed. P. Timothy Bushnall, Valdimir Shlapentokh, Christopher K. Vanderpool, and Jeyaratnam Sundram, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991, 59- 76; McClintock, The American Connection. 488 Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 3. The Center for Justice and Accountability claims that “over 75,000 civilians died at the hands of government forces during the Civil War in El Salvador (1980-1992).” Center for Justice and Accountability, “Background on El Salvador,” n.d., accessed 12 June 2012, http://cja.org/article.php?list=type&type=199. 489 Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 1.
239 arms and military equipment played a vital role in building the state’s coercive capacity. Budgetary support through economic aid allowed for increasing levels of military expenditure and the expansion of El Salvador’s armed forces throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. Despite repeated threats from the United
States that military aid would be cut-off if human rights abuses continued, the accrued resources of the Salvadoran state and the perception of a growing
Communist threat in Latin America meant that these threats were largely meaningless and therefore did little to influence the dynamics of state violence in
El Salvador.
The United States first began providing foreign assistance to El Salvador’s security sector in the mid-1960s. The U.S. Office of Public Safety provided law enforcement training that included the deployment of Central Intelligence Agency operatives in an effort to improve El Salvador’s intelligence apparatus. 490
Counterinsurgency doctrine and technical assistance were also provided by U.S.
Army Mobile Training Teams and temporary advisors.491 American interest in El
Salvador expanded in the late 1970s when the country experienced a period of political instability generated by a quick succession of governments. Initially, aid under the Carter administration was categorized as “nonlethal” and included trucks, night-vision gear, and tear gas.492 Levels of American aid to El Salvador began to increase when General Carlos Romero was elected to the Presidency in
1977. However, El Salvador did not hold a prominent place in U.S. foreign policy
490 McClintock, The American Connection, 61. 491 Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 82. 492 Americas Watch, El Salvador’s Decade of Terror: Human Rights since the Assassination of Archbishop Romero, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Human Rights Watch Books, 1991, 117.
240 in Latin America until the collapse of the Somoza government in Nicaragua in
July 1979. Shortly thereafter, an October 1979 junior officer coup ousted
President Romero and focused the United States’ attention on El Salvador.
The failure of the junta that followed Romero’s ouster and the emergence of the second Revolutionary Governing Junta made the United States an active player in El Salvador. Economic aid from the United States increased from just over $29 million in 1979 to about $137 million for 1980.493 According to figures from the World Bank, U.S. economic aid constituted 85 percent of the bilateral
ODA that El Salvador received in 1980. In addition to ODA, the United States provided $14 million in military aid for the 1980 fiscal year, which drastically increased to $164.1 million in 1982.494 Of this amount, over $90 million was provided in the form of MAP grants. The increases in bilateral foreign aid from the United States strongly correlate with increases in Salvadoran military expenditure. Military expenditure had been slowly creeping upward since 1975 but, in 1980, it jumped from $72 million to $116 million. The country’s armed forces expanded from 8,000 in 1977 to 23,000 as of 1981.495
Following the 1979 coup that overthrew Romero, state-led violence in El
Salvador escalated dramatically with government forces reportedly killing civilians at the rate of one thousand per month.496 In the spring of 1980, Congress debated continuing military aid to El Salvador given the ongoing human rights abuses and ultimately decided to continue funding the ruling junta. Congressional
493 USAID, US Overseas Loans and Grants. Amount is reported in constant 2009 US dollars due to a discrepancy in reporting introduced in a 2012 revision of the data. 494 USAID, US Overseas Loans and Grants. 495 World Bank, World Development Indicators. 496 Cited in Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 2.
241 approval was given for an executive request for almost $6 million in nonlethal aid.497 However, helicopter deliveries were put on hold and economic and military assistance commitments were temporarily frozen following the murder of four
American churchwomen in December 1980.498 By the time these temporary restrictions were put in place, the number of civilians killed by state forces that year totalled approximately 11,895.499
Attempts to pressure the Salvadoran military to stop the violence through foreign aid restrictions failed largely because the U.S. executive branch was actively working to ensure that arms and aid were delivered to El Salvador. In
1981, Congress adopted a six-month human rights certification requirement for foreign aid to El Salvador just as the Carter administration was providing weapons to the Salvadoran army for the first time in five years in response to
Cuba and Nicaragua’s support for the FMLN.500 In all, U.S. foreign aid to El
Salvador totalled $319.5 million in 1981 with over 23 percent of that aid provided as military assistance. Salvadoran state forces killed between 11,727 and 16,266 individuals that same year.501 One particularly notable event in December 1981 involved the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion, which killed 811 people (including
195 children) in the area around El Mozote.502
497 Americas Watch, El Salvador’s Decade of Terror, 118. 498 Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 214. 499 Socorro Juridico Cristiano (Christian Legal Aid), “Sobre los refugiados salvadorenos,” Mimeographed, San Salvador, 1981. Cited in Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 206. 500 Americas Watch, El Salvador’s Decade of Terror, 118, 120. 501 These estimates likely underreport violence which occurred in rural areas. Socorro Juridico Cristiano (Christian Legal Aid), “Informe no. 11, ano IX,” Mimeographed, San Salvador, 1984; Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 222-224. 502 Ian Urbina, “O.A.S. to Reopen Inquiry Into Massacre in El Salvador in 1981,” The New York Times, 5 March 2005, accessed 15 August 2012,
242 The coercive tactics used by the Salvadoran military expanded in the context of the civil war from targeted disappearances and executions to include indiscriminate violence against civilians in areas where the FMLN enjoyed support, a pattern similar to that observed in parts of Indonesia.503 Military campaigns that included aerial bombardment generated substantial casualties.504
Both military and economic assistance from the United States continued to increase with military assistance totalling $164.1 million in 1982 and economic aid reaching $364.5 million.505 The Salvadoran Truth Commission estimates that
5,962 civilians died at the hands of government forces that year.506
The upward trend in U.S. foreign aid to El Salvador was reinforced by the election of President Jose Napoleon Duarte in May 1984, which prompted
Congress to approve record amounts of military aid to El Salvador.507 U.S. bilateral military aid peaked in 1984 at $363.3 million with the majority of this aid provided as MAP grants.508 Thanks in large part to military aid, arms imports to El Salvador rose from $6 million in 1979 to $60 million in 1984 and in 1985,
El Salvador’s military expenditure reached $252 million.509 Economic aid from the United States constituted 93.5 percent of the total bilateral ODA received by
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/international/americas/08salvador.html?_r=1. See also, Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote, New York: Vintage Books, 1994. 503 Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 2. 504 For example, a military campaign in San Vicente resulted in the deaths of 300 to 400 peasants. Latin American/North American Church Concerns of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, “El Salvador—Civil War Chronology,” Archbishop Oscar Romero: An Archbishop for the New Millennium, Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, 2004, accessed14 June 2012, http://kellogg.nd.edu/romero/Salvador.htm 505 USAID, US Overseas Loans and Grants. 506 Americas Watch, El Salvador’s Decade of Terror, 121. 507 Americas Watch, El Salvador’s Decade of Terror, 126. 508 USAID, US Overseas Loans and Grants. 509 World Bank, World Development Indicators; Correlates of War, National Military Capabilities Dataset.
243 El Salvador and by 1987 ODA amounted to almost 11 percent of GNI. Salvadoran military expenditure peaked in 1987 at $794 million with U.S. military assistance amounting to almost 24 percent of El Salvador’s military expenditure. 510 U.S. economic assistance amounted to $788.8 million, just over 99 percent of the country’s military expenditure.511
In addition to MAP grants that could be freely spent, the United States provided rifles, automatic weapons, artillery, helicopters, reconnaissance and transport aircraft, and A-37 ground attack jets to the Salvadoran military.
Significant changes in force structure were brought about through aid-funded U.S. training. In 1982, IMET funds for El Salvador reached $10.57 million. The following year, $9.61 million were dedicated to IMET.512 Military assistance from the United States was used to create the Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalions
(BIRI, Atlacatl, Atonal, Belloso, etc.), which were later identified by the country’s Truth Commission as “the primary agents of war crimes.”513 By 1985, the size of the military had increased to 48,000 troops.514
While all branches of the state’s coercive apparatus were involved in the violence against civilians, including the National Guard, the Treasury Police, and the National Police, small military-backed civilian death squads also
510 World Bank, World Development Indicators. 511 Author’s calculations based on World Bank, World Development Indicators and USAID, US Overseas Loans and Grants. 512 As a point of comparison, the greatest amount of IMET funding that Indonesia received was $9.18 million in 1959 when that country’s armed forces numbered approximately 300,000. In 1982, El Salvador’s military stood at 28,000. 513 Latin American/North American Church Concerns of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, “El Salvador—Civil War Chronology.” 514 The armed forces remained at this size until 1988 when the number of military personnel very slowly began to decline. See, Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 227.
244 contributed.515 As in Indonesia, some death squads conducted joint operations with and received logistical support from branches of the military.516 During a visit to San Salvador in December 1983, Vice President George Bush publically condemned “death squad terrorists” and privately demanded the removal of certain military personnel linked to human rights violations.517 As a reward for improving human rights conditions, the Reagan administration promised a massive increase in military assistance including additional aircraft.518
Although no large scale army massacres occurred between August 1984 and September 1988,519 substantial civilian fatalities continued to be generated by the conflict between the government and the FMLN. 520 Political violence, including extrajudicial killings and disappearances in the context of Operation
Phoenix and other counterinsurgency measures persisted until 1989. The most notable episode of state violence in this period was the killing of six Jesuit priests and two women by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl battalion in 1989.521 In 1992, a peace treaty between the government and the FMLN marked the end of large-scale political violence in the country and led to a series of reforms including the creation of a State Council for Human Rights and modifications to the judiciary
515 Death squads were very small and generally fairly secretive about their work. Plus they were often composed of or linked to military units, political officials, etc. For example, Roberto D’Aubuisson was running a death squad out of his offices in the Salvadoran legislature. 516 Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 120-121. 517 Americas Watch, El Salvador’s Decade of Terror, 124. 518 Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 229. 519 Americas Watch, El Salvador’s Decade of Terror, 126. 520 According to Human Rights Watch, there were 1900 political killings and disappearances in 1985 of which 90 percent can be attributed to the government. Americas Watch, El Salvador’s Decade of Terror, 126. 521 Center for Justice and Accountability, “Background on El Salvador.”
245 that reduced the government’s freedom to use coercion.522 Military assistance had been slowly declining throughout the late 1980s and dropped by 66 percent in
1992 before falling to less than $1 million in 1994. Only in 1994 did U.S. bilateral economic aid to El Salvador decline significantly.
Given that there were no external sources of revenue to the Salvadoran state other than foreign aid and that the country’s GDP did not experience any notable changes in the 1980s, it can be argued that bilateral aid from the United
States financed significant changes in El Salvador’s coercive capacity as aid exceeded 120 percent of military expenditure. Indeed, as Stanley argues, “only massive U.S. assistance allowed the Armed Forces of El Salvador (FAES) to turn the tide and achieve a stalemate against the FMLN.”523 Unfortunately, achieving this stalemate came at the cost of significant losses of life including thousands who have subsequently been proven to have no direct involvement in the insurgency.
Together, the cases of El Salvador and Indonesia demonstrate that at least two mechanisms exist for the operation of the coercive effect of foreign aid. The first is a capacity-building mechanism. As the cases of El Salvador and Indonesia show, foreign aid can directly contribute to the coercive capacity of a country through arms acquisitions, military training, and changes in force structure. Over time, these changes can create a sustained capacity for coercion as air forces and naval fleets are expanded and military trainees themselves become trainers.
522 Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 6. 523 Ibid., 3.
246 One difficultly with assessing the relationship between bilateral foreign aid and subsequent state coercion through the capacity-building mechanism is that the lag between changes in coercive capacity brought about through foreign aid and the use of this increased coercive capacity for repression is potentially unpredictable. In the case of Indonesia, excess military equipment from the
Vietnam War was available when the government sought to expand its capabilities in the lead up to the invasion and occupation of East Timor. Thus, the time lag between the transfer of aid-funded arms and state coercion was relatively short. In the case of El Salvador, arms transfers did not play as large a role as
IMET-funded military training.
The unpredictable effect of military training is illustrated by the fact that while the Atlacatl battalion was founded in 1980 based on U.S. training at the
School of the Americas, this battalion engaged in documented human rights abuses in 1982 and 1989. Given this, why the Atlacatl battalion did not engage in human rights abuses throughout the 1980s is difficult to explain. On the one hand, it may be that human rights violations occurred and have yet to be documented.
On the other hand, the variation in such dynamics may be related to individual- level or idiosyncratic factors that the theory cannot fully account for.
The second mechanism, an income effect, can be observed in the
Indonesian case. In the early 1970s the bankruptcy of Indonesia’s state-owned oil company, combined with the debt load acquired under Sukarno, placed the country under severe economic strain. Despite the economic pressure experienced prior to the formation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
247 (OPEC), the substantial amounts of bilateral economic aid being provided by the
United States (over $1 billion annually from 1969 to 1973) enabled the Suharto government to heavily subsidize certain societal groups while simultaneously engaging in a military build up that culminated in the 1975 invasion of East
Timor.
The Salvadoran case demonstrates that the provision of high levels of foreign aid may create some donor leverage over the aid recipient. There was a temporary decline in death squad killings following the 1983 visit of Vice
President Bush to the country. However, by continuing to provide foreign aid regardless of the military’s conduct towards civilians, U.S. influence over the
Salvadoran government was ultimately squandered. As Stanley argues, “more than 14,000 of these [civilians] died during the Carter administration, which claimed a commitment to defending human rights.”524 The case of Indonesia additionally demonstrates that cutting off military assistance once a substantial coercive capacity has been developed has only a limited effect on subsequent state coercion, especially when economic aid continues to be received.
South Korea
At first glance, the case of South Korea seems to be an ideal scenario in which to observe the coercive effect of foreign aid. It shares many traits with
Indonesia, including the legacy of the highly coercive Japanese colonial state.525
524 Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 263. 525 Sohn discusses three phases in Japanese colonial rule in Korea. The first phase was rule through “an extended military police system established even before Korea formally became a
248 Early in the history of post-independence South Korea, the military considered itself to be the country’s sole modernizing agent and was staunchly anti-
Communist.526 South Korea also shares some political characteristics with El
Salvador including a history of military coups and a strong and extensive intelligence apparatus. However, the relative size of the South Korean military, which currently stands at just under 700,000 troops with an additional 3 million on reserve, has historically dwarfed that of both Indonesia and El Salvador by both relative and absolute measures.527
Given South Korea’s post-war authoritarian political system, which lasted until the late 1980s, and the government’s need for economic control in order to ensure the success of the country’s export-led development model, the theory of the coercive effect of foreign aid would suggest that conditions were ripe in South
Korea for the vast amounts of foreign aid given by the United States to be used for internal coercion. To explain why this was (for the most part) not the case, it is important to understand both the economic and political changes that occurred in the country during the 1970s. These domestic changes, in addition to the constraints imposed by the military threat of North Korea, provide an explanation for the limited state coercion that took place in South Korea as well as the reasons why the violence that did occur was fairly constrained in its scope and intensity.
colony.” The second phase was a period of greater freedom of association and the expansion of education within the context of a police state. The third phase, which ultimately led to the end of Japanese rule, was a period of militant expansionism that harnessed the people and resources of Korea for Japanese war aims. See, Hak-Kyu Sohn, Authoritarianism and Opposition in South Korea, London, UK: Routledge, 1989, 10-11. 526 Sohn, Authoritarianism and Opposition in South Korea, 17-19. 527 South Korea has a mandatory 21-month period of military service for all males as well as a policy of wartime conscription.
249 An ally of the United States, South Korea received significant American financial support following the division of the two Koreas in 1948. Over the next decades, the United States gave South Korea a total of $74.5 billion in bilateral economic and military aid.528 The majority of this aid was provided between the end of the Korean War in July 1953 and the mid-1970s. During this period, South
Korea was ruled by two main autocratic leaders—Rhee Syngman, who spent three terms as president and General Park Chung Hee, who took power in 1961 through a military coup and ruled until his assassination in October 1979. The foreign aid given in the 1950s and 1960s played an essential role in South Korea’s subsequent economic miracle by helping the country to avoid economic disaster in the aftermath of the Korean War. Initially, military aid made up only a small percentage of South Korea’s aid from the United States. This changed in 1956 when military assistance skyrocketed to $3.06 billion or almost 55 percent of the
$5.59 billion in U.S. bilateral aid given to South Korea that year.529 In comparison with the other cases discussed here, South Korea received a substantially higher proportion of military aid.
By overriding the constitutional limit on presidential tenure and manipulating elections, Rhee undermined the democratic regime that had been established in South Korea following the post-World War Two trusteeship. Rhee targeted the political left heavily through harassment and political imprisonments and used instruments such as the National Security Law of December 1948 to
528 USAID, US Overseas Loans and Grants. 529 Author’s calculations. Reported in 2010 constant US dollars. USAID US Overseas Loans and Grants.
250 conduct an anti-Communist drive.530 This drive included the banning of political parties and the arrest of opposition leaders but stopped short of the widespread anti-Communist killings seen in Indonesia.
While political repression was extensive under Rhee, the first notable incident of state violence did not occur until after the 1960 presidential elections when 200 anti-Rhee student demonstrators in Masan were killed by police fire.531
In spite of the billions of dollars of foreign aid given by the United States, only after almost 12 years of authoritarian leadership was the coercive arm of the
South Korean state unleashed against civilians. Rather than face the potential escalation of political violence, Rhee resigned.
In May 1961, the months of democratic rule that followed Rhee’s resignation were ended by a military coup led by General Park. The Third
Republic, established in 1963, featured the development of “a political order which joined formally representative institutions to an authoritarian rule grounded in a coercive state.”532 While the specific political configuration was unique to
South Korea, the facade of regular elections under a dictatorial president was shared by Indonesia under Suharto.
In its early years, Park’s government received levels of financial support comparable to the Rhee regime. U.S. bilateral foreign aid averaged $2.65 billion annually from 1961 through 1970. In 1968, U.S. military assistance to South
Korea increased from $1.47 billion to $2.16 billion with an increase in the
530 Sohn, Authoritarianism and Opposition in South Korea, 16-17. 531Ibid, 18. This event has come to be known as the April 19 Student Revolution. 532 Sohn, Authoritarianism and Opposition in South Korea, 20.
251 proportion of military aid from 61 percent to 71 percent. $1.8 billion was provided as grants and $263 million as the transfer of excess military stock.
In 1969, South Korea began a period of militarization that culminated in the declaration of martial law by President Park in October 1972. This period of militarization was motivated by what became known as the Guam Doctrine
(1969) – the idea promulgated by President Nixon that both internal subversion and external aggression should be increasingly dealt with by Asian nations themselves rather than the United States.533 As a legacy of the Korean War, South
Korea had been home to a large number of U.S. troops and bases but in 1970 the
United States announced that 20,000 troops would be withdrawn. In response, the
Park government established a Five Year Plan to Reinforce Military Equipment and solicited U.S. military aid as compensation. 534 In part to counter the
(perceived) growing threat from the North and to increase South Korea’s military independence, military aid was increased further to $2.99 billion in 1971 and amounted to 80 percent of total U.S. bilateral aid to the country.535
Given the notable level of U.S. military aid and in particular the military equipment transfers to South Korea, one would expect that the capacity-building mechanism of the coercive effect of foreign aid to be at work in South Korea.
Indeed, the military increasingly took on internal security functions due in part to the failure of the police in suppressing student demonstrations, such as the 50,000 who rioted in Kwangju in August 1971 in anticipation of the presidential
533 Sohn, Authoritarianism and Opposition in South Korea, 25. This doctrine was based on the belief that the military aid the United States provided to these countries should enable them to provide for their own self-defence. 534 Ibid, 26. 535 Author’s calculations based on USAID, US Overseas Loans and Grants.
252 election. 536 In the wake of Park’s re-election, protests intensified and the government proclaimed a “garrison decree” that empowered the military to maintain public order in Seoul including through the military occupation of the city’s universities. 537 The following year, U.S. military assistance increased further to $3.14 billion before declining to $1.49 billion in 1973 and falling further to $616 million in 1974. Crucial in altering these aid levels was the resignation of President Nixon in 1974, which ended a period of unquestioned
U.S. support for the South Korean political leadership.
While Park’s regime cracked down on political opposition and banned numerous political parties and organisations, state violence was fairly restrained.
Political imprisonment was the main form of state coercion and occurred primarily in response to political demonstrations, which became increasingly frequent as Park’s time in office continued. This overt suppression of democracy irked members of Congress. During the Ford administration, House committee hearings identified human rights abuses in South Korea as a challenge for U.S. foreign policy. Testimony at these hearings noted that the country featured “mass arrests, prolonged detention without trial” and other repressive features including surveillance by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). 538 Despite growing awareness of human rights abuses, attempts to reduce military assistance to South Korea were voted down by Congress in May 1975.539
536 Sohn, Authoritarianism and Opposition in South Korea, 35. 537Ibid, 40. 538 Yong-Jick Kim, “The Security, Political and Human Rights Conundrum, 1974-1979” The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea, ed. Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 462. 539 Kim, “The Security, Political and Human Rights Conundrum,” 465.
253 U.S. bilateral foreign aid to South Korea declined in the late 1970s for several reasons. Carter’s human rights agenda clearly conflicted with the support provided to South Korea. As a result, the country received an average of about
$673 million per year in total U.S. bilateral foreign aid under Carter in comparison with the $3.28 billion average under Nixon.540 At the same time,
South Korea’s economy was rapidly developing thanks in part to U.S. economic aid. In 1979, the country’s leadership pledged to increase military spending to 6 percent of GDP in response to U.S. pressure for South Korea to bear a greater share of the military burden.541 South Korea’s importance as a frontline anti-
Communist state also declined in importance during this period as relations with
China improved.
The most notable episode of state violence in post-independence South
Korea occurred in May 1980 in the context of decreasing American involvement in the country. Park had been assassinated in October of the previous year and
South Korea was governed de facto by General Chun Doo Hwan of the KCIA, although a civilian, Choi Kyu Hah, was the official head of state. U.S. foreign aid to South Korea was in sharp decline, having fallen to $308 million in military aid and a mere $72 million in economic aid. In what has been termed the Kwangju riots or uprising, student demonstrations in the city of Kwangju were met with violence first by the police and later by the country’s special forces when the police proved to be insufficient for the task.
540 Author’s calculations based on USAID, US Overseas Loans and Grants. The Nixon average is calculated based on the years 1969 through 1973. 541 Kim, “The Security, Political and Human Rights Conundrum,” 480.
254 The violence associated with the military response to the protests generated further violence as civilians armed themselves with guns stolen from barracks in addition to Molotov cocktails and other improvised weapons.542 Given the country’s universal military training, the civilians were able to force the military out of the city for several days. This led to a military operation to regain control of Kwangju. In total, there were an estimated 238 civilian fatalities (191 confirmed) and 2710 injuries from these events, although some estimates report up to 400 civilian deaths.543 Less than two years after the Kwangju uprising, U.S. economic aid to South Korea was effectively cut off. From 1982 to 1986, annual
U.S. military aid averaged about $367 million per year but dropped precipitously in 1987 to $3.44 million. The effective elimination of U.S. military aid to South
Korea in 1987 corresponded with the beginning of a period of political liberalization under President Roh.
The two major episodes of state violence that occurred in South Korea, in
April 1960 and May 1980, reflected the culmination of domestic pressures both for and against authoritarianism in South Korea. While the mechanisms underlying the coercive effect of foreign aid did operate in South Korea, state coercion was constrained by several factors. First, both Congress and members of the U.S. executive attempted to pressure the Park regime regarding human rights.
Although there is no clear evidence that this pressure led to substantial changes in human rights behaviour (though sizeable numbers of political prisoners were released in response to pressure from Carter), foreign aid restrictions on South
542 Linda S. Lewis, Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002, 23. 543 Lewis, Laying Claim to the Memory of May, 69-70.
255 Korea remained a considerable threat. By behaving within limits that were acceptable to enough members of Congress and elements within the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, the Park regime ensured the continued flow of U.S. foreign aid in spite of the repression of an increasingly widespread political opposition.
Second, the extensive presence of U.S. troops in the country,544and U.S. command and control of parts of the South Korean military potentially contributed to restraint through military professionalization as well as direct pressure. It is also likely that the universal and mandatory nature of military service in South Korea made the armed forces an unlikely instrument for internal coercion. Although the police were responsible for the April 1960 violence, in many other instances the police were unable to suppress pro-democracy demonstrations. The inability of the police to maintain order resulted in the use of military’s special forces against civilian demonstrators in May 1980. By and large, the South Korean military and U.S. troops in the country were focused on the external security threat of North Korea.
Third, rather than utilize the country’s armed forces to suppress further opposition to his continued rule, President Rhee chose to resign in 1960. Park’s assassination had largely the same effect of eliminating the possibility that the military would be turned against the populace in a bid to retain power. The resignation of Suharto in Indonesia could also be thought of as constraining
544 Despite the fact that Kwangju was cut off from the rest of the country during the violence, there was still a substantial American military presence in the city and the nearby airbase in Songjung- ri. Henry Scott-Stokes and Le Jai Eui, eds., The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea’s Tiananmen, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2000, 35.
256 further political violence to the degree that his successor set in motion the process that led to the eventual independence of East Timor. However, the cases of South
Korea and Indonesia both suggest that whether leadership resignation or removal potentially restrains state coercion may depend largely on who assumes power and the stability of the resulting government. In Indonesia, there was substantial political violence in the short-term following Suharto’s resignation including mass killing in East Timor and inter-communal violence throughout the country.
In the long term, state violence has declined in the post-Suharto period due to the resolution of the conflicts in East Timor and Aceh—developments that were not considered possible while Suharto was in power. In South Korea, the democratic government that followed Rhee’s resignation was swiftly removed by another dictatorial leader who continued Rhee’s pattern of political repression but did not engage in major acts of state violence. Political repression characterized South
Korea’s authoritarian period.
Conclusion
The existing literature on the relationship between foreign aid and contentious state-society relations focuses largely on civil wars and whether such aid makes incumbent governments more or less likely to face, and defeat, internal challengers. This study has contributed to expanding this literature by focusing on the relationship between foreign aid and coercive state behaviour directed at civilians. I have focused not only on the amount of foreign aid dollars given by the United States as the world’s leading bilateral aid donor, but also what these
257 dollars translate into within the domestic environment of the recipient state. In particular, I have focused on how foreign aid can affect the coercive capabilities of the state, as well as state-sponsored actors such as militias or death squads, by financing military expenditure, changes in force structure, and arms acquisitions.
Rather than taking a purely quantitative approach, which has characterised recent work on foreign aid, I have also employed process tracing and multiple case studies to illustrate the contingent nature of the processes linking foreign aid with increased state coercion. Furthermore, I have disaggregated both foreign aid and state coercion to introduce a greater degree of nuance in our understanding of the dynamics of the coercive effect of foreign aid. The benefit of this approach is seen in both the preceding statistical analysis and the case study of Indonesia, which show that economic aid is indeed associated with state coercion contrary to traditional expectations.
In addition to presenting new findings regarding the relationship between bilateral foreign aid and human rights abuses, this study raises several questions worth further consideration. The first question is whether international actors can positively influence human rights practices in other countries through their foreign aid policies. The evidence analysed here suggests that human rights considerations rarely translate into significant changes in foreign aid policy.
However, the threat of potential changes in policy can occasionally be leveraged to bring about short-term changes in coercive state behaviour, such as the release of political prisoners. The second question that emerges is whether or not international aid donors are responsible for the negative outcomes of their aid
258 policies discussed in this study. Should countries like the United States be made accountable for the human rights abuses funded by their foreign aid? What mechanisms of accountability could be developed? The third question is whether, given the above considerations, foreign aid will be a useful international policy tool in the future. If foreign aid can have the coercive effect highlighted in this study, should aid continue to be given? I address these three questions in turn in this section.
The Limits of International Efforts to Promote Human Rights
Is foreign aid a useful tool for inducing changes that improve human rights behaviour in recipient countries? While the promotion of human rights is only one of the many goals of the United States’ (and many other countries’) foreign aid policy, it is an integral one. Both human rights and democratic conditionality have been introduced into American foreign aid policy as a result of the belief that without respect for human rights, economic or other gains in aid recipient countries may be of little benefit to the population. This study demonstrates that the provision of foreign aid does not necessarily improve human rights practices.
There is little evidence in the existing literature that suggests foreign aid has unconditionally improved human rights practices in recipient countries. Despite rhetorical commitments to the promotion of human rights by both individual
American presidents and members of Congress, foreign aid restrictions based on the human rights provisions of the FAA have rarely been imposed on aid recipients with records of human rights abuses. When U.S. policymakers impose
259 aid restrictions, the restrictions are typically limited to military aid and their effectiveness is therefore limited by the fungibility of economic aid into military expenditure. As a result, the potential cut-off of foreign aid has not created incentives for improved human rights behaviour nor has the actual cut-off of aid emerged as an effective tool with which to punish abusive regimes.
This study suggests that foreign aid may actually harm human rights in recipient countries. The provision of bilateral foreign aid by countries such as the
United States, both prior to and during periods of political violence, contributes to the conditions that give rise to and sustain state coercion. Generally, foreign aid enables recipient governments to divert precious resources towards military expenditure through an income effect. Foreign aid may also allow governments to acquire or purchase arms, equipment, and training that directly increase the state’s coercive capacity. Both mechanisms play an important role in enabling the state to repress its citizenry.
Based on the findings of this study, foreign aid appears to be an inappropriate tool for promoting human rights. Foreign aid is first and foremost a financial resource provided by governments to governments and can be spent largely as the recipient government sees fit due to the fungibility of aid. In constrained political or social environments, aid is unlikely to be spent on institutions or other resources that would empower opposition forces. However, this is not a general rule. Countries that have institutionalized mechanisms for grievance airing and/or governments that respond to popular pressure by increasing public services are less likely to witness the coercive effect of foreign
260 aid. Indeed, foreign aid may play an important role in democracy promotion during political transitions by providing funds for relevant political actors, such as political parties and election monitors, as well as the establishment of independent democratic institutions.
Future research on the effectiveness of foreign aid as a tool for promoting human rights must pay greater attention to emerging foreign aid donors and in particular to China. U.S. foreign aid policy is characterised by a high degree of transparency while that of China is not. China published its first White Paper on foreign aid only in 2011 despite having provided foreign aid for decades. Based on the findings presented in this study, it is plausible that bilateral Chinese foreign aid has an even greater pernicious effect on human rights than U.S. foreign aid given the lack of political transparency and oversight in both China and the recipient countries that it targets. On the other hand, other new aid donors such as
South Korea have had their own experiences as aid recipients and may be pursuing policies based on “lessons learned” that could mitigate the coercive effect of foreign aid observed in U.S. aid recipient countries.
The Question of Culpability
If foreign aid can undermine human rights in certain countries, are the developed country donors that provide such aid responsible for human rights abuses? Any potential answer to such a question is necessarily complex. The general assumption is that donors provide aid with the intent “to do no harm.”
However, the support provided by the United States and others to highly
261 repressive regimes or those engaged in civil wars suggests that this precept is simply that – a convenient saying. It is extremely difficult to ascertain the purposes of the vast majority of foreign aid. Even when non-lethal forms of military assistance are provided to governments, this assistance is received and utilized by agents of coercion. Recent events, such as the local and international media attention given to the use of U.S. aid-subsidized tear gas canisters against anti-Mubarak protestors in Egypt,545 suggest that donors should be held to account even if only in the court of public opinion.
This begs the question of where culpability lies – in policies or policymakers? In the preceding analysis, I have taken care to point out incidents where high-level American policymakers were aware of the role that the United
States was playing in facilitating political violence in aid recipient countries. Both primary documents and historical analysis demonstrate that the United States was not only complicit in much of the state violence which occurred in Indonesia, but also that members of the American political leadership actively sought ways to continue providing foreign aid despite explicit knowledge that aid was being used to support the TNI while it was engaging in human rights abuses. Similar evidence abounds for the cases of El Salvador and South Korea, even after explicit human rights considerations were integrated into the legislation that guides U.S. bilateral foreign aid policy. That being said, even when counterinsurgency training is taken into consideration, it is clear that the aim of
545 Sarah O. Wali and Deena A. Sami, “Egyptian Police Using US-Made Tear Gas Against Demonstrators,” ABC News, 28 January 2011, accessed 30 January 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/egypt-protest-police-us-made-tear-gas- demonstrators/story?id=12785598.
262 both U.S. policy and individual American policymakers was not to harm civilians but rather to end a civil war in favour of the incumbent government or to maintain a favourable leader in office.
The Future of Foreign Aid as a Policy Tool
Foreign aid can be an effective policy tool for many worthy goals.
Emergency humanitarian relief can save lives by helping to shelter the homeless and feed the hungry. Aid for infrastructure can help facilitate the development of business by improving transport routes, of education by providing schools, and of health by building hospitals. In spite of all of the good that foreign aid may help to achieve, this study has emphasized the fact that there is a dark side to foreign aid as a policy tool. When states are weak and governments uncertain of their continued tenure and popular support, aid intended for good purposes can be and often is diverted towards coercion.
The implications of such a seemingly common sense finding are profound.
Channelling substantial amounts of foreign aid to countries with uncertain political regimes, or ones that rely on force as a tool of governance, is not a wise investment for donor states concerned with human rights. Instead, foreign aid should be targeted to those countries that rank low on the risk factors for state coercion: countries with little or no history of civil conflict, countries that feature open political regimes, countries that do not rely on natural resources for a substantial portion of their GDP, and countries that do not use their national militaries for internal security purposes. In addition, this study suggests that aid given to countries that have faced major leadership changes, such as Egypt post-
263 Mubarak or a potential post-Assad Syria, is unlikely to have political effects different from those previously seen in the absence of major institutional changes.
Given that foreign aid to Afghanistan and other weak states is likely to continue, this study contributes an important perspective on how such aid is likely to affect state-society dynamics in such countries. The insights provided in this study should alert policymakers as, to how aid can, and has been, diverted for unintended purposes with significant consequences for security conditions in aid recipient countries. Future policy research needs to focus on developing more specific mechanisms for ensuring that aid is not used for coercive purposes, whether such aid is provided as military assistance or general budgetary support.
As debates continue in countries like the United States and the other developed countries regarding the future of foreign aid programs in an era of fiscal restraint, it is important to remember that the cost of providing foreign aid is not simply the amount of money spent on annual foreign aid allocations instead of other domestic programs. What this study has demonstrated is that the continuation of foreign aid to repressive countries may unfortunately be more damaging in the long-term for recipient countries than the cut-off of foreign aid in the face of human rights abuses.
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