Smuggler's Army

Incensed by the discovery that it was losing millions of tax dollars in illegally exported rubber, the Indonesian government early this year assigned its best investigators to track down the culprits. The trail soon took an embarrassing turn. The chief smuggler--and the proprietor of a neat little fleet that regularly plied the straits between Sumatra and Malaya --turned out to be the Indonesian army. What was worse, the army 1) freely admitted it. 2) boldly declined to stop it. "We smuggle rubber," said a ranking officer. "So what? We have to live."

Indonesia's army is well trained, high-spirited and bigger than the nation can comfortably afford. Since 1952 the army has had to fend for itself, living haphazardly on inadequate special appropriations because no government has lasted long enough in office to get a budget through Parliament. Army forces in north Sumatra found smuggling a practical solution to the budget gap. Rubber smuggling is big business: last year Malaya officially bought five times as much rubber from Indonesia as Indonesia officially exported. It was also profitable: the army acknowledged having earned $5,000,000.

Last week an army spokesman flew into Djakarta to woo popular support for the army's new sideline. "The army smuggles continuously and purposely," he said, and challenged the Attorney General to prove any graft. "Our books show that it has not been done for personal gain but to finance the building of barracks and other expenditures for troops."

While the government fumed, the Sumatran army headquarters continued last week to dispatch nightly caravans of heavily guarded trucks to small northern ports where 16 small-tonnage ships waited to smuggle the rubber across the narrow Malacca Strait. The government was helpless: the army alone has the authority to stop smuggling.

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