Word: archipelago
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...protagonist, Hidayat, is a Jakartan intellectual caught up in the Japanese occupation. The conquerors use Bahasa Indonesia, the archipelago's lingua franca, as an administrative tongue in their polyglot territory. Hidayat - drawing on Alisjahbana's actual wartime employment in occupied Indonesia's language office - is put in charge of formalizing its grammar and syntax. In the novel (as it was in life), the office is a meeting place for nationalists who seize on Japan's defeat in 1945 to declare independence and adopt Bahasa Indonesia as the new nation's official tongue...
...outside world, this tiny archipelago nation of some 300,000 people exists mostly in ads for sun-dappled luxury holidays. The Maldives lie southeast of India, a jumble of nearly 20,000 idyllic islands and azure lagoons nestled in coral atolls (a word for reef formations which came to English, fittingly, from Dhivehi, the local Maldivian tongue). Gayoom, 71, is chiefly responsible for building up the lucrative tourism sector - which has fast become the country's leading industry, ahead of its traditional fisheries. It has made Maldivians - at least statistically - the most affluent people in South Asia, and the country...
...Channeling Chávez There are limits to what any elected President can accomplish in the diverse and far-flung island nation. To many Indonesians, the wrangling over economic policy is a sign of a healthy democracy. Sarundajang, the North Sulawesi governor, points out that the original contract allowing Archipelago to dig for gold in his province was signed in 1986, during the Suharto years, when citizens' wishes were disregarded. The struggle against the mine, he contends, is a struggle to correct the sins of the past. By opposing the mine, he says he wants to "give a salute...
...Indonesians these days are definitely making themselves heard, even in the thatch-hut hamlets surrounding the Archipelago mine. Some in the community, like village headman Marten Katiandagho, believe that preserving the environment is all well and good, but that the area also badly needs the jobs and the tax dollars the mine will bring. "People need to eat," he says. But other villagers have battled Archipelago ferociously, even forming their own NGO, called the Alliance of People Against Mining Waste, to stage protests and lobby in Jakarta. Says Tajudin Hema, one of the leaders of the antimine group...
...Still, there are those who see too much opportunity to quit the country. At the Sulawesi gold-mine site, Dave Morrison has begun hiring contractors to complete facilities construction. Archipelago hopes to start digging next year. "Everyone is telling the truth from their own aspect," Morrison says of the controversy surrounding the mine. "I'm confident that things will move forward." If Indonesia's leaders did more to reinforce that confidence, perhaps the country's promise, like its gold, won't always seem out of reach...