Word: archipelago
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...military remains the only truly national institution in an archipelago state composed of diverse ethnic and religious groups whose only common history was colonization by the Dutch - and it has effectively governed Indonesia for most of the past four decades. Although mounting violence by separatists in Aceh, Papua and elsewhere - as well as between Muslims and Christians in the Moluccas - is threatening to break the country apart, Wahid has restrained the military from maintaining the traditional order by brute force. The waning of their own authority may make the top brass more sympathetic to Wiranto's own plight, while...
Best Nonfiction Book The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...diagnosis for a psychiatrist: manic-depressive. In the 18 months since former President Suharto was deposed, the country has lurched repeatedly from giddy euphoria to violent despair and back. But despite the ethnic violence, lynchings and looting in major cities and the carnage in seceding East Timor, this sprawling archipelago of 210 million people has not disintegrated into ungovernability or civil war. Some had predicted the world's next Yugoslavia, but after last week, Indonesia had instead completed its graduation from a military-backed dictatorship to the world's third largest democracy (after India and the U.S.). "Indonesia is born...
...Prevention of Danger law was rescinded because military leaders likely realized that wielding the big stick could provoke rather than prevent danger in the diverse and often fractious 13,000-island archipelago. "Secessionist rumblings are stretching the army pretty thin, and they may have come to the view that claiming martial law powers at this point was a mistake," says TIME correspondent William Dowell. "Cracking down too hard right now may actually trigger more secessionist activity, and the Indonesian military has a very sophisticated approach to dealing with these things. It?s also not a monolith ? it's generals...
Where in the World is East Timor? East Timor is a nation of some 800,000 inhabitants located on a small island on the southeastern tip of the Indonesian archipelago, 400 miles north of Australia. The western half of the island had been a Dutch colony, and was therefore part of what became independent Indonesia after World War II. But the eastern half, which had been ruled for three centuries by Portugal, was given its independence with the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1975. Indonesia invaded the country in December of that year and annexed East Timor...