Word: archipelagoes
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...last time may not be in a hurry to install her. It's not even clear that she wants the top job right now, when increasingly volatile ethnic and religious tensions in Aceh, Irian Jaya, Ambon, the Moluccas and elsewhere are threatening to break apart the archipelago nation. Meanwhile, the economy languishes in the doldrums as foreign investors steer clear of Jakarta's political instability...
Aceh, an oil- and gas-rich province on the opposite end of the Indonesian archipelago, is starting to relive the East Timor tragedy. Separatist sentiment is building in the seaside towns, the jungle up-country and rice-growing villages. In reaction, the military has revived its time-honored strategy of slash and burn. On the wall of a torched house in Rantau Pangang, a riverine settlement on the main north-south highway, is a date daubed in paint: 25/3/2001. That was the day police and army units arrived in trucks to shoot six villagers, apparently randomly, and burn down most...
...harrowing Indonesian truth that what happened in Sampit could be repeated tomorrow in scores of other places in the sprawling archipelago. Most immediately, it could spread to other parts of Kalimantan where the same communal tensions are simmering, notably in the oil-rich region of Balikpapan in the eastern part of the state...
...Former President Suharto believed in firm central control of the entire, far-flung archipelago. On Jan. 1, new legislation came into effect reversing his legacy. Jakarta controls foreign affairs, monetary policy and external defense, but all other government functions, including taxation, will be handled by locals. The autonomy experiment is less than three months old, and each province is different. Kalimantan, for example, has major problems with migrant communities, which have yet to surface in Sumatra...
...chord with many treasure-mad Filipinos. Newspaper classifieds routinely advertise the services of psychic fortune hunters, and the four governments since Ferdinand Marcos' regime have embarked on searches for Japanese war loot?reportedly worth billions of dollars in gold and jewels?that was allegedly buried somewhere in the archipelago when General Yamashita Tomoyuki's forces retreated before the Allied invasion in 1945. The "primitive" tribes of Mindanao are often the first to capitalize on this gullibility. Says General Ruben Cabignati, regional military commander based in the town of Cagayan de Oro in Mindanao: "I know of so many smart businessmen...