Word: archipelagos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nation, will fall apart just as Wahid's presidency did. The country is in deep trouble. It is emerging painfully from 32 years of the Suharto dictatorship, an era of forced social engineering and epic plunder. As the center collapses, ancient tribal and religious feuds have revived across the archipelago of 13,000 islands; 3,500 died in the violence last year. Unemployment is estimated at 40%, while corruption and economic bungling have kept foreign investment at "sub-zero," as a diplomat puts it. Most worrying of all, many observers in Jakarta doubt that Megawati, who owes her ascension...
Meanwhile, in the far-flung islands of the archipelago, Indonesians are starting to thumb their noses at Jakarta. Squatters invade mines and plantations, nobody pays taxes, smuggling is rampant, and murders go unpunished. Since February, some Dayak tribesmen in central Kalimantan have kept the heads they cut off Madurese migrants as trophies of magic power. Indonesia has more than 1.2 million refugees from ethnic violence. Says sociologist Paulus Wirutomo: "There's a hate being kept alive in our culture. We have to get rid of this." Wahid tried but failed. And Megawati...
...Indonesia matters, and Indonesia is a mess. Measured by population, it is the world's fourth largest country, and a decade ago it would have been counted among Asia's most important economies. Spanning the oceans from Thailand to Australia, the 14,000-island archipelago serves as a kind of geopolitical tollgate to the Pacific. The Japanese occupied it in World War II, and its strategic significance was underlined in the early 1960s when it became the theater of perhaps the bloodiest-ever proxy war between China and the United States...
...allowed Libya to broker a ransom deal. As a result, the ragtag band of one year ago has grown into a kidnapping army that can only get more audacious with every success. With Washington's backing, Arroyo refused all negotiation and ordered 5,000 troops into the scattered Sulu archipelago to, in the words of operational commander Brigadier General Romeo Dominguez, "rescue and destroy." Unlike last year, the Abu Sayyaf has made no attempt to pretend the kidnappings are for any higher ideal than money. Group spokesman Abu Sabaya has talked before of the value of U.S. captives. "One American...
...their captives. "Maybe we will stage an execution," Abu Sabaya told a local radio station via cell phone, adding: "Welcome to the party." As the skirmishes continued overnight with helicopter gunships backing the government troops, the guerrillas picked up reinforcements from among their 1,100 fighters in the Sulu archipelago. As the body count mounted?by Saturday evening, scores of soldiers, civilians and rebels, including commander Yusup Nadjal, were lying dead on the roads and in the jungle, or expiring in a local hospital?the Abu Sayyaf stormed St. Peter's Catholic church and the hospital, placed snipers...