Word: borneo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...roll on the ground, tussling, teasing each other and gleefully aping their elders. They climb the tropical trees with abandon and plunge happily into cooling water-holding their noses when they dunk. Despite the similarities, the equatorial playground, at the edge of a 12,000-acre forest preserve on Borneo is no boys' camp. It is the Malaysian state of Sabah's experimental center for the rehabilitation of orangutans...
...orangutan-Malay for "man of the forest"-is badly in need of a helping hand. Once these big red-haired primates (an adult male stands about 5 ft. tall, weighs 150 lbs.) inhabited the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra by the tens of thousands. Today, only 6,000 or so are left. Spreading farms and logging operations have driven the survivors ever deeper into the rain forest; native hunters shoot the mothers and carry off the young orangutans for illegal sale to foreign zoos (price: as much as $4,000 apiece). To save this vanishing Asian cousin of Africa...
Numbering 750 hard-core fighters, plus several thousand support troops, the guerrillas have repeatedly attacked Indonesian military sites and terrorized Malaysian border areas since July. They have also tried to enlist by intimidation Borneo's primitive Dayak tribesmen, the descendants of legendary headhunters. This tactic provoked a reaction that their Maoist guerrilla handbooks did not even hint at. Meeting terror with terror, the Dayaks exploded in an avenging rampage of killing, burning and cannibalism against all Chinese...
About 25,000 of the traumatized Chinese have descended on the sleepy West Borneo port of Pontianak, where they live in dismal squalor. The Chinese are crammed into makeshift quarters, bathe in muddy, sewage-filled canals and wander aimlessly along the waterfront, many of them without homes or hope. Pontianak's Communist propagandists could easily use these displaced Chinese as a breeding ground for more unrest and tension...
...guerrillas themselves remain threatening and elusive. As in Viet Nam, they burrow deep in underground bunkers and in mountainside caves, attack only when they consider the odds right. Two weeks ago, 500 guerrillas caught Indonesian troops in a heavy mortar barrage at Fir Mountain, near the Malaysian Borneo state of Sarawak, where the soldiers had stumbled upon a major guerrilla encampment. While the Indonesians flew in more troops, the Malaysians evacuated Indonesian casualties...