Word: bukit
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...good bars, but all in all, Aceh, Indonesia, is not a bad place to live if you're a foreign employee of the biggest, most profitable corporation on earth. The people who oversee ExxonMobil's gas fields in the province are generally housed in a company-built neighborhood called Bukit Indah. It is a fenced-off and fortified oasis of ranch-style homes and green lawns, a place where kids ride bikes, carefree, on tree-lined streets. There are swimming pools, tennis courts and a nearby golf course. Weekends bring barbecues or softball games. And in the evenings, residents watch...
...Imagine you are one of these people, an oilman from Texas maybe, reared on down-home cooking and wholesome notions of right and wrong. Suppose further you have heard that Bukit Indah's tranquility has been built on Aceh's ashes. You have been told the Indonesian troops whom ExxonMobil funds to protect you and your family?soldiers who salute you in the mornings?spend their nights burning villages, looting and killing at random. Activists are claiming that these troops have used your company's equipment to dig mass graves and are turning your company's warehouses into torture chambers...
...Anwar thinks it should. At a crowded refugee camp in a mosque not far from Bukit Indah, the 30-year-old farmer lifts his shirt to reveal thick, track-like scars, the remnants of wounds he says he received last summer when soldiers, assigned to defend ExxonMobil employees and property, whipped him nightly for a month with ropes of barbed wire. He was also burned with cigarettes and beaten unconscious with a wooden board. They did not kill him, but he wishes they had. Then he would not have had to watch the soldiers shoot his brother in the head...
...ExxonMobil's senior executives are not bad people. Bukit Indah's setup shows they care about their employees. If they have to be in a place with a war, employees have to be kept safe?and that means depending on the army. They are required by their contract with the government to fund the troops?they have even made sure there is a clause that prohibits the soldiers from conducting any offensive operations in the field. ExxonMobil no doubt thinks it has done all it can do in a difficult spot...
Estimates put the number of tigers remaining in the wild at fewer than 5,000. The group chose the Bukit-Barifan-Seletan park because it reportedly has the highest concentration of these animals in the world...