Word: indonesia
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...days last week, Indonesia had an embarrassment of Presidents. Even after Wahid was impeached and the People's Consultative Assembly gave Megawati his post, the irascible and nearly blind Muslim cleric held on. "They can turn off the water and electricity, but they're not going to get me out of here," Wahid, 61, told his wife Sinta Nuriyah. But Megawati had already put the presidential "No. 1" license plate on her black Mercedes limousine. "That's fine, dear," sighed Wahid's wife. "But the people are going to be looking to you for leadership. What then?" Wahid finally agreed...
...risk now is that Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous 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...
...moderate and a reformer, Wahid came to office with high expectations as Indonesia's first democratically elected President. But his sheer orneriness was a fatal flaw; in less than two years, 22 ministers left his Cabinet. And though he inherited respect as a hereditary Muslim religious leader, Wahid was dangerously uninformed about the true level of his support. Toward the end, he shunned many advisers and retreated into the world of supernatural omens and spirits...
...Europeans are certainly correct in insisting that the conference properly address its global mandate, rather than fixating on the issues of racism in Israeli-Palestinian relations at the expense of other issues. After all, the conference could just as easily spend a whole week discussing ethnic violence in Indonesia or the Balkans or Burundi or England, slavery in the Sudan or the rights of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. And too much focus on the Middle East might even help some governments keep their own skeletons out of the limelight...
...nationalism strongly supported by the military, a nationalism that doesn't easily tolerate federalism or secession, which suggests she'll authorize a harsh response to the troubles in the provinces. On the economy, she remains a blank slate: She'll commit to the IMF's ideas about how Indonesia's economy should be reformed, but it's not yet clear whether she'll challenge the interests of the elite by cleaning up the banking system and putting an end to corruption...