Word: indonesia
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...return to power of Indonesia's founding family may mark a fairytale moment in her country's history, a moment shrouded in powerful mythology by many of her long-suffering compatriots. But there was little public celebration. Few Indonesians really expect a storybook conclusion to their national travails...
...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...
...father, President Sukarno, who had steered the nation to independence in 1945, was overthrown in a bloody coup in 1965. The new dictator, Suharto, was viewed by Washington as the indispensable strategic counterweight to Chinese ambitions in Asia. Today, three years after Suharto's ouster, the fate of Indonesia may be even more critical for a U.S. administration that envisages long-term strategic competition with China...
...Indonesia, at the moment, is in critical condition. The nation has never recovered from the financial crisis that precipitated the overthrow of Suharto, much less from the resulting political turmoil that has produced three presidents in three years. Hanging over all is the fear that the entire country might descend into a violent disintegration similar to the bloodbath that accompanied East Timor's independence. Separatist rebellions in Aceh and Irian Jaya and inter-communal violence in the Moluccas and elsewhere show that the patchwork of ethnic enclaves that became a nation-state only by dint of their common colonization...
...Very much so. So was Wahid, of course, but Megawati is much more so. In fact, people say she doesn't want to be president; she wants to be queen. She thinks it's her birthright to rule as the daughter of the father of modern Indonesia, but she doesn't want to concern herself with the messy responsibilities that come with power...