Word: indonesia
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President Abdurrahman Wahid is unlikely to survive an impeachment vote in the Indonesian parliament, where he controls only 10 percent of the seats. But if his supporters decide to contest his ouster in the streets, the latest twist in Indonesia's tortured post-Suharto politics may provoke a bloodbath. And that's exactly what Wahid's supporters were threatening Tuesday, as they poured into Jakarta from his East Java stronghold, bearing machetes, sickles and the implacable conviction that the parliamentary challenge to the President is an assault on the 40-million strong Muslim organization he heads. Their mission: To stop...
...want to talk about it. People in her village, most of whom also work in processing units or mines, didn't want to know about the dangers. They were poor, and the gold brought money and jobs. So, day and night, in the hills above Manado, capital of Indonesia's North Sulawesi province, you can hear the noise from the processing units, the ore and water and stones and mercury sloshing and banging in steel barrels, the roar of the diesel motors turning the long lines of drums...
...collapse of political order in Indonesia has put the world's fourth-largest country through one nightmare after another in recent years: ethnic cleansing, cannibalism, mob massacres, military slaughter of civilians, lynch mobs enacting vigilante justice. But lost among these headline-grabbing horrors are other tragedies, the kind that will continue to haunt Indonesia long after the headlines have been forgotten. Factories are spewing out toxins unchecked, illegal loggers are slicing through national parks with impunity, and poachers and hunters are decimating the country's rich wildlife. At sea, pollution, uncontrolled fishing and the use of cyanide and dynamite threaten...
...prospects of a government program to control the flood of mercury in Talawaan are almost zero. World Bank estimates put the cleanup costs at around $1 billion, a laughable figure in near-bankrupt Indonesia. And that assumes environment officials could get into the site. Victor Malonda, who heads the district mining office, recounts how he took 120 policemen and soldiers to the site a year ago to try to halt the mining. "We were chased away," he says despairingly. "They had samurai swords. We had to run for our lives...
...What are the implications of either scenario for Indonesia's immediate future...