Word: indonesia
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...that if Syamsudin Noor makes it through the next few weeks, he is still a dead man inside. Syamsudin has pushed through a crowd of fellow refugees to tell his story, describing in patient detail how a visitation of almost unimaginable brutality destroyed his remote village of Sangai in Indonesia's Kalimantan province. "All my children, my grandchildren were killed," he mourns. "They cut off their heads and then cut them up and took them away to eat. There were a lot of Madurese in Sangai. Now 95% of us are dead...
...There may have been a time when the law did matter in Indonesia, but it's hard to remember that now. Last week, Indonesia's central Kalimantan province reverted to the law of the jungle when indigenous Dayaks, celebrated in tourism brochures for their tribal customs and picturesque, dormitory-style long-houses, went on a coordinated spree of murder against the province's migrant community from the arid island of Madura. And concepts like rule of law began to seem completely irrelevant when the Dayaks, following their traditional custom, began eating the body parts of their victims to gain spiritual...
...gruesome quality of the massacre makes it indelible, but also obscures what it says about Indonesia as a whole. Yes, the police couldn't, and often didn't even try, to save the Madurese victims. The center of Sampit is decorated with a plinth commemorating Indonesia's 1948 independence, guarded by a life-size plaster statue of a policeman?an apt symbol of their frozen response to the crisis. Two battalions of soldiers were brought to Sampit a week after the massacres broke out to restore order, but Madurese houses continued to go up in flames long after their arrival...
...Wahid's Indonesia, however, that's par for the course. There are bigger, more troubling imponderables. The country seems to be falling apart in so many different ways. Was Kalimantan's carnage an anti-migrant pogrom similar to those in Irian Jaya? Or was it more like the separatist-incited violence in Aceh? Or was it similar to the bloody religious rivalry between Christians and Muslims in Ambon? When the Dayaks carved out the hearts and heads of their victims, was this the kind of tribal blood sport that would have proliferated in Indonesia had former President Suharto not exerted...
...Taiwan, Dr. Lin Shih-ku, director of the Taipei City Psychiatric Center's department of addiction science, estimates there are 200,000 addicts, or about 1% of the population; in Thailand there are an estimated 2 million speed addicts; in Indonesia the numbers could be even more appalling, though no accurate figures exist...