Word: indonesianness
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...attack could strengthen the hand and the resolve of Indonesia's do-nothing chief, President Megawati Sukarnoputri, allowing her to stand up to terrorism and begin seriously addressing the country's economic problems. "Will this wake her into decisiveness and action?" asks Tom Lembong, a former official at the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency. "That's really the multi-million dollar question...
...getting back to normal." Last week, a regional high school soccer tournament, scheduled to take place in Jakarta, was hastily moved to Malaysia, taking scores of families and probably thousands of tourist dollars with it. But the real pain may come in lost jobs, since tourism supports 12 million Indonesians. "A drop in a million tourists potentially means a million unemployed," says Alistair Speirs, chairman of the Indonesian chapter of the Pacific Asia Travel Association. The country is already hard pressed. The unemployment rate is about 8%?and two million young Indonesians enter the job force each year...
...wake of a particularly horrific blast in Bali, provided the answer: Asia offers the softest targets, often because its governments and police forces lack either the will or the way to crack down on extremist groups. In Bali last week, tourists and locals alike were outraged by revelations the Indonesian government ignored warnings from the U.S. that groups linked to al-Qaeda were active in the country. (The British and Australian governments denied allegations they had been told about a possible attack in Bali.) President Megawati Sukarnoputri's administration had also repeatedly snubbed requests from Malaysia and Singapore to arrest...
...Indonesia's tolerance for troublemakers is rooted in its recently history, not in its culture. "The principal difference is not something indigenous to Indonesian culture, but something that grows out of the particular challenges of a struggling, young democracy that's emerged after 50 years of dictatorship, and that's unique in the region," the No. 2 official at the Pentagon says. "Singapore and Malaysia have very different political systems in which the balance is definitely struck on the side of security...
...Indeed, her situation begs comparison with Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf, who was forced by September 11 to choose between the U.S. and his regime's Taliban proteges - a strategic choice challenged by increasingly influential Islamist parties. But from the point of view of those seeking efficient curbing of Indonesian extremism, the laxity shown by Megawati until now may be a symptom of the often volatile diffusion of power in Jakarta that began in 1998 with Suharto's ouster, when a nation deeply riven by political, social and ethnic divisions began moving awkwardly towards democracy. Now, as in Pakistan, terrorism...