Word: indonesianness
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...total exports. But the same grinding geologic processes that make this wealth possible also bedevil Indonesia with disasters like the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 160,000 people in Sumatra. Lusi is unlike any previous disaster, however. Unfolding in implacable slow motion, it has confounded Indonesian engineers and mystics alike. The mostly poor villagers who have lost homes and livelihoods to the mud complain that the response to the unfolding disaster has been equally sluggardly - a symptom, perhaps, of the fault lines in Indonesian society's own unsettled foundations...
...Locals call it Lusi - a portmanteau of the Indonesian word for mud, lumpur, and the name of the nearest city, Sidoarjo. Lusi is a mud volcano, though that appellation is somewhat misleading. The mud is actually more like brackish water. And, unlike the igneous volcanoes that dot Indonesia's countryside, the underground plumbing fueling Lusi is largely mysterious. Twenty-two months after it first erupted, Lusi remains the world's most bewildering environmental disaster. "I've never seen anything like it," says Richard Davies, a geologist at Britain's Durham University and one of only a handful of experts...
...That's because mud isn't the only thing boiling over in Porong. Villagers displaced by the eruption blame the disaster on PT Lapindo Brantas, an Indonesian mining company drilling for natural gas in the area. Lapindo is partly controlled by the family of Aburizal Bakrie, Coordinating Minister for the People's Welfare, one of Indonesia's wealthiest men and an ally of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Victims of the disaster say that a murky web of political influence and corporate fecklessness has blunted the official response to the mud eruption. "Everyone is suspicious," says Mas Achmad Santosa...
...East Timorese. (Because Dili is a small town, it's not uncommon to see such officials dining in trendy Portuguese cafés situated near the poor and homeless squatting in tents.) Portuguese is the official language of the government, which means that most East Timorese, who speak Indonesian or the local language Tetum, cannot understand, or participate in, political discourse. The authorities have not launched effective job programs to retrain former guerrillas who fought Indonesia; for example, few ex-insurgents have been hired for the police force. Resentment among onetime fighters runs deep. On several occasions, only personal pleas...
...country where many people suffered horrifically under Indonesian rule, leaving scarred psyches, minor conflicts can easily escalate into major battles. In the first half of 2006, gangs of former guerrillas fought with one another and the authorities across Dili. The conflict spiraled, leaving entire areas of the city burned to the ground, and tens of thousands of East Timorese in temporary shelters...