Word: suhartos
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...incident marked the latest stage in a war touched off last month by the Sydney Morning Herald, which accused Indonesian President Suharto's family and business associates of "waxing fat on government capital, credit and concessions and accumulating $2 billion to $3 billion." The Jakarta government retaliated by threatening to reject Australian military-aid programs. By midweek, however, Indonesia eased its stance and waived the visa requirement for Australian tourists, who bring the archipelago millions of dollars in annual revenue...
...Asian financial crisis impoverished millions, fueling street protests against Suharto's kleptocratic government. Christians and Muslims warred in Ambon; the nation of 17,000 islands "seemed to be breaking up and slowly sinking." Nowhere was the violence more barbaric than on the island of Borneo, where Lloyd Parry chases down news of tribal fighting between the Dayaks, one of the island's indigenous tribes, and the Madurese, transplants from Java. Penetrating the jungle, he doesn't find fighting so much as slaughter, and worse. The Dayaks, rumored to possess black magic that renders them impervious to bullets, have massacred entire...
...Parry stalled. Maybe it was just cold feet; maybe it was a foreign correspondent's instinct for impending mayhem. He canceled his flight and headed into the city, just in time to catch a student protest that would turn violent and help trigger the beginning of the end of Suharto's three-decade reign over the country. It was May 1998, and Indonesia was about to go insane...
...greatest horror comes later, in the twinned crises of Suharto's fall and East Timor. In May 1998, Lloyd Parry reports from a burning Jakarta, "a capital city looted by its own people," as a mix of demonstrators and marauders run wild in the streets. The structure of Lloyd Parry's book, which seems to lack much new research, leans too heavily on a chronological, riot-by-riot retelling of his experience. But his elegant, understated prose preserves a bubble of sanity amid the madness; he's particularly adept at capturing the moments when history is about to be made...
...DIED. WEE KIM WEE, 89, well-loved Singaporean statesman who as President from 1985 to 1993 used his common touch to increase the accessibility of the office; in Singapore. A former journalist who scored an international exclusive with an interview of then General Suharto following Indonesia's bloody coup of 1966, Wee went into politics in 1973 and served as high commissioner to Malaysia and ambassador to South Korea and Japan before being tapped to become the city-state's fourth President. Wee "took to diplomacy like a duck to water," said Deputy Prime Minister Shanmugam Jayakumar, and was eulogized...