Word: timorous
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Aceh, an oil- and gas-rich province on the opposite end of the Indonesian archipelago, is starting to relive the East Timor tragedy. Separatist sentiment is building in the seaside towns, the jungle up-country and rice-growing villages. In reaction, the military has revived its time-honored strategy of slash and burn. On the wall of a torched house in Rantau Pangang, a riverine settlement on the main north-south highway, is a date daubed in paint: 25/3/2001. That was the day police and army units arrived in trucks to shoot six villagers, apparently randomly, and burn down most...
When the people of East Timor decided 20 months ago to secede from Indonesia, the backlash was swift and horrendous. The Indonesian military, using local militia groups, spearheaded a three-week rampage of pillage and slaughter. The toll: 1,200 dead, wanton destruction of property and a population of survivors traumatized to this...
...occupied by GAM fighters in early March. Security forces moved in hours later, and now it is a charred ghost town presided over by Brimob, the Police Mobile Brigade under the command of the national police force? including some of the same troops who led the carnage in East Timor. The situation is so bad in Aceh that ExxonMobil, whose local plant produces one-third of the country's gas exports, temporarily pulled out of the region. And things are only going to worsen: last week Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid ordered additional troops to the North Sumatran province...
...parallel between East Timor and Aceh isn't exact. East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, enjoyed a brief period of self-determination before it was invaded and absorbed by Indonesia in 1975. It never really cohered to the country under former President Suharto, who ordered the invasion. Aceh, in contrast?like the rest of post-independence Indonesia?had been part of the former Dutch East Indies, and has since been a major contributor to the national wealth by producing billions of dollars worth of liquefied natural...
RESIGNED. XANANA GUSMAO, 54, as President of East Timor's National Council, saying internal squabbling hampered the territory's transition to independence; in Dili. Gusm?o, who for many years led a guerrilla war against Indonesia and was widely tipped to become President, quit the defacto parliament after it refused to consult the people on the proposed new constitution. RESIGNED. RICHARD LEAKEY, 56, conservationist renowned for spearheading the fight against elephant poaching in Africa, as head of Kenya's civil service; in Nairobi. Leakey's appointment by President Daniel arap Moi in 1999 to tackle the country's endemic corruption...