Word: wahid
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...Megawati's critics say her preference for public silence masks a dim intellect. That may be too harsh, but she has few discernible beliefs other than a garbled echo of her father's nationalism and a disdain for regional autonomy. On July 22, when Wahid tried to declare a state of emergency and dissolve parliament, Megawati went to the movies to see Shrek with her grandchildren. On her second day in office, when she might have been lobbying the national assembly for her pick for Vice President, she attended a fashion show at a posh Jakarta hotel...
...past few months, as Wahid bickered with parliament, the military took the offensive. Security forces moved three more battalions into the oil- and gas-rich province of Aceh; there are now 40,000 troops and police there. The army has burned villages and kidnapped suspected collaborators of the Free Aceh Movement. Often these missing Acehnese turn up on the side of the road, shot to death after being tortured. "The military is using brute force to eliminate everything in its path--including civilians," says a Western diplomat in Jakarta. For all Wahid's flaws, he tried to improve the military...
...from "nonbudgetary sources," as local economists euphemistically call it, which include logging in Indonesia's vanishing rain forests, extortion and prostitution. Jakarta's red-light district was shut down in the spring of 2000, not out of religious zeal but because the army and police quarreled over the profits. Wahid tried to pension off the worst offenders and replace them with more idealistic middle-ranking officers. Such attempts at reform may stop...
...tribesmen in central Kalimantan have kept the heads they cut off Madurese migrants as trophies of magic power. Indonesia has more than 1.2 million refugees from ethnic violence. Says sociologist Paulus Wirutomo: "There's a hate being kept alive in our culture. We have to get rid of this." Wahid tried but failed. And Megawati...
...Just ousted Indonesian Pres. Abdurrahman Wahid...