Consider this: Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world. It has the largest population of Muslims, the second highest measure of biodiversity after Brazil, a very stable democracy despite its ethnic and geographic diversity and the potential to be a major player on the world stage in coming years. Yet Columbia University offers no courses on Indonesia and only two on all of Southeast Asia. How is it that Indonesia has come to be...
WikiCommons Drug trafficking in Southeast Asia is the epitome of high-risk activity. The latest case to infect global consciousness involves a British grandmother, 56-year-old Lindsay Sandiford, who was on 22 January sentenced to death for the trafficking of 10.6 pounds of cocaine in Bali, Indonesia. The British government has strongly rebuked the sentence, lamenting the barbarism of the verdict – the death penalty for a “nonviolent” crime – by...
...ublic finally obtained in full a crucial document from the years Henry Kissinger served as secretary of state. We now know exactly what was said in a meeting among Kissinger, President Ford, and President Suharto, dictator of Indonesia, on December 6, 1975 – the day before Indonesia invaded East Timor. Only the latest in a long list of revelations, this decades-old record proves once and for all that Suharto began the invasion knowing he had the...
...iciency (leading to the enrichment of a small elite), and capital flight (the disappearance of those elites’ money from their home countries). In contrast to the flagrant corruption of the regimes of decades past – Suharto in Indonesia, or Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines – today’s Southeast Asian governments are on the whole a more efficient and attractive economic entity, as the increased prominence and ambition of the Association of Southea...
...government policy illustrate that it sometimes works the other way around. In 2001, for example, when separatist violence encroached on ExxonMobil’s facilities in the Arun gas fields in the chronically unstable state of Aceh, Indonesia, the company threatened to suspend operations unless the Indonesian government could create conditions under which its employees felt safe. Robert Gelbard, the US ambassador to Indonesia, reported concern that the...
...ing joint-military training with Australia and Singapore, and counts New Zealand, the Philippines, and Thailand among its key non-NATO allies in the Asia-Pacific region. Although not yet strategic military partners, Vietnam, Indonesia, and particularly India have also presented themselves as potential allies for Washington in its effort to keep China from doing anything rash. The risks: Such an approach might heighten China’s perception that it...
...arkers of an excellent presidency. Following this laudatory introduction, Sirleaf took the stage. A major focus of her U.S. tour has been on her newly minted position as co-chair (alongside UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang) of the high-level UN post-Millenium Developmental Goals panel. As such, she spoke primarily about the challenges of global development and nation building – calling the Liberia she inher...
...99% of us that never knew Thatcher or her family personally, we speak of her exclusively in relation to her politics. It was not Margaret the mother of two children who cut social services, endorsed dictatorships in Chile and Indonesia, and brought working-class movements to their knees, but Thatcher the Prime Minister. The former died on April 8th, while the latter’s political legacy is very much still alive. Therefore, I see no reason that we w...
...utpouring will affect the world. And this great leap in Asian interaction with the wider world will not stop with China. India’s population will be larger than China’s by the year 2025 and will be younger and growing to boot. Indonesia, Pakistan, Vietnam, and the Philippines (among others) all promise economic and population growth, which means that educated workers will leave their countries in unprecedented numbers. Additionally, as we have see...
...onment, realize the importance of preserving their country’s natural splendor. Development, of course, has made this possible, and so the land is restored to, if not to its prior glory, a decent level of preservation. Brazil, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea – these are all countries which are currently caught in the middle. Their economic successes have been won at the expense of environmental deterioration. Preservation groups have already swooped i...
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