Word: sumatra
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...Council as it strikes in the name of Islam. Since the downfall of former President Suharto three years ago, violent Muslim raids on bars, discos and massage parlors have become commonplace in the capital, Jakarta. But now dozens of similar groups have appeared in smaller cities on Java and Sumatra. People are regularly clubbed, beaten or intimidated. Police rarely interfere. In Yogyakarta a soldier patrolling the streets says he has no problem with the roving vigilantes "as long as their actions do not lead to anarchy...
...thirst before a fishing boat rescued her. Some 370 others perished in the disaster, disappearing under the waves along with what had been their hope for a new life, a battered 19-m Sumatran fishing vessel they had been told would ferry them the 36 hours from Tanjungkarang in Sumatra to Australia's Christmas Island. Most of the refugees on this trip were Iraqis like Rokaya, but the passenger list was a roll call of the desperate and downtrodden: Afghans, Algerians, Palestinians, Sudanese...
...This was a China that sought to dominate the region. On one journey, as recounted in Louise Levathes' 1994 book When China Ruled the Seas, Zheng He put down an uprising in Sumatra and brought the rebel chief back to Nanjing for confinement; the Emperor had the man executed. On another, the fleet landed in Sri Lanka and captured the Sinhalese King - punishment, according to one version of events, for his refusal to hand over to the Chinese Emperor a sacred tooth of the Buddha. He and his family were taken to China and imprisoned. Impressed by such power, rulers...
...Zheng He's Indonesian ports of call isn't exactly a scenic journey. There's beauty, not least in the spirit of people who will without fail return a smile with a bigger smile, but most of these places don't show up on postcards. The next leg on Sumatra is a prime example: between the dusty, trashy port town of Dumai and the city of Medan some 10 bumpy hours by car to the north, the eye catches on the bare-bones shacks with their thatched roofs and cleanly swept earthen yards, smarts through the smoke of fires that...
...visible on a rutted, auburn-hued dirt track outside Pangkal Pinang, where Cung A Siuk lives. There are a handful of houses out here. Cung says there used to be fewer. There is no news, either. She's never heard of the persecution of Chinese people in Java and Sumatra. John, the photographer, and I are the first white people she has ever seen, and she's 73 years old. "If I were scared," she says, "I would have closed the door and stayed inside." Her words are translated from the Chinese-Indonesian hybrid she speaks into Indonesian, then into...