October 21, 2006: The UN has completed its investigation of this years violence in East Timor and concluded that the main cause was the failure of elected politicians to unite in defense of the law and public order. Instead, several key politicians sought to help armed factions of supporters with weapons, and encouragement to use violence. It all spun out of control, and now the country has no effective government, and there are doubts that there will be any effective local government for years.
October 17, 2006: Islamic terrorists succeeded in damaging the tourist industry on the largely Hindu island of Bali. Tourist business is down by over a third after another terrorist bombing last year killed four people. An earlier bombing in 2002, killed over 200, but back then, the tourist activity returned to pre-bombing within six months. This time, many tourists have decided that the government has not got the Islamic terrorists under control. The Islamic terrorists want foreign tourists (at least those who are not Moslem, and most are not) out of the country, along with the fifteen percent of Indonesians who are not Moslem.
October 16, 2006: Religious violence continued in Central Sulawesi, as a Christian clergyman was murdered by a gunman.
October 15, 2006: A recent opinion survey found that ten percent of Indonesian Moslems (that's 8.5 percent of the total population) approve of Islamic terrorism, with another 20 percent of Moslems being somewhat supportive. That gives Islamic conservatives the support of about 26 percent of the total population. It's from the hard-core ten percent of the population that terrorist groups recruit. However, the pro-terrorist Indonesians are not concentrated, so their operations are always at risk of detection by anti-terrorism Moslems.
