One country on the forefront of the battle against the Islamic State is Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, which has over the past year successfully crushed militant cells.
One country on the forefront of the battle against the Islamic State is Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, which has over the past year successfully crushed militant cells.
The threat the Islamic State (IS) poses to Western nations is very real — witness in recent weeks the thwarting of a public beheading in Sydney, the raids on terrorist cells in Melbourne, raids in The Hague and Brussels, possible threats to subways in Paris and New York, and the recent averting of a terrorist plot in London.
Following forty years of fighting and tens of thousands dead, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) signed a peace deal with President Benigno Aquino’s government at a high-profile ceremony in Manila on Thursday. The conflict over control of this resource-rich area stems from the claims of its Muslim population to an ancestral homeland, dating back […]
Indonesia: As an update to the growing backlash in SE Asia over the China-ASEAN FTA, the Berita Jakarta is already blaming the FTA on a decline in exports from Jakarta: It can be seen from the decline in the city’s export value by 4.80 percent or US$ 2.828 billion in January this year, from that […]
Cambodia and Thailand – Our favorite soft authoritarian, Cambodian PM Hun Sen is back at it. Just when you thought they were on the road to peace, Hun Sen has ordered Cambodian troops and police to fire on anyone crossing “illegally” into the area around the Preah Vihear Temple. This was Hun Sen’s response to […]
The Arroyo Administration continues its two-prong approach to the Philippines’ decade old para-military terrorist problem. The Filipino government has tried to renew peace talks with the Islamic separatist group, Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Although talks had been intermittent since 2001, an agreement was reached last years, only to be found unconstitutional by the Filipino […]
American President Barack Obama’s first meeting with Filipino President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo , which is also his first meeting with a Southeast Asian head of state, was overshadowed in the American press by the domestic melodrama, known as “Gates-Gate” or the “Beer Summit”.