The cruel world
The cruel world
The motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity) seems to
have a hollow sound if we read in newspapers or see on TV what
has been going on in various regions, such as Sambas (West
Kalimantan), Ambon, East Timor, etc. Each time I read about such
atrocities it sends a shudder through my innermost thoughts and I
cannot help muttering to myself: "How can a man be so cruel to
his fellow countrymen? It is like annihilating your own sisters
and brothers."
Bisnis Indonesia, in its March 22, 1999 edition, reported that
since the previous week, conflict had exploded between ethnic
Malay and Dayak against a minority newcomers from Madura. Last
Saturday, indigenous Dayak and Malay armed with bows and arrows
and torches paraded around the town of Tebas with human heads
(severed from bodies) on a pick-up truck.
Newsweek of March 8, 1999 reported: "Evil to the end." John
William King and his friends apparently killed James Bird (an
African-American) as an initiation rite to their own Klan-style
group. The friend allegedly picked up 49-year-old James Bird who
was hitchhiking on a Saturday night last June. They chained him
to the truck and dragged him, still alive, through the town until
his elbows peeled away on the pavement and his head rolled off
the road. John William King was sentenced to death by lethal
injection last week Texas, U.S.A.
Newsweek of March 15, 1999 reported that in 1947, Mikhail
Isayevich Tanich, two years after returning from Berlin as a
victorious Red Army soldier, was shipped to a labor camp in
Siberia. He spent six years of his life -- from 23 to 29 -- in
Joseph Stalin's gulag. His crime was prototypically absurd. He
told the people in the home country (Russia) that the highways in
Germany were excellent and he had never seen such good roads! The
so-called Autobahn. That a man could be jailed for six long years
for expressing his thoughts boggled my mind! And to top all this,
the atrocities that are now being committed in Kosovo, which can
be seen daily on TV are almost unbelievable!
A. DJUANA
Jakarta