Violent attacks trying to
into
force Indonesia
Islamic State
by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
The Washington Post
November 08, 2(X)0
More than 85 percent of Indonesia's
216 million people are Muslim, but it is
not officially an Islamic country. To pro
mote national unity, independence lead
ers insisted in the late 1940 s that the
country's constitution officially recognize
four faiths - Islam, Christianity, Hindu
ism and Buddhism.
Although Jakarta has a mosque every
few blocks and Friday prayers bring
many businesses to a halt, its wide bou
levards feature neon billboards touting
locally brewed Bintang beer. The city has
“We see the lack of morality spreading like an
illness, it's like malaria. It's not enough to treat
those who are ill. We must kill the mosQuitoes."
-Habib Muhammad Rizieq bin Hussein Syiliah, a 55-year-old high school
teacher who leads the Front for the Protection of Islam.
bars open all night, where scantily clad
teenage girls gyrate on the dance floor.
There are gambling dens and bordellos.
The tact that such establishments ex
ist and that alcohol is so openly promoted
galls Habib Muhammad Rizieq bin
Hussein Syihab. a 55-vear-old high
school teacher who leads the Front for
the Protection of Islam. He w ants the bars
shuttered and the prostitutes jailed. He
also w ants Islamic law to be imposed on
ever)one. no matter what their religion.
“We see the lack of morality spread
ing like an illness," Rizieq said. “It's like
malaria. It's not enough to treat those who
are ill. We must kill the mosquitoes."
Aleutians’ vast ecosystem is collapsing
by Marla Cone
I.os Angeles Limes
November 3. 2000
ADAK ISLAND. Alaska - There are
few places on Earth that have changed
so much, so fast as the narrow arc of
islands where the Pacific Ocean greets
the Bering Sea.
The Aleutian Islands are in the
middle of nowhere. No tourists, no
cruise ships, no chartered fishing trips,
no quaint country inns. On a quiet day,
when the turbulent seas and legend
ary winds are still, you can hear a
killer whale breathe.
But look and listen more closely.
Something is missing.
Where are the sea lions, fat and
happy, napping on the rocks and bark
ing at their pups? And the furry sea
otters crunching on urchins'.’ What
became of the ample king crabs and
shrimp, and the schools of silvers
smelt'.’ And where are the lush, un
dersea forests of kelp that provided
food and refuge for fish?
As sudden and savage as an Arctic
storm, some mysterious phenomenon
has transformed this spectacular
1,300-mile archipelago in just a hand
ful of years.
A vast sub-Arctic ecosystem is col
lapsing. No one knows why.
The sudden changes in the Gulf of
Alaska and the Bering Sea have in
spired an eclectic team of men and
women to try to solve an extraordi
nary environmental whodunit. Virtu
ally alone in a forbidding wilderness
closer to Siberia than to Anchorage,
they have been divebombed by
eagles, bitten by otters, buffeted by
70-rnph winds, rattled by earthquakes
and lost in storms. And each year they
return for more, drawn back by the
Aleutian paradox. If this rugged, re
mote ecosystem is collapsing, can any
place on Earth be safe?
Jim Estes, a marine ecologist at the
U.S. Geological Survey in Santa
Cruz, Calif., has traveled to the Aleu
tians for the last 30 summers, study
ing what once was the world's largest
and healthiest population of sea otters.
Three summers ago Estes realized that
the otters had virtually disappeared
while he watched.
There were no bodies to dissect,
few clues to decipher. The otters aren't
starving. They aren't sick. They have
Rizieq claims that his movement has
15 million followers who are ready to
do battle against what they believe are
evil Western influences in Indonesia's
emerging democracy. Political analysts
say he probably only has a few thousand
machete-wielding men at his command.
But the analysts note that his group - like
other fundamentalist-minded organiza
tions - has grown markedly in the past
two years.
Hard-line religious leaders also are
trying to rally support around disaffec
tion with President Abdurrahman Wahid.
A pluralist and moderate who once
headed the world's largest Muslim so
cial organization, Wahid has angered
fundamentalists with his commitment to
keep religion out of politics and his flat
rejections of calls to impose Islamic law.
Wahid has said he is trying to strike a
balance between the interests of Muslims
and minority religious groups. His sup
porters contend that a majority of Indo
nesian Muslims do not favor the impo
sition of Mamie law or other social re-
strictions
But Rizieq insists his group will con
tinue its violent attacks until Wahid re
lents. "It seems that the government is
deaf to the interests of Muslims," he
said. "So this is our only option."
simply vanished.
Throughout the Gulf of Alaska and
probably the Bering Sea, too, the bal
ance of prey anti predator has been
upended, a transformation so extreme
it’s called a "regime shift.” Waters
once brimming with seals, otters and
king crab are now dominated by
sharks, pollock and urchins. Virtually
no creature remains untouched.
"You just can't grasp how different
things were It) years ago." Estes said
during a recent expedition. "No one
h;ts ever seen a decline of this mag
nitude in such a short period of time
over such a large geographic area."
Piece by piece, over the last three
years, scientists have started to solve
the pu/./le. Clues point toward some
thing - almost imperceptible - that
Netted specimens such as the octupus are
returned to the sea after examination.
happened in the ocean in 1977. But
the answers are more disturbing than
satisfying, more elusive than conclu
sive. It seems the ocean's chain of life
is actually a fragile silken web. If you
remove a strand, the whole thing un
ravels. And it may never be whole
again.
Tim Tinker is swathed in a bulky
orange survival suit, hanging from the
bow of a 25-foot boat as it hugs the
rugged shore of Adak Island.
A brutal storm has just ended, leav
ing August skies crisp and clear.
Adak's mountains, set against a blue
satin sky and fog as white as cotton
balls, are draped with a luxuriant
fleece blanket of moss. The green
shines so brightly it seems as if it
could glow in the dark. Overhead, a
WORLD & NATIO
bald eagle soars, and black and white
puffins skim across the surface of the
sea. their orange webbed feet splash
ing the 40-degree water.
From his perch on the bow, Tinker
lifts his binoculars, training them on
rocky reefs. For the ninth straight year,
he is counting the Aleutians' sea ot
ters for an annual survey. He scans a
reef and holds up a single finger clad
in ragged wool gloves.
Iris Faraklas, a research assistant,
dutifully makes a notation: One otter.
An hour into the survey, Tinker _ a
marine mammal biologist at Santa
Cruz - and his colleague Brian
Hatfield have counted only five otters
and two harbor seals.
“Back in the old days, in the early
'9os, we probably would have seen
500 otters by now,”
Estes said. “Now
we go miles and
miles without see-
ing even one.”
This day,
they will survey
200 miles of coast,
finding only 171
adult otters and 29
pups.
If sea ot
ters dream, they are
surely dreaming
about a place like
Adak Island, in the
middle of the Aleu
tian chain. There's
plenty of food.
Plenty of sanctu
ary. But only one
otter per mile.
In the 1980 s, as many as 100,000 ot
ters inhabited the islands. Today, only
about 6,000 remain, according to
aerial surveys. Between 1992 and
2000, the population dropped by 70
percent, a rate of decline that research
ers say is unprecedented for any mam
mal population in the world.
“What's really horrifying is that the
Aleutians have always been consid
ered the stronghold of otter popula
tions,” said Rosa Meehan, who heads
the marine mammal office of the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchor
age.
“At one time, 80 percent of the
world's population of sea otters were
out there,” Meehan said.
Now, the wildlife agency has de
clared otters a candidate for endan-
gered-species protection, although
only in western Alaska.
In 1995. when they began to no
tice the signs of a population de
cline, Tinker and Estes, who spe
cialize in otter behavior and popu
lation biology, at first looked for
signs of disease, famine or repro-
ductive troubles. They found
For a couple of years, as the de
cline steepened, they were baffled.
If thousands of otters had died.
where were the bodies?
Then it dawned on Tinker: Per
haps the animals were being eaten.
By killer whales.
But orcas had lived in harmony
with otters for thousands of years
on the Aleutians. Why, all of a sud
den, were they preying on them so
heavily?
To find the answer, biologists sim
ply had to follow the food chain.
Orcas customarily feed on sea li
ons and seals, which are packed with
high-calorie blubber. But the popu
lation of Steller sea lions, the world's
biggest sea lions, took a sharp dive
in the late 1980 s. Harbor seals also
declined at a similar rate.
By 1992, otters were the only plen
tiful marine mammals left in Aleu
tian waters. The orcas, in their hunt
for calories, apparently had been
forced to switch prey.
The effects cascaded rapidly down
the food chain.
With far fewer otters around to eat
them, sea urchin populations ex
ploded - increasing eightfold within
a few years. As many as 100 of the
spiny green creatures now cover each
square foot of ocean floor around the
Aleutians.
The urchins, in turn, ate the kelp.
In 1993, kelp forests were 20 feet
deep and so thick they clogged the
engines of Brenda Konar's dive boat.
“Now the only kelp you find is the
stuff right by the shoreline, and it’s
maybe only three feet deep,” said
Konar, a biologist with the School of
Fisheries and Ocean Sciences in
Fairbanks.
When the leafy undersea forests
vanished, so did many of the rock
fish, snails, starfish and other crea
tures that use the kelp for food, shel
ter and breeding grounds. Some lo
cal seabirds, mainly puffins and kit
tiwakes, also are hurting from lack of
Iraq Bombings
Um-Grayda lost nine family members when two laser-guided
bombs punched a hole in the reinforced steel roof of the Amariyah
Shelter in Baghdad, Iraq, on Feb. 13, 1991. Having changed her
name to Arabic for “Mother of Grayda” in tribute to her 15-year-old
daughter who died in the blast, she now leads tours of the shelter
where hundreds of civilians were incinerated. The U.S. military
believed the shelter was an Iraqi command center. “It is a crime
that all these people died here in one minute,” Um-Gradya says.
“It is a bigger crime that the sanctions have killed many children
for 10 years."
The rocky outcroppings along the Adak shoreline offer a good habitat
for seals and sea lions, but the mammals' numbers have dwindled
drastically.
The Aleutians offer proof that one
small ecological change can move
like a tsunami throughout the entire
ocean realm.
Yet the snarl in the food web had
to begin somewhere. Where, scien
tists wondered. And, even more im
portant, who - or what - did it?
The Aleutians are a dynamic place,
ever-changing. Fog shrouds the is
lands one instant and retreats the next.
Hurricane-force squalls _ descend
with little warning. The environment
of the Aleutians, however, isn't sup
posed to be as capricious as its
weather. Ecosystems normally evolve
slowly.
"I have not come across any other
example of such a total flip-flop," of
an ocean environment, said Bruce
Wright, a division chief at the Na
tional Marine Fisheries Service in
Alaska.
Ecological shifts as sudden and
sweeping as the ones in the Aleutians
usually can come only from human
interference, said David Lindberg, an
evolutionary biologist at the Univer
sity of California, Berkeley. If the
shift were natural, animals and plants
of the Aleutians would have evolved
with some defensive strategies, he
said.
“We're incredible, as a species, at
speeding up changes,” Lindberg said.
Scientists are exploring many fac
tors - global warming, overfishing,
pollution - that might have played a
role in the Aleutians' misfortunes.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2000
Looking back, they theorize that the
key event may have come in 1977,
when a sudden warming - just two
degrees Celsius - in the average tem
perature of the Gulf of Alaska was re
corded.
The Arctic has been especially vul
nerable to climate change, which many
scientists believe is caused in part by
worldwide burning of fossil fuels and
production of greenhouse gases.
While they cannot know for sure,
researchers believe the chain of events
was most likely this:
Warmer water caused plankton -
short-lived and ultra-sensitive to tem
perature changes - to disappear. Tiny
copepod and krill probably followed
quickly.
The shrimp and crab, along with
smelt fishes such as capelin and her
ring, would have vanished afterward,
deprived of their food, to be replaced
by an explosion of cod and pollock.
Once-thriving shrimp and crab fish
eries collapsed in the late 1970 s while
the new species attracted large fish
ing trawlers that descended on Alaska,
harvesting millions of tons of pollock
and cod a year for American and Japa
nese consumers.
So far, the rest of Alaska has escaped
the regime shift, presumably because
waters elsewhere around the state have
different ocean circulation patterns and
have not warmed.
There is never one factor at play....
“Sometimes you poke along and
poke along and all of a sudden, the
pieces fall into place.”