Is Indonesia would allied with the United States?

THE United States and Indonesia have pledged to expand co-operation to a global scale, saying they can play supporting roles on hot-button issues from the role of Islam to the Middle East conflict.

Holding an inaugural joint commission on ties, Washington and the world's largest Muslim-majority nation promised to keep a ''scorecard' ' on recent agreements such as boosting student exchanges to fighting climate change.

''Indonesia is not only a great bilateral partner, it is a leader on behalf of so many of the important issues that we both are addressing,' ' US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa, speaking earlier at a think tank, said the world's third and fourth most populous nations should complement each other on the international stage. ''We are ready to work with the United States in fostering mutual understanding wherever there is a conflict or tension,'' Mr Natalegawa said at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

''Whether the problem is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula, we will always strive to be part of the solution,'' he said.

Indonesia does not recognise Israel, but the archipelago is religiously diverse with most Muslims moderate in their beliefs. Jakarta has long-standing ties with North Korea, sometimes serving as an intermediary with the reclusive state.

President Barack Obama's administration has put a new emphasis on South-East Asia, which it believes the previous team under George Bush neglected due to its preoccupation with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Indonesia is at the heart of the strategy. But Mr Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, has twice put off visits to the country due to domestic issues.

Likewise, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is not expected to attend this week's summit between Mr Obama and South-East Asian leaders in New York.

Indonesia recently reacted strongly to threats by a small Christian congregation in Florida to burn the Koran. Mr Yudhoyono said such a desecration threatened world peace and protesters rallied outside the US embassy. Radical pastor Terry Jones later dropped his planned burning of the Koran.

Mr Natalegawa, speaking at the joint news conference next to Mrs Clinton, voiced confidence that the two nations saw eye-to-eye on the issue.

Comments

Greenpeace boycott Palm oil products Duta Palma

Environmental organization Greenpeace India has demanded that all Indian palm oil importers and corporate consumers immediately stop palm oil sourcing from Indonesian companies like Duta Palma who make palm oil by destroying forests and tiger habitat in Indonesia. An investigative report issued by Greenpeace Indonesia released on Thursday links India's growing palm oil imports and corporate apathy to Duta Palma's destruction of hundreds of acres of Indonesian rainforests and tiger habitat in complete disregard of Indonesian government&# 39;s moratorium on such activities in the rainforest. Big Indian corporates like Ruchi Soya, Adani -Wilmar, Godrej Industries, Parle, Britannia are among many who use Indonesian palm oil in their products on a large scale. "Duta Palma's dirty oil could well be entering into their supply chains. Yet, so far, no Indian company has taken any visible steps to clean up their supply chain, to delink their brands from the ...

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s. During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization. Even though NU was one of the ...

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy. But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...

INDONESIA A NEWS

Search This Blog