Expatriates by James Wesley Rawles

non-Islamic banking practices had been what precipitated the collapse. This cemented their power and marked a radical shift in their foreign policy. From then on, open jihad became their byword.
    Indonesia and Malaysia had experienced a simmering conflict since the end of hostilities in 1966. But as time went on, the tensions lessened, and they became regular trading partners. As the Crunch set in, this bilateral trade grew increasingly more important, as global trade collapsed.
    Several things worked synergistically to unite Indonesia and Malaysia: The new presidents of both countries were distant cousins and both were strident Wahhabists. Just before the Crunch, Indonesia had assisted Malaysia both in earthquake relief and in setting up desalinization plants during a drought. Then came the “fairy-tale romance” between the son of the Indonesian president and the daughter of the Malaysian president, which culminated in a marriage that was played up intensely by the mass media in both countries, much like British royal weddings. Ironically, the conservative clerics, who had ordered the removal of the mushy soap operas from Indonesian television, left a vacuum that was partly filled by media coverage of the romance and marriage.
    As Caleb Burroughs heard all this on the BBC broadcasts, he thought about how his mates over in Afghanistan would go on high alert when the word
wedding
was listed in the intel officer’s portion of the commander’s brief.
Wedding
was almost always a code word for a jihadi
attack. It seemed a cruel irony to have it actually touted as such in the media.
Life imitates art
, he thought to himself.
    Shortly after the much-publicized wedding, a variation on the Austrian
anchsluss
occurred in Malaysia wherein it quickly became a puppet state of Indonesia. The state-controlled mass media in both countries tried to put a positive spin on the takeover, calling it the
perkawinan
(marriage) of the two countries.
    The kingdom of Brunei also made special concessions that effectively put Indonesian theocrats in control of the country. Remarkably, these changes in Malaysia and Brunei all took place without a shot being fired. These
anschslusse
were the ideal outcome for Indonesia because they needed
all
of their available military power for their planned invasion of the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and Australia. They could not have spared the manpower that otherwise would have been needed to occupy Malaysia and Brunei.
    The Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN) soon transferred most of their large ships to the Indonesian Navy at nominal cost. These included their recently launched guided missile destroyer (KD
Sabah
), two frigates, two corvettes, three nearly new landing craft, sixteen
Ligan
class new generation fast attack craft, two 37-meter Fast Troop Vessels (FTV), as well as the majority of their replenishment ships and military transport ships.
    Meanwhile, the sultan of Brunei “gifted” Indonesia his navy’s four 41-meter
Ijhtihad
class fast patrol boats and all three of his 80-meter
Darausalam
class multipurpose patrol vessels, complete with missiles and helicopters. All of these Bruneian ships were only a few years old and had been built to be state of the art. With all this talk of jihad, the Sultan felt obliged to donate the ships. To do anything less might have triggered a fundamentalist uprising in Brunei.
    Ironically, the Indonesian government, which under previous leadership had spoken out so forcefully against the Jamaah Islamiyah militants and the Bali bombing, would less than two decades later be espousing many of the same fundamentalist Islamic goals, and building their own time bombs.
    â€”
    A few years before the Crunch, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard had urged schoolchildren to prepare for the “Asian Century” by learning Asian languages. Little did she know that Bahasa Indonesia would become the most important language to learn because Indonesia culture