TERRORISM: Murder on the Milk Train

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The Moluccan headache is a heritage of the old days of empire. A chain of islands at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, the Moluccas were once known as the Spice Islands, for their prized crops of cloves, nutmeg and mace. When The Netherlands gave up its East Indies colonies in 1949, a faction of Moluccans, mainly from the island of Amboina, fought against being absorbed into the Indonesian Republic. After Jakarta crushed an attempt to set up a South Moluccan Republic, some 12,000 islanders were allowed to settle in The Netherlands. At the time, the Dutch held out hope for the eventual creation of a Moluccan state, but the government has long since abandoned the goal as unrealistic. The exiled islanders have not. Their numbers swollen by Dutch-born children, Moluccans in Holland today number around 35,000. The cause persists, even though some of the young Moluccan rebels have never seen the islands they kidnap and kill for.