WHILE most of the world celebrated the true arrival of the millennium with an explosion of carefully choreographed fireworks, the occasion was marked in two of the major nations of Southeast Asia with meticulously planned sequences of terrorist bombings. The eight deadly detonations in Indonesia and the five in the Philippines were timed and placed for maximum political impact. In Jakarta they were set off in churches in an effort to provoke a Muslim-Christian conflagration. In Manila explosions ripped apart buses and shopping malls in a campaign to foment a sense of national emergency. And in each case the terror campaigns were suspected of being organized not by some lunatic fringe but by a major power bloc in the national establishment that could think of no better way to unsettle political rivals. These bombings tolled the death of Southeast Asia as the world has known it for the past thirty years. They seem to be a suitable, if dreadful, declaration of the arrival of a new era, of the region's abrupt transition from miracle to malaise.
