PREACHING JIHAD IN A PEACEFUL LAND.

Southeast Asia is experiencing a marked rise in Islamic fundamentalism. Among many adherents, the United States and the West are viewed as the enemy, something underscored by the October 12, 2002 bombing of a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali that killed almost 200 people, many of them foreigners. Authorities say the plan to attack so-called soft targets such as tourist destinations was hatched on January 28, 2003 at a meeting of Muslim extremists in Thailand. Especially in the south of the country by the Malaysian border, where Malay-Muslim separatists, divided from their co-religionists in Malaysia by an arbitrary border a century ago, have striven for their own nation. Resentment there has been simmering for years; now, in the wake of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent start of the U.S. campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, as well as the threat of war against Iraq, experts say the situation is coming to a boil.