Fortune: Year of Pig Will Bring Disaster

A man poses in front of pig decorations at a park in Beijing, Friday Feb. 16, 2007. The city's parks and temples are being decorated in preparation for a week-long Spring Festival holiday marking the Lunar New Year. The Year of the Pig begins on Feb. 18. (AP Photo/Greg Baker) (Greg Baker - AP)

Singapore fortuneteller John Lok predicted the situation in Iraq will not settle and President Bush will have a bad year.

He also said the next president of France may be a woman _ no surprise there since one of the main candidates is a woman, Segolene Royal of the Socialist party.

While the pig is beloved by the Chinese, the animal is offensive to Muslims, who consider it unclean. For that reason, Chinese New Year celebrations have to be handled with care in Malaysia and Indonesia, mainly Muslim countries with large ethnic Chinese minorities.

For the first time in its history, Indonesia introduced a special set of postal stamps to mark the Lunar New Year. But concerns over Muslim sensitivities led the postal service to drop plans to put a large pig on the stamps. It chose a Chinese temple instead.

"We took the middle path," said Hana Suryana, director of the Indonesian postal service.

Still, that was progress for a country where ethnic Chinese, who make up 5 percent of the population and have long faced discrimination, once were not allowed to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

"That has changed now, but we still feel uncomfortable celebrating the day in a large way because there are some people who cannot accept that Chinese culture is a part of Indonesian culture," said Jhony Tan, a trader in Jakarta's bustling Chinatown.

Yusri Mohammad, president of the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, said he had no problem with the Chinese celebrating the pig year in his country. He said decorative pictures of pigs in shopping malls are fine _ as long as Chinese don't start using live pigs or eat pork in public.

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Associated Press writers Stephan Grauwels in Taipei, Elieen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Niniek Karmini in Jakarta and Derrick Ho in Singapore contributed to this report.