The Back Page

October 28, 2002

NO PLACE LEFT TO HIDE

To a Canadian in Indonesia, Bali was a place of innocence--until the bombings

By WARREN CARAGATA

BALI HAS ALWAYS seemed like a fine, peaceful place, a land of rice terraces scalloped against hillsides under brooding volcanoes, a place so green that it sometimes seems like all the green of the world has been gathered up into this one colour-saturated vista. Those parts of Bali still exist, and it's still a place where it almost seems temples outnumber people. But to a Canadian expatriate like me, Bali now conjures up a darker, more frightening vision. Two Saturdays ago, while my wife and I were having Thanksgiving dinner with Canadian friends in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, a bomb exploded at a crowded nightclub in the always-hectic tourist district along Kuta Beach in southern Bali, killing nearly 200 people and leaving hundreds more injured or missing. (We called our dog Kuta, after the beach, and it occurs to me now that maybe we should change it to something with a happier connotation.)

For me and so many others, Bali now represents the final loss of innocence at the hands of terrorists. Maybe, as my wife and I have remarked sadly in the past few days, we'd be safer back in our original respective homes in Regina or St-Antoine-de-Tilly, Que., but who knows what place is really safe these days? If victory for al-Qaeda and its followers and imitators can be measured by the absence of safe havens for ordinary people, then they've won, and all the after-the-fact bluster of the politicians isn't going to change it.

Perhaps we should have seen the violence coming. Since we moved here three years ago, a powerful bomb outside the home of the Philippine ambassador injured him and killed several others. A bomb at the Jakarta Stock Exchange tower killed 15 people, bombs have gone off at churches on Christmas Eve, and there have been bombs at shopping centres and other venues. Such violence isn't everyday fare, but it's happened often enough that my wife and I have discussed how to deal with the arrival of unexpected mail parcels. But now, it's really different because it was Bali, where people thought they were exempt from terror, and many of the victims are westerners like us. And it's different because there's an overlay of international and national politics that will have lasting impact.

For months, foreign governments have told the Indonesian government that it needed to get tough with its Muslim extremists. The United States and Singapore, in particular, pressed the government to arrest Abu Bakar Bashir, a Muslim cleric accused of masterminding a group called Jemaah Islamiah, which wants to create an Islamic state covering Malaysia, Indonesia and the southern Philippines. The group has been accused of being in league with al-Qaeda. The government's response has been perplexing, and many public figures defend Abu Bakar and others like him. Vice-President Hamzah Haz said that if accusations from abroad continued, Indonesians would react in a fury that the government would not control. You can read that as a threat.

Until the Bali bombings, the Indonesian government of President Megawati Sukarnoputri had been able to resist demands from abroad to take action and still portray herself and her country as a participant in the American-led war on terror. That will now change, as the pressure has become irresistible. But her reticence until now may prove to have been an accurate reading of the political winds. Most Indonesians are as chilled by what happened as we are, but among elites, there persists what one Indonesian friend calls an act of national denial. Abu Bakar plays to that denial when he says the bombing was "engineered by the United States and its allies to justify allegations that Indonesia is a base for terrorists."

It's one thing for Abu Bakar to talk like that, but the state-run news agency Antara ran a story the day after the bombing saying much the same. A leading Jakarta newspaper went one step further, suggesting the blame rested with either the international Jewish conspiracy or the United States. Another Indonesian friend, when quoting these comments, noted that such arguments should not be dismissed out-of-hand.

Even after recent incidents, I feel great affection for the country that has become my second home. But there are times when it can be a frustrating place, where everything that happens here is someone else's fault. It's a country where people still blame the Dutch for whatever goes wrong, even though Indonesia has been independent for almost 60 years. The government will act, not because it feels it necessary to confront its own homegrown terrorists, but because it has no other choice. Debt-ridden, its economy in shambles, it will bow to international pressure, but unhappily. And while innocence is lost, there will be some in Megawati's government who will continue to insist that somehow all this has had nothing to do with Indonesia, that it is all a foreign plot. Many of us here -- and not just expatriates -- know better. And many of us here will never again think of Bali as a peaceful land of impossibly green rice terraces. Sadly, these days there's no place to hide.

Former Maclean's senior writer Warren Caragata is a consultant in Jakarta.