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The butchers of Bali

By Paul Toohey.

The deja vu is unmistakable. Bali is Asia's terrorism ground zero again. As nations mourn their losses and injured it is clear that the lure of the island paradise for Australians is dead in the water.

At Denpasar’s Sanglah hospital, it is 2am and little more than 24 hours since the suicide bombers struck. Heavy Australian boot heels ricochet on white tiles through the otherwise deserted corridors. Small groups of Indonesians sleep or stir on benches or in doorways, awaiting news of their loved ones.

Handwritten signs point the way to the Kamar Mayat - the morgue. An old man, the mortuary attendant, Pak Nida, is keeping guard. He worked here during the October 12, 2002, tragedy when this place became death central. “It upsets me that it’s happened again,” he says. “It’s really sad to see all these bodies.”

Most of the 27 dead are no longer here. The majority of Balinese victims have been taken home by their families to be washed, dressed, farewelled and cremated. Very sadly, an Australian woman, Jan Hill, 54, is yet to be carried home. She died from a heart attack, which her family has said was brought on by the shock of the bombings.

The morgue is a mess. No one has had time to clean it up yet. Used gloves, scissors, mops and body bags are scattered about. Blood stains the floors and runs from the sliding stainless steel fridge drawers.

Sometimes, in Indonesia, when you ask to see something, you end up seeing too much. Pak Nida slides open a drawer and slides out a Japanese man in a clear cellophane bag. Other fridge doors are marked simply “body parts”. These are the suicide bombers. All that is left of them is their heads and feet.

Seeing them there like that, just a few bits and pieces wrapped in crumpled yellow body bags, they look less than human. While it is tempting to conclude this is a fitting way to view them, you must pull back from this analysis. What is really tragic is that they were human.

Earlier in the evening, Bali police chief I Made Mangku Pastika had presented national and international media with gruesome photographs of the men’s heads sitting on white plastic morgue trays. While they chose to tear apart the lives of others, they could not erase their own images. The three heads are surprisingly intact, with clear facial features. Locals say they are, without doubt, Javanese. They are a very good find indeed for the police. Each is easily identifiable as someone’s neighbour, someone’s son. It is not a matter of whether they will be identified, just when.

Leaving the hospital, past whiteboards that list the injured and the dead, Jane Marie Lumy raises her tired body from a bench. She is a Balinese who has come to the hospital to volunteer her help. “Welcome to Bali,” she says. “For a very sad story.”

VOLUNTEER SECURITY GUARDS

A few days ago it was a busy sunset restaurant precinct with tables and chairs in the beach sand. Jimbarang Bay is now a major crime scene, with kilometres of yellow police tape cordoning off the entire area. Police and becalang - local men who form volunteer security guards in urban villages - now stand guard over Bali’s latest sadness.

Jimbarang seems a most unlikely place for a visit from suicide bombers. The damage was no doubt less than it might have been had the killers taken themselves to a packed nightclub cauldron. Which is what makes the attacks seem just a little bit random, as if the bombers hadn’t quite made up their minds where to hit on Saturday evening.

This is supported by the account of Darwin man David Johnston, who told The Bulletin he was with his Indonesian girlfriend, Putu, in the vicinity of Raja’s bar and restaurant, in Kuta Square - site of the first blast.

Johnston believes he saw the Raja bomber wandering about as he was looking for a target. “I saw this Indonesian bloke, probably about 20, and he was wearing a very bulky jumper - sort of unusual ’cause it was bloody hot as usual and he was acting up very strange, sort of nervous and moving around very fast.

“He was going in each of the places along the beach as if he was checking them out. Me and Putu saw him and she thought he was also strange. [She] said he was a Muslim from Java. I don’t know how she knew but I suppose Balinese know the diff between the Hindus and the outsiders.

“It put the shits up us a bit so we head off back toward Kuta and about five minutes after we left we heard this explosion from behind us and people going crazy along the beach.”

At Jimbarang, someone has erected a hasty banner and hung it on the roadside. It depicts an angel praying and a terrorist being hanged by the neck over a raging fire. The English is mangled but the point is clear: “May the Lord forgive all of those innocent victims. Condemn the fuckin terrorists & forigive our disability to keep Bali save.”

Jimbarang is where two of the three suicide bombers did their damage, in two neighbouring seafood restaurants, Menega and Nyoman. The blasts were indiscriminate in more than one sense.

Wired for hate, the 10kg lightweight shrapnel-filled bombs that the terrorists wore strapped to their backs or waists did not just kill, maim and terrify Indonesians and tourists. They cut deeper into Bali’s heart and soul. This must have been part of the agenda: to damage those Hindu people who rely on visitors for their livelihoods. The three bombs caused instant mass unemployment. Kuta and Legian beaches are now almost devoid of tourists. There is little sign of panic, and foreigners are leaving slowly, but they are leaving steadily. If Bali had tumbleweeds, they’d have been rolling through the streets.

Perhaps the most poignant story for Australians was that of the Fitzgerald family, of Busselton, south of Perth. Jessica Fitzgerald, 13, saw a man throw a bomb onto a table in the crowded Raja restaurant. Jessica’s father, Terry, is on the critical list and struggling for his life. Jessica was being spared the news that her 16-year-old brother, Brendan, would not be coming home alive.

An Australian volunteer aid worker, Danial Kelly, went straight to Sanglah hospital only a short time after the bombs exploded. At that time there were only Indonesian doctors in the hospital who were unable to communicate with the victims. Kelly, who speaks Indonesian, acted as a translator for the injured Australians.

Most were desperate to get messages home to their families in Australia. Balinese people say the mobile phone system went down fast, and speculate this was because the authorities ordered the phone companies to limit their services in case the bombers were planning to use mobile phones to detonate more bombs.

Kelly says he and other volunteers persevered and were in most cases able to get the message back to Australia. “We tried to calm them and do what we could,” he says. “We had a doctor here from New York who turned up at the hospital very early on. That helped. Then a small team of Australian doctors who were here on holiday turned up. Mostly the injured Australians were very composed, given the circumstances. People looked grazed and had small cuts. But overwhelmingly the victims were Indonesian.”

Two C-130 Australian Defence Force Hercules returned to Darwin in the early hours of Monday morning, carrying Australians, Indonesians and other foreigners in need of help. Qantas put on an extra flight to evacuate those uninjured Australians who no longer felt safe on the island.

In Sanglah’s intensive care unit, a woman named Siska, from Jakarta, cannot hear. She doesn’t know how close she was to the Raja bomber. It is all a blur. Her eardrums are perforated and both her eyes are blackened. She has what looks to be third-degree gravel rash.

In the next bed is Kadek Ardani, 20, a Balinese woman who was waitressing at the Menega, where she has worked for two years. She says she was one metre from the blast. “I didn’t see anything,” she whispers. Ardani’s left side is deeply imbedded with ball-bearings which are clearly visible on her X-ray. Several of the ball-bearings are lodged deep, next to her femur. She is psyching herself for the operation to have them removed.

Her father, Nyoman Manik, is a study of controlled anger. “I would like to meet five of the people who do this kind of thing and fight them by myself,” he says. “I hate those people but the problem right now is my daughter. I must worry for her first.”

The Australian dead and injured had mostly left Bali by Sunday night for Darwin and Singapore in a series of rapid medical evacuations. The 7000 Australians who were in Bali on Saturday night chose to ignore the now-standard Department of Foreign Affairs travel warnings for Bali and Indonesia. With four Australians confirmed dead and another seven on the critical list, it has to be said foreigners have become complacent. But the terror cell Jemaah Islamiyah, believed to have been behind the blasts, has never stood still.

All suicide bombers are amateur, in a sense. It is not the sort of task you can rehearse and become accomplished at. Still, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty revealed the disturbing news that they had used a type of detonator Australian and Indonesian police have not encountered before. Traces of TNT and undisclosed “other chemicals” were found on the bombers’ torn bodies. Pastika believes the bombers were part of a bigger cell which has scaled down its ambitions of building huge bombs and will deal in small, deadly attacks.

“What do you do?” asked Keelty. “Do you shut down Kuta that night because someone heard a rumour that something might happen?”

No need. Kuta, at this stage, has shut itself down.

For Australia, it seems like the long relationship with Bali is converging in a series of unrelated events that may just see the ties indelibly broken. There’s Schapelle, about to have her appeal sentence handed down; the Bali Nine, who begin their trials next week; and now this, a deadly follow-up reminder from 2002’s killers that they will never let us relax. Some Australians bravely claim they will not be cowed by the attacks and have vowed to stand by the Balinese in their hour of need. For others, Bali is no longer Australia’s second home.