October 14, 2003

LOST HORIZONS: The hopes of a generation of Indonesians were destroyed in the rubble of the Sari Club

also see Cultural Cringe

Eric Ellis, Bali

NYOMAN SADA’S HANDS betray Bali’s tragedy.

I’ve seen the 37-year-old Balinese father of three on most days I’m on the island. Before the October 12 bombings, he’d drive me around, his smooth hands sure at the wheel of his sharpest Kijang 4WD, one of a fleet built up over 15 years running a thriving tourist taxi service.

Fluent in English, Sada’s conversation was erudite, worldly and informed, his bearing statesmanlike as would befit a trained teacher, and mayor, of Penestenan, a tiny hamlet outside Ubud, Bali’s art and cultural heartland which – for most of the Australian Shazzas and Dazzas whose Bali is the fleshpots of Kuta and Sanur – is a day trip they don’t make.

A month after October 12, I bumped into Sada planting a rice padi in front of my house, working alongside his gnarly old father. Sada’s hands were horribly bloodied, blistered from the sickle he hadn’t wielded for 20 years. To the good-natured taunts of his 62-year-old dad, hardened because he’s only ever known padi work, Sada was also rubbing kerosene into his legs to keep off the leeches. “There’s no business, the economy has gone ... but I have to feed my family.”

He looked pallid, explaining that he’d been ill from a change in diet, no longer being able to afford the western groceries that had arrived with Bali’s relatively sudden prosperity. “My problems are your problems,” he said, pinching a paunch and patting a heart, “full of cholesterol”.

It was like this all over Ubud, he said, all over the island. Balinese like him were going back to the padi “because we have no choice”. Some 88 Australians died last October, while a generation of Indonesians, who had emerged as a flourishing, democratic and moderate middle class – yes, probably Australia’s best friends in South-East Asia – were literally bombed back to the stone age by Imam Samudra, Amrozi and cohorts.

Then there’s our neighbour Suriati. Her 17-year-old daughter should be preparing for university but Suriati hasn’t earned enough money from the holiday house management service she runs for the expensive school fees. Her daughter Putu has been bombed out of an education and, again, it’s happening across the island and beyond.

The plight of the Balinese since last October, often overlooked in the self-absorbed year of mourning, reminded me of the harsh remarks of Ibu Luh Ketut Suryani, one of Bali’s most prominent Hindu intellectuals and cultural leaders. She’s a professor of psychiatry at Bali’s prestigious Udayana University, her rooms about a block away from the impromptu Denpasar courthouse where the Bali bombers cheered their death sentences like they’d won the Grand Final.

A day or so after the bombs, Ibu Suryani said the October 12 attacks were a “good thing” that would cleanse Bali of unwanted foreign evils. “This is the punishment of God,” she told me. “It is good for my people that Australians will not come to Bali. We now have prostitution, gambling, paedophilia, drugs, casino. These things are not Balinese, they are brought in by foreigners.”

A year on, Ibu Suryani’s view hasn’t much changed. On the day Samudra was sentenced to death, which by local legal design was Purnama, the auspicious full moon for Balinese Hindus that denotes cleansing, she railed that Bali and its masters in Jakarta have missed an opportunity to renew the island.

“We are just going back to what we did before, the same things that brought the foreigners and their behaviour and that also attracted the Muslim extremists. We must think why the bombs came here. People still think tourism is the best but, with the war in Iraq and SARS, this type of mass tourism is impossible. This is not the one purpose of our lives. Every family has been affected, 100,000 people have no jobs. We must diversify.”

Suryani’s problem, and Bali’s, is that the island’s tourism-based economy already is a diversification – for Jakarta. The Indonesia that Jakarta’s mandarins present to the world is Hindu Bali, partly because Islam isn’t selling too well, but more because fat cats in the Indonesian capital got used to the easy money that flowed from Bali, the tourist magnet. But if Suryani’s take is correct – and how many times did we hear Samudra himself rail against “evil and immoral westerners” – “soft targets” such as Bali could be as much at threat today as they were a year ago, as tourists straggle back to the region.

Her comments also reveal a political shift. Bali has long been President Megawati Sukarnoputri’s political heartland, a symbol of Indonesia’s enduring secularism that’s now challenged by Islamists such as Jemaah lslamiyah and which offends more fundamental voters elsewhere in Muslim Indonesia, as the country prepares for general elections next year. The part-Balinese Megawati’s PDI-P party carried the Suharto stronghold with almost 90% of the vote in the 1999 election that first brought her to office. But Balinese have lost confidence in Megawati, probably irretrievably. Herman Basuki, editor of Bali's Nusa broadsheet newspaper puts Megawati's support at 35-40%.

Bali’s disillusionment with Megawati set in soon after October 12, exacerbated by the mass unemployment the bombings brought. Across Bali, village banjars (local councils) replaced security functions normally under-taken by the state with traditional pecalang, the banjar’s passive-aggressive vigilantes. Balinese were also deeply unimpressed that Megawati didn’t attend the huge multi-faith cleansing ceremony held a month after the attacks. She has also refused to come for this weekend’s commemoration. That her representative then – and likely next Sunday – is her much-disliked Sumatran tycoon husband Taufik Kiemas (who is extending his business interests in Bali) simply adds insult to an already deep wound.

Balinese aren’t about to break away from Indonesia. But there are greater calls for de facto separation from Jakarta, from people such as Putu Suasta, a political activist and talkback radio host who has co-founded a new party, Partai Indonesia Baru (New Indonesia Party). He wants Balinese autonomy from Jakarta and for Balinese to own more of their economy. “We only own about 3% to 5% of the businesses on Bali,” he says. “This is not right or fair ... Megawati is finished in Bali.”

So is Bali “coming back to normal”? Yes, and no. With one eye on the half-full aircraft arriving at Ngurah Rai Airport, Balinese say the island is much safer. The swift justice meted to the bombers has helped confidence hugely. Attracted by huge discounting, tourist traffic is steadily picking up and restaurants such as the Eurotrash-heavy Ku De Ta in Seminyak claim better returns this August than last. But it’s not yet a recovery. Unemployment remains widespread, wages low and petty crime is rampant.

I view Bali’s evolution through the state of Nyoman Sada’s hands. I saw him again a fortnight ago, hassling for fares on Ubud’s main drag with other idle drivers. He’s thinner now, is no longer mayor, the fleet sold. The casual grace of past years was absent.

“Your hands have healed?” I asked him. Sada laughed. “Padi life is very tough. I do this now with my hands ...” And he slapped a 100,000 rupiah ($17.45) note into the card game as he waited for tourists who weren’t coming. “I make money by gambling.”