November 16, 2002

Bali prays for delivery from evil

Hindus on the holiday island want to exorcise the bombing. Eric Ellis and Shawn Donnan report from Kuta.

The Balinese are an intensely spiritual people. So in the days after the October 12 bombing the holiday island's Hindu priests consulted sacred texts.
A cleansing ceremony was needed, they decided, and November 15 was the most auspicious day.
So it was that tens of thousands of Balinese, dignitaries and family members of those killed in the Kuta bombing yesterday descended on the site of the tragedy.
A little more than a month after the bombing - blamed on the Jemaah Islamiyah Islamist group and possibly al-Qaeda - Bali is still reeling both economically and psychologically. But Balinese hope that yesterday's ceremony will allow recovery to begin in earnest, and that the Indonesian holiday island can recover the innocence its tourist industry sprang from.
With holy water, guttural prayers and the sacrifice of pigs, goats, ducks and cows, local Hindus, with foreigners sprinkled among them, sat on the ground in traditional sarongs and head-dress praying for the dead, and seeking to cast out the evil so many islanders have felt hanging over them.
All around - on signs tacked to blackened pylons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers stuck haphazardly around the bomb site - sang out the slogan Bali tourism officials hope will bring visitors back: "Bali loves peace".
"This is a beginning," said Robert Hepworth, the Canadian manager of a $500-a-night resort on the island. "For the last month Bali was sad. But Bali isn't sad any more."
Things are still grim for Bali's tourism industry, which has seen occupancy rates slump as low as 5 per cent in the wake of the bombing. But there are already signs of recovery.
Around the pools of the island's resorts, holidaymakers are again gathering in small bands. Mr Hepworth, who plans not to lay off any of his 47 staff, says his 14 villas are all booked for Christmas and he expects to begin breaking even again in December. By May next year, he hopes, business will have returned to normal.
But even as the Balinese tried to kickstart their recovery, there was evidence of the hangover from the attack.
Indonesia's security position remains tenuous - international schools in Jakarta were closed yesterday for the first time since the Bali bombing as a result of threats. And although it seemed to gain vigour in the days after the bombing, Indonesia's government remains largely inscrutable and prone to the occasional bout of very public bumbling.
Megawati Sukarnoputri, president, was absent from yesterday's ceremony in Bali. That left it to her husband, Taufiq Kiemas, to sweet-talk the international media - a peculiar gesture, given repeated criticism of Mrs Megawati's absent leadership after the bombing.
The Indonesian economy too is taking a battering. The country's statistics bureau yesterday reported that gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.9 per cent in the three months to September 30.
Activity has slowed considerably since the bombing, however, and economists now say the government's 4 per cent growth target for this year looks implausible. Next year, the direct impact on tourism alone of the Bali attack could take a full 1 percentage point off GDP.
The indirect effects are just as visible. In a lush rice paddy outside Ubud, a hill town an hour inland from Kuta that is a magnet for tourists seeking Balinese art and artifacts, the change is evident on 36-year-old Nyoman Sada's blistered hands.
Before October 12, Mr Sada earned $50 a day operating a tourist transport service, showing foreign travellers around his beloved island. Now his hands are bloodied from returning to work in a family field he had not farmed in 20 years.
"In just two days after the bomb, my business totally dried up," he laments.
Mr Sada has been ill from a change in his diet, which like those of many Indonesians of his generation had progressively become more western. And his blistered hands refuse to heal.
His 62 year-old father, who has never stopped working the family plot, says the best medicine is to work on. "They will heal if you work," he tells his son. "They will become tough like mine."