http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/12/opinion/edvatik.php
After the bombings, Bali reflects on conflict
Michael Vatikiotis
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2005
UBUD, Bali I went to Bali to escape violence. I stayed in Ubud because
the clear burbling streams and deep green glades where the spirits live have a
calming effect few other places in this world can offer so accessibly. From a
distance, friends and family urged caution. A second bombing, they all said;
surely this was a sign of worse to come.
I went because not to go is to give in to the terrorists.
No one else who gathered in the artistic heart of Bali for a festival of
reading and writing, barely a week after the Oct. 1 bombing that killed two
dozen people in nearby Kuta and Jimbaran wanted to give in either. "I came in a
spirit of solidarity in the face of these suicide bombings," declared East
Timor's president, Xanana Gusmao, a former guerrilla leader himself and once
branded a terrorist by the Indonesian state.
As the world's media ruminated on the attacks that hit this island's most
fashionable beach spots, it was heartening to see leading literary figures like
Michael Ondaatje and Amitav Ghosh mingling with local writers and an ample
supply of foreign guests and residents barely an hour's drive from Kuta.
Reports of the demise of Bali's tourist industry were greatly exaggerated.
All the same it was an opportunity to reflect on conflict. Ondaatje, who
was born in Sri Lanka, spoke of the clichés that distort and confuse coverage
of wars in marginal places. "I want equality of consideration," he declared
about the long-running war in Sri Lanka that has all but faded from the
headlines.
Amitav Ghosh, who is from Calcutta but lives in New York, argued that
fiction paves the way for greater understanding of the uncertainties of today's
world. "Only a fiction writer can show you how to inhabit the world in these
conflicted times," he said.
My Indonesian friends felt uncomfortable in the face of such literary
candor. "People expect us to address the issue of terrorism, so we should,"
said Nasir Tamara a veteran journalist and Muslim intellectual.
A Balinese writer, I Gusti Raka Panji Tisna, gave voice to some of the
anxiety masked by this Hindu island's serenity. "There is already animosity
towards the Muslim Javanese who come here, now there is a suspicion that the
Muslims are jealous of the Balinese." Yet instead of laying blame, Panji took
refuge in karmic guilt; that somehow the violence was punishment for all the
decadence that tourism has brought to the island.
Most Indonesians are still in denial about the roots of terrorism. It is
hard for Muslims like Nasir Tamara to condemn the violence without blaming some
other, more menacing source of global injustice, mostly meaning the United
States. "There is no justice in law if the law is created by dominant
countries," argued another leading Indonesian thinker, Arief Budiman.
Absent from the discourse was a frank admission of the country's long
history of violence, usually missed amid the outrage expressed over the
targeting of foreigners in Bali. And yet it was here in the shadows of the
balmy Bali night some 40 years ago that thousands of Balinese were slaughtered
for being suspected Communists.
Many Balinese turned to Communism in the struggle against Dutch colonial
rule in the early 20th century, just as many Javanese have turned to militant
Islam in the face of grinding poverty and social alienation.
Each conflict in Indonesia's cycles of violence - from the Muslim
radicals who launched futile rebellions in the 1940s to the Communists clubbed
to death in the 1960s - has produced widows and aggrieved children. They nurse
feelings of vengeance and become easy targets for those who want to plough new
furrows of conflict.
In Balinese the word Ubud means medicine, and this gentle town filled
with beautiful art and the sound of gongs and cymbals is an ideal place to
promote healing in the wake of a terrorist attack. Death is never far away,
though. At the cremation of a young man who died after falling off the back of
a motorcycle, friends and neighbors gathered to watch the corpse consumed by
flames ignited by a man in a sarong and white head band and wielding a giant
gas torch. He looked so casual he might have been burning leaves.
Meanwhile, Balinese say that an old lady went into a trance at a temple
somewhere in the south of the island and gave the names and addresses of three
men responsible for planning the Oct. 1 bombing, including details of the
vehicle they were driving. It's not clear if the police are investigating.
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