Blogged Up On The Island Of The Gods

pjdillon@attglobal.net
Something went badly wrong last week while I was in Bali writing about the opening day of the Amrozi trial, the first of 33 conspirators believed responsible for the Sari Club bomb back on Oct. 12 of last year.
I actually blogged a couple of the stories I wrote, the first for The Globe & Mail and the second, for USA Today. For some reason, neither ended up sticking. Weird because my word-flow is usually sticky enough to adhere to even the most smooth and inhospitable of surfaces. So, in the interests of the public record, and to prove that I actually do work occasionally, here we go again.
NOTE: These are the versions scalped from their papers’ respective web sites. Each has been updated with a brief wire service update, a function of the papers both going to the printers before I’ve woken on this side of the Pacific.
The Globe story, which ran the day after the trial (13-05) is otherwise exactly the same as what I filed, while roughly 200 words have been shorn from the USA Today copy (12-05), mostly street interviews with local residents and tourists, as I’d been requested to do.
They begin below.

Bombing trial begins in Bali
By PAUL DILLON
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, May 13, 2003 - Page A15
DENPASAR, INDONESIA -- Two walls of Sisa DeJesus's office, which rests at the edge of a picture-postcard Balinese rice paddy, are covered with the painful memories of the children she works with, the youngest victims of the world's worst terrorist strike since Sept. 11, 2001.
In style, many of the paintings are indistinguishable from the crude products of kindergarten-aged children everywhere -- except that these are the horrific imaginings of youngsters whose parents were killed when Islamic militants detonated a massive car bomb outside a packed nightclub on the resort of Kuta's seedy Legian strip last Oct. 12.
"This little girl Dinda's mother was driving past the Sari Club to pick up her husband at the hotel where he worked when the bomb went off," says Ms. DeJesus, a transplanted New York native, pointing toward a painting that features a wild, airy web of brown spatter tightening to a densely packed riot of red and black at its base. "She told us it's a picture of Mommy's motorbike. She's three years old."
Yesterday marked the opening of the first trial in the Kuta bombing, at a special courtroom in nearby Denpasar, less than two kilometres from the office where Ms. DeJesus works. The court was packed with spectators and guarded by snipers and bomb-sniffing dogs as a police convoy brought the first suspect, Amrozi, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, to answer administrative questions from a five-judge panel.
The short proceedings completed, the trial was adjourned until next Monday. But it was a far more significant event for the hundreds of spectators, most of whom watched on two large television screens set up outside the courthouse.
"Let's just kill him. He killed our friends after all," said Wayan Sumerta, a 35-year-old Balinese driver.
Elsewhere, streets were deserted as Balinese watched live on television, a people transfixed by the memories of last October's carnage, in which 202 people died, more than 350 were injured and the island's reputation as a peaceful tourist idyll was forever changed.
Today, there is little evidence that anything untoward happened at the intersection of Jalan Legian and Poppies Lane II, where the bombs went off. Buildings damaged by the blast are being rebuilt or renovated, and a solid green fence separates pedestrian traffic from the empty lot that once held the Sari Club.
There's talk of a memorial of some sort, but the the Kuta strip has slipped back into its seedy persona, a mix of bars and restaurants, high-end surf shops, low-rent T-shirt hawkers ("Osama don't Surf" is a big seller), beggars, hookers and drug dealers.
A middle-aged Balinese man in mirrored shades leaning against a van across the street from the Sari lot is fairly representative of the area's full-time street population. "Hey boss, you wanna buy some hashish, some good hashish?" he says by way of an opening line. "You want transport? You wanna buy a T-shirt? Marijuana?"
Yet the bombing's effects continue to reverberate in Bali, which has long been dependent on tourism. The hotel industry has been ravaged, with some hotels recording single-digit occupancy. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their livelihoods.
"This bomb before and now SARS has destroyed the economy of Bali," said a Balinese bartender who gives his name as Willi. "For so many years, we were able to look forward to a regular paycheque -- so we had plenty of kids, bought motorbikes and cars and DVD machines. Now no one has any money and we try to sell our stuff to buy food."
It would have been worse but for the loyalty shown by a small core group of repeat visitors, such as Terry McNish and his family, Australians who have been visiting Bali on vacation for years.
"Look, if something is going to happen, mate, it's going to happen. But you can't live your life looking over your shoulder all the time," he said.
END

Bali bombing trial starts Monday
By Paul Dillon, special for USA TODAY
DENPASAR, Indonesia — Ayu Prihana-Dewi was six hours into a busy Saturday night shift as a cashier at the bustling Sari Club when a massive explosion blew out the front of the sprawling nightspot, tossing her across the room.
Terrorists had struck the softest of targets, a Bali nightclub packed with hundreds of vacationers. More than 200 people died, and 350 were injured in the attack Oct. 12. Among the dead: more than 80 Australians, 38 Indonesians and seven Americans.
Today, the first of 33 suspects in the Sari Club bombing will be tried. On the eve of the trial, the last of Prihana-Dewi's physical scars — third-degree burns on her left forearm — have finally healed. Mentally, too, the 22-year-old claims to be making a full recovery, though the prospect of attending the trials makes her shiver.
"For the first few months, if I'd met these terrorist people, I would have killed them," says Prihana-Dewi, who now works with an aid group assisting the families of Balinese victims of the blast. "I've come to understand that the law is there for a reason, so I'm happy to see the trials start."
Indonesian prosecutors will read out a 33-page indictment today against Amrozi bin Nushasim, a small town mechanic from East Java suspected of buying the vehicle and materials used to build the bomb and transporting them to Bali. The trial is expected to last almost five months. It is the long-awaited first phase of criminal proceedings against the 33 men, including two of Amrozi's brothers, suspected of belonging to Jemaah Islamiyah, a group dedicated to creating a pan-Islamic state comprising the Philippines, the Malaysian peninsula and Indonesia.
Several suspects have reportedly confessed to their role in the bombing and said they carried out the operation to avenge the deaths of Muslims elsewhere in the world.
The attack on the Sari Club forced a reluctant Indonesia, the world's most-populous Muslim nation, into the fight against Islamic extremism. Despite a history of religious tolerance and suspicion of fundamentalist preachers, the sprawling and politically unstable archipelago comprising more than 18,000 islands is seen as the ideal base of operations for regional terror groups — some linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
The Indonesian security agency, with assistance from law enforcement agencies in Australia and the USA, rapidly identified and arrested dozens of alleged members of Jemaah Islamiyah. They included most but not all of the principal suspects in the Bali bombing.
Western analysts say Jemaah Islamiyah's ability to operate has been degraded, but it is still in operation. "I think they retain some capacity to network. But it's become very difficult to plan a major strike of the kind we saw in Bali, which involved many meetings in many different places, because now, almost inevitably, one of these meetings is going to be infiltrated," says Sidney Jones of International Crisis Group.
Jemaah Islamiyah's retreat has done little to help Bali. It is dependent on tourism, and the plummeting numbers of visitors has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Indonesia also is struggling with separatist movements. In Aceh, the northernmost province in Sumatra, the government says it will crush a 27-year rebellion despite a 5-month-old Swiss-brokered cease-fire.
Indonesia's military has been pouring troops into the area. It vows to renew fighting if the rebels refuse to meet government demands to put down their weapons and accept autonomy by today.
END