Balinese experience intense soul-searching

Dewi Anggraeni, Contributor, Kuta, Bali

Against a green corrugated iron sheet blocking off the vacant lot along Jl. Legian in Kuta, which once had been Sari Club, leaned three bouquets of flowers. Stuck between the first and second bouquets was a piece of paper inside a protective plastic sleeve, bearing a poem.

The poem was a heart-rending appeal to God not to abandon Bali, and to forgive the Balinese.

"... God are you angry with us?/We know we have been made a lot of mistakes (sic)/We know we are often misguided/God please forgive us..."

Those who stopped to read the poem, especially the few foreign tourists who still came to this beautiful island, were invariably moved to mumble, "Poor people ... they blame themselves ...."

This perception of a people who look into themselves when something bad happens has never been more emphasized than after the Oct. 12, 2002, bombing which destroyed the Sari Club, Paddy's Bar and seriously damaged many buildings surrounding them. This is reinforced time and time again when you ask people around you, shopkeepers, cafe operators, restaurant waiters or waitresses, taxi drivers, private security guards and many others, how they perceive the Oct. 12 atrocities, regardless of whether they have been directly affected by the terror act or not.

They usually give you the first -- the public -- face of Bali with some minor variants.

Murni, a stallholder whose lodgings were about a hundred meters behind Sari Club, recounted how she was awakened by an enormous explosion followed by the shattering of windowpanes in the house. Despite being traumatized to the extent of the inability to sleep for weeks on end, when asked how she regarded the bombing, she said, "It was a punishment from God. We must have neglected our religious duties, so we were warned and reminded to return to the right path." No bitterness against anybody else.

Kadek, a private security guard who suffered burns to his back and right leg from the Sari Club bomb, believed that it was a warning from God, for Balinese to redress the balance of good and evil. "We must have strayed too far one way," he said.

Putu, a taxi driver, went further. "There's no doubt we have been punished. And now we are given an extended time to look back and evaluate. Balinese have been too greedy. We've been too busy chasing the dollar, and neglecting our religious and cultural lives. Oh, many of us knew what was happening, but we couldn't stop. It was as if we were trapped in this mad race. So God had to intervene ...."

Among these mea culpa outpourings, you will also be entertained -- if you are the sort who likes ghost stories -- with tales of taxi drivers who have picked up passengers near Sari Club and Paddy's Bar just to find at the nominated destinations there was no one in the passenger seat, of locals who looked out of their houses and saw disembodied legs scrambling along the footpath as if running away from some evil event, of locals hearing moaning outside their houses and many, many more.

In a longer taxi journey, the driver was more forthcoming with what he meant by "straying too far from an honest life".

"Sari Club and Paddy's Bar were the type of place where drugs, escort girls and escort boys abounded. Some of the couples didn't even bother to go anywhere private. They'd just go to the beach. And the police were more interested in peeping on them than policing. So you see, Bali was being contaminated and we were not just doing nothing. We were abetting them. Yes, Bu, I believe we were punished."

If these musings begin to remind you of the part of the Barong (lion) dance where in a trance, some of the dancers frantically try to stab themselves, or that there are parts missing in the culture of these people, you should persevere and seek out the missing piece or pieces of your imaginary jigsaw puzzle.

Anger is not far from the surface, they just know how to manage it.

In conversations over long cool drinks or hot coffee, people tend to open up and you are able to move beyond the public facade. Cautiously bring up the issues related to the alleged perpetrators of the Oct. 12 bombings, and you may hear their wider thoughts to various degrees.

"Of course they upset us. They came here, committed their abominable, atrocious act, causing untold damage to Bali and Balinese, and they thought they could just go away scot-free!" one said with a barely elevated note in his voice.

"But they didn't go scot-free. They were caught. You saw them yourselves on TV!"

"Oh that? You think we enjoyed seeing Amrozi grinning around, waving at the camera like a celebrity, while the journalists egged him on?" Amrozi was the first of the alleged perpetrators to be caught, in November 2002.

"I guess not. How did you feel?"

"Ha! Some of us were quite ready to buy him. Did you know that?"

"Buy him? What for?"

"Well, use your imagination. You're a writer!" The man laughed nervously. He then added calmly that he had only been joking. "No. The truth is, we didn't like seeing that on TV. Not at all. It was like a slap in the face for us."

It is a lot more reassuring when the people you are speaking with turn out to be human after all.

Something else also came to the surface in the course of this informal conversation. An unreal sense of untouchability.

"You will find that Balinese would never do anything like that. Since we begin to understand words we've always been taught the principles of Karmapala. You get back what you do to other people," one interlocutor explained. "Or, if for some reason the payback eludes you, your descendants will suffer from it. So when you hear something bad happening, you can bet your life it is perpetrated by people from outside Bali."

Another added, "And Balinese have been spared the worst in the bombings. While there were Balinese injured, none were dead."

Unfortunately this claim does not conform with official records where there are Balinese in the fatalities.

In longer interviews, official and unofficial, people went into deeper soul-searching, where the issue of warning and punishment from God was taken on board, without fudging the anger and resentment toward the perpetrators who, let us face it, are non-Balinese.

And the anger is justified too. Bali was regarded as a peaceful place, a place of refuge, by many who had to escape, albeit temporarily, from the heat of their own troubled homes throughout Indonesia. Until Oct. 12, 2002, that is.