Balinese experience intense soul-searching

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.