Stop the slaughter of innocents

Simon Marcus Gower, Contributor/Jakarta

It was a bright sunny day and all was quite quiet where I was in the city. I sat reading a book, benefiting from a gentle breeze blowing through an open door.

But then a strange thing happened. I felt a jolt. It was as though something very heavy had been dropped or a door had been slammed hard.

But as I looked out of the window to see if there was any reaction from anybody else, I began to feel that it was just me; just my imagination.

How I wish it had been.

Within an hour, my mobile phone was lighting up with worried text messages. Now I knew that the jolt had not just been my imagination. Even though I was miles away from it, I felt the shockwaves from the bomb.

But the shockwaves are not just confined to that second or two when I felt a jolt. The shockwaves are continuing. The shock and misery of another attack here are being felt by so many today. So many people have been injured and people again have lost their lives to a bombing.

Sept. 9's bombing is already being referred to as the "Kuningan bombing", just like the Bali and Marriott bombings, and these labels seem to be making these places synonymous with death and destruction.

The world too is making these associations. Indonesia is being seen as a country suffering more than most others from the problems of terrorist attacks. Friends from around the world now think of Indonesia as a 'dangerous place to be'. They see the television images of bloodied bodies, of shattered windows and shattered lives and Indonesia suffers.

But it is the innocents that suffer. The presidents and prime ministers of today dedicated to their "war on terror" may claim that the world is a safer place because they are "rooting out the terrorists", but after a day like Thursday it is not easy to see the world as becoming safer and it certainly does not seem to be safer for innocent people, especially those who lost their lives on Jl. Rasuna Said and others who are physically or emotionally scarred.

But has their victimization achieved anything?

Since Thursday people have discussed how complacent we have become in Jakarta about the threat of bombs and the need for security checks. It is probably true that we had become relatively thoughtless about it all. Security guards waving metal detecting wands at entrances to malls and office buildings have become part of our lives but mostly we probably thought of them as a minor irritation rather than a necessary guard.

Indonesia has now become the victim of a number of bomb blasts but does anything really change because of them? For sure, hundreds of people's lives have been taken; many more people's lives have been changed irrevocably but the world continues. As the American poet Robert Frost wrote "In these words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on." The bitter and awful truth for too many people, though, is that life does not go on after these attacks.

When the bomb blast took place on Thursday, I felt the jolt of it and asked myself "what was that?" The answer to that question came quickly and it was/is horrific and it was/is awful. But now I am asking another question, and the answer will not come so quickly and perhaps an answer will never really come -- "why was that?"

Why do bomb blasts have to happen? Surely, they do not have to happen. Do they really achieve anything? All that I can see from Thursday is, again, the loss of innocent life. Innocent people are in sorrow again, but why?

In the spirit of Robert Frost's words we must "go on" but we must surely go on to try to foster peace and understanding. Bombs, with all their death and destruction, only entrench misunderstanding.