Horror and terrible death in paradise

The two bomb blasts that shook Bali, the "paradise island" of Indonesia, and a third that struck our Philippine Consulate in Menado (in Sulawesi, much nearer our archipelago), should be ample warning to us that the terrorist war on all of us has racheted up several deadly notches.

It’s significant that the RP Consulate was targeted. Maybe they’ll blame the Abu Sayyaf!

Many Indonesians had been angrily denying that Islamic terrorists had made their 87 percent Muslim nation a "haven". Now, they may be having second thoughts about those denials. General Da’i Bachtiar, their National Police Chief, has already described the car bomb which devastated Kuta Beach in Bali as "the worst act of terror in Indonesia’s history".

The bomb which proved the most destructive was the one which exploded about 11 p.m. Saturday in front of the Sari Club, a popular nightclub on Kuta Beach, a five-kilometer strip crammed with restaurants, bars, boutiques, art shops, travel agencies, and home-stay speakeasies as well as first-class hotels.

As soon as the first television reports said "Kuta Beach", I immediately surmised that most of the 182 dead were probably Australians – since Kuta, sometimes called the "wild beach" in the old days, is the favorite among Aussies (who are the backbone of tourism in Bali) and New Zealanders, particularly the surfers, boozers, and the beachboys – and, of course, the beach-combing Sheilas. For this is where the surf crashes, and the pubs overflow with Foster’s, FourXXXX, Swan beer, and Touhys.

Sure enough, when the casualty figures came out, it was confirmed by the Australian Embassy’s deputy, Neil Mules, that there were 181 Australians among the 300 wounded, many seriously injured and badly-burned, being tended in the inadequadete Rumah Sakit (clinics and dispensaries) in the area, or being evacuated by the Royal Australian Air Force.

Although I used to prefer the more sedate Nusa Dua beach, while it is somewhat "cut off" from the rest of Bali (there are a splendid Grand Hyatt, a Nusa Dua Beach Hotel, and even a Club Mediterranée there), or the old Bali Beach (Inter-Continental) at Sanur, I discovered the sybaritic joys of Kuta some years ago when a conference held there compelled me to book into the Kartika Plaza Beach Hotel.

The conference was literally abandoned by some of the delegates who were too bleary-eyed to participate because they had been seduced into partying half the night, rubbing elbows with the surfers and backpackers, and, of course, the cuter sex from Down Under. And the Aussies just kept on coming by the planeload daily – aboard flights direct from Sydney, Melbourne, Darwin and Perth.

Not any more, I guess. At least not for the next few months. Or maybe they won’t be back for years. Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer are now cautioning Aussies not to go to Bali. It’s the apparent feeling that Australians and other "Westerners" were being singled out for attack by the terrorists.

Another bomb went off almost simultaneously 300 feet from the United States Consulate in nearby Den Pasar (Bali’s capital town) but nobody was injured in that second explosion.

But the word is out. America and America’s "friends" (including us, I kid thee not) are on the bombers’ list.

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If our police and military haven’t been on the alert in Metro Manila, they’d better snap to it now. Only last September 19, the "convicted" Indonesian national, Fathur Al-Ghozi, who’s in prison here for having been caught with 1.2 tons of explosives in General Santos City and carrying forged travel documents (including two Philippine passports), signed a sworn statement at our Department of Justice in which he warned that his extremist group planned to bomb Western targets as part of its jihad (holy war) to establish an independent Islamic State in the region.

Al-Ghozi, who has been linked to the terrible bomb blasts which blew up an LRT train, a bus, and damaged other targets in Metro Manila in December 2000, is a self-confessed member of the Jemaah Islamiyah movement. This time, his statement mentioned two JI leaders as among the prime-movers of the plot – one of them Riduan Isamudin a.k.a. "Hambali", an Indonesian preacher suspected of being behind a series of Christmas Eve church bombings in Jakarta and elsewhere in the year 2000, and the other Faiz Abu Bakar Batana (whom Al-Ghozi described as the Malaysian financier of the group).

The bombing in Zamboanga which killed that US Special Forces soldier a week and a half ago, and the bomb discovered in a minibus in the same city may be only the beginning.

It is incredibly easy to plant and detonate such explosives. The bomb which destroyed the Sari Club was exploded in a Kijanj, a jeep-type vehicle parked in front of the place.

Although the explosives left a large crater in front of the club, it would have been less effective had it not ignited a horrible blaze, possibly sparked by bursting gas cylinders, which spread like . . . well, wildfire, to collapse the roof which crashed down on hundreds of customers inside. The blaze rapidly spread to engulf neighboring clubs and buildings on the block. The blasts, of course, killed Indonesians along with the Aussies, Britons, Canadians, Swedes and other nationalities which composed the revelers in the area.

Although Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople has announced that no Filipinos were victims of the blast and its aftermath, let’s wait and see. There are always Filipinos everywhere – whether in the desert sands, the outback, the Antarctic, or at the North Pole. Perhaps one of the bartenders, busboys, or chefs, – if not one of the revelers, – was a Pinoy.

The tragedy at Kuta Beach means that tourism in Bali – which had seemed untouched by the jihad mischief even in nearby Moluccas and Poso, or Sulawesi – is dead. Bali, one of my own favorite resorts in all the world, seemed serenely above the religious ferment which had gripped the region in the past few years. A Hindu island in a Muslim sea, Bali appeared a haven of tranquility, beauty, song and dance. Even as tourism withered elsewhere, owing to the threat of terrorism worldwide, Bali was unaffected.

In fact, the two top destinations in Asia remained Bali and Phuket in southern Thailand. (In Bali, before the weekend blasts, hotel occupancy was 90 percent! Now, from the TV reports, every foreign visitor is rushing to flee the island, scrambling aboard every outbound plane or ferryboat.) I hope Phuket isn’t next on the terrorist list.

Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who I feel earnestly wanted to do something earlier to curb the activities of extremists in her country, will now be compelled to act.

Singapore, which first uncovered the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist movement’s aims, arresting dozens and alerting us to Fathur Al-Ghozi, has for months been urging Indonesia to arrest Islamiyah’s suspected leader, Abu Bakar Ba’ashir, who lives there. However, Jakarta has been saying that there is no "evidence" against the guy. They ought to look more closely now at his background and activities. They might even find his fingerprints or those of his brethren on the Bali bomb fragments.

Instead, not only Singapore but Malaysia has been saying that the JI headquarters is in Indonesia. As for us, don’t we remember? Our former Ambassador there (who’s just come home, by the way) was blown out of his car in the driveway of his own Embassy residence.

It’s not lost on anyone that last Saturday’s explosions took place on the second anniversary, as wire reports point out, of the al-Qaeda attack on the American destroyer, USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen, which killed 17 American seamen.

Indeed, the US Embassy in Jakarta even closed down last September 10 and stayed shut for almost a week after receiving threats of an impending bomb attack.

The threat is not over yet. Not by a long shot as the Bali incident demonstrates.

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It is also quite possible that Indonesia is being "punished" for having arrested an alleged al-Qaeda operative last June and, finding him an alien, turned him over to the Americans.

This was Omar Al-Faruq who was seized by government agents last June 5 at a mosque near the West Java town of Bogor (not far from Jakarta and the site of one of the late President Sukarno’s palaces). Al-Faruq – who is married to an Indonesian woman – tried to pose as a native but could not manage in either Bahasa Indonesia or the local dialect. He was arrested for obtaining a fake Indonesian passport.

Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has confirmed that Indonesian officials had deported Al-Faruq to the US-held Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, outside Kabul.

TIME magazine subsequently published an article in its September 23rd issue saying that Faruq, 31, had confessed not merely to a plot to kill Indonesian President Megawati in 1999 but to a bungled try to assassinate her in August last year. (The would-be assassin’s bomb went off prematurely in a Jakarta shopping mall and he was himself blown to kingdom come.) Al-Faruq, TIME claimed, even admitted to having been involved in the above-mentioned Christmas bombings in nine Indonesian cities in the year 2000, in which 18 Christian worshippers were slain and more than 100 injured.

When TIME added that Al-Faruq had further admitted "links" with Muslim preacher Abu Bakar Ba’ashir of JI, as well as Agus Dwikarna, an Indonesian Islamic activist currently in jail here for possession of explosives, Ba’ashir furiously denied that he even knew this Arab, Al-Faruq, or had any terror ties.

His lawyers announced they were filing a libel suit against TIME in a Jakarta court.

Oh, well. The jihadis have an advantage over everybody else. Even the outlaws among them can, if they fail to bomb their targets out of existence, invoke the law against their foes. It’s the same old story. They fight from ambush. Then, when they’re caught, they fight it out in court. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?