The murderous Bali bomber Dulmatin now personally feels the pain

One of the best stories I’ve read in a long time was yesterday’s dispatch from Mindanao by our Zamboanga Bureau Chief Roel Pareño.

Carried on the front page of The STAR was the story that fugitive Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist Dulmatin, one of the chief perpetrators of the horrible Bali Bombings which cruelly killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists from 25 countries, but the majority of them Australians, was raging over the capture of his wife and two young sons by our Armed Forces troops pursuing him and his fellow Indonesian terrorist-sidekick Umar Patek.

His wife, Istiana B.T. Omar Sovie, alias Amenah Tohe, and his two sons, Edar, 6, and Alih, 8, were captured last week in Patikul, Sulu, one of the notorious and traditional hideout areas of Moro insurgents, particularly their terrorist host, Chieftain Khadaffy Janjalani of the Abu Sayyaf.

Dulmatin, according to the story, is threatening retaliation by staging a series of "bombings." Okay, Dulmatin you rascal – bomb away! Thanks to Allah, he is now experiencing just a minuscule part of the anguish he inflicted on so many families he and his cohorts cruelly bereaved on that tragic Saturday night in Bali four years ago.

Did Dulmatin have any pity or sympathy for the loved ones of those he so callously murdered – his bombs blasting apart the Sari Club on Legian street, and just across from it, Paddy’s Bar? Not only were the innocents, dancing and partying inside, killed, but they died in agony and flames. For days afterwards, searchers were moving among the smoking ruins and debris to recover burned and mutilated bodies or body parts.

It’s significant that only last Thursday (October 12), the fourth anniversary of that tragic event was mourned in a small ceremony near Kuta Beach held by 50 Indonesians (Balinese) who also lost family members, and 20 Australians who had flown over to pray for their own dead.

Now Dulmatin’s angry? He’s fortunate that his wife and sons are being well-treated, not savaged as they would have been had the opposite happened, and his fanatical Jemaah Islamiyah chums had been the captors of "enemy" womenfolk and kids. The Abu Sayyaf, their buddies here, have long been noted for torturing and gouging out the eyes of Catholic priests before they beheaded them, or for beheading Filipino and foreign hostages, and mercilessly raping hostaged women as well.

As for his threat to go on a bombing rampage, that’s what the gutter-rat Indonesian terrorist Dulmatin (who has a bounty of $10 million on his head) was going to do anyway. He and pathetic Patek had come to Mindanao two years ago, by golly, to train Abu Sayyaf and some MILF cadres in bomb-making techniques and where and how to explode those IEDs.

I remember what our late, great President Ramon Magsaysay told me when he and a reinvigorated military (his Battalion Combat Teams, his newly-mobilized Scout Rangers under Rocky Ileto, and a newly-inspired Philippine Constabulary, like the Nenita Unit under Col. Napoleon "Pol" Valeriano).

"We knew the Huks were licked when they began leaving their wives and children behind to surrender," Monching had said, "because that was a sure sign they were on the run too desperately to protect and extricate their own families."

Maybe that’s what’s happening with Dulmatin, Patek, and Janjalani Incorporated. They’re on the run – with our boys in hot pursuit. However, this is not the time to relax, but instead to redouble our efforts to get them. They not only retain their sharp teeth – but, as Dulmatin vowed, they have explosive teeth.

Sovie had told interrogators a few days ago that her husband would fight to the death. I hope so.

* * *

Just to give you an idea of how heartless this fellow Dulmatin is – he’s one of those who got away – let me give you a bit of a picture of what he wrought in Bali four years ago. (Three of his co-conspirators and fellow bombers were caught by the Indonesian military and police, with the help of Australian "advisers", and are now in prison awaiting execution by firing squad).

During the years this writer covered Indonesia, I went to Bali a number of times, staying mostly in the Nusa Dua beach area, but a couple of times in the Kuta Beach Hotel, which even then was known as the favorite beach of Australians who flew over almost daily from Oz for surfing, beach-bumming, and otherwise partying night and day. It was in the vicinity of the latter that Dulmatin and his co-plotters struck, intending to kill as many "whites" as possible.

Two years ago, I flew from Jakarta to Bali’s Denpasar airport, then drove over with local friends to Legian street where the blasts had occurred. The street is your typical tourist haven, crammed with shops and pubs, souvenir peddlers, and vendors of aquatic sports stuff as well as cunning carvings, paintings from Ubud, et cetera. It was bustling with commerce, but the window-shoppers were predominantly frugal locals, with a few foreigners, mostly Aussies, would you believe, and Europeans beginning to return.

Where the Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar had stood were empty spaces, the rubble cleared away but nothing as yet rebuilt (although they said they were erecting a monument honoring the victims).

On a flimsy fence were still hanging portraits of those who had perished – school teachers on an excursion from England; holiday makers from Germany, Americans in search of "paradise in the South Pacific", but mainly Aussies, each with a loving poem of remembrance accompanying every smiling picture of those who would smile no more.

I staggered, nearly downed by the familiar heat and humidity, needing a cool drink, into a pub next door. From its walls hung, incongruously enough, posters hailing "Manchester United," or "Chelsea" and other British League football clubs, or "Bondi Beach" in Sydney and "Surfers’ Paradise" in Coolangatta, Australia – obviously it was designed for foreign visitors, since the locals, Balinese Hindus and Muslim Indonesians, anyway not in public, are not supposed to drink. (But, from long experience, some of the biggest boozers were my Indonesian friends, not just in beer, but in Scotch whisky and Jack Daniels etc.)

I asked the languid-looking proprietor who was in colorful Batik short-sleeves, "How’s business?" He replied, "Bagus," which means more or less okay, but he rolled his eyes to heaven, not in jubilation but, it seemed to me, in despair.

In any event, don’t let me gabble on. Let’s hear what a real witness to the awful events of that night and day, Alan Atkinson of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., said of it. He and his wife Margie and children had been on holiday, by coincidence, in Bali which he described later as "the best holiday we ever enjoyed." He was alerted in his hotel in Tuban, not far away, by a phone call which reported to him that at least 50 Australians were dead in a blast near Kuta Beach. He rushed to the scene. The place was still smoking but charred bodies in sheets or pieces of bodies were being brought out by sweating and despairing would-be rescuers and piled in ramshackle ambulances and other vehicles.

In the story he dictated from nearby to ABC back home,Atkinson said, "The force of the blasts was so great that for about a mile around the scene, plate glass windows of shops and big stores were shattered. And the normally smiling Balinese who would usually be offering to sell you their goods, are standing outside their shops and watching the rescue effort in stunned disbelief."

Dulmatin and his vicious partners in jihad had devastated the lives of his own countrymen, not just the "foreign" tourists he wanted to destroy.

* * *

Atkinson had kept a diary of his family holiday, and then the night and the days that followed the Bombing. He subsequently compiled his notes into a small book, Terror in Bali, and on page 84, one poignant vignette says it all:

"The Golotta family from Adelaide were at the Sari Club on Saturday night. John and his wife Tracey, and others in their family group had gone back to their hotel nearby about an hour before the blast. Angela, their nineteen-year-old daughter, wanted to stay on for a bit with some footballers she’d met from back home. She promised her parents she’d take a taxi back to the hotel."

"John Golotta has described to reporters how he and his son Michael heard the explosions and ran back to Legian Street through all the people running away from the scene. Where they had been drinking, just a short time before was now wreckage, fires and carnage. Body parts were everywhere. There were people still alive with skin blown off. John says he found himself standing on bodies as he searched for his daughter. He yelled her name over and over again. Finally he realized he wasn’t going to find her. He returned to the hotel and then he and Tracey went on a desperate search of hospitals throughout Saturday night."

"In the morning, realizing the worst, the family joined the chaos at the Sanglah Hospital morgue and turned over charred bodies until they found their daughter. They recognized her from a string of beads and a button. They asked for her body to be put in a bag in a safe place, from where it could be returned to Adelaide."

"The Golotta story has been echoed by many other families who talk of searching in unbelievable conditions for their loved ones. Some have found them. Others will go back again to look. Some relatives are angry, others too distraught to speak, many still numb with shock. Over and over again, they say they can’t believe the chaos and that not enough is being done. Although some families are consoling each other, each family seems to be locked into its own dark tunnel of grief."

For Australia, the author commented, it was one of the most tragic events to occur in peacetime in the last one hundred years.

Aussies had fought in the first World War and suffered heavy casualties at Gallipoli and elsewhere, and valiantly fought, too, in World War II, with their own men once again struggling and dying in the island-hopping campaign that led to destination Tokyo, or defending "mother country" Britain against the Nazis of Adolf Hitler and the Fascists of Benito Mussolini. Every ANZAC Day they commemorate those who gallantly perished "In Other People’s Wars."

But in Bali, thanks to terrorist Dulmatin – who’s now here – and his Jemaah Islamiyah they found Hell when they expected paradise.

The late Indian leader, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, once described Bali as "The Morning of the World." Dulmatin and his bombers tried to turn it into the Sunset of the World – bloodily and vengefully.

Which is why we must stay ever on the alert – and pursue him to destroy him – with every ounce of effort and even blood. For he could, perish the thought, repeat his malevolent act of blasting Bali right here – in our very home. We must get him, before he gets us!

Inshallah.