Bali Attack Destroys Notion of Immunity From Terror
By Doug Struck, Washington Post Foreign Service
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SYDNEY – Craig Salvatori’s phone call was the hardest he would ever make, said his family. From a phone in Bali on Tues-day, he got his two small daughters on the line, Eliza, 6, and Olivia, 9.
“I’m sorry,” he told them. “Mummy’s gone to heaven.”
Hours later, little blond Eliza would stand in a packed church here and tell the congregation softly, “Mummy’s a little shining star at night, an angel on my shoulder.”
Australia is suffering heartbreak as it counts its dead from the bomb blast in a Bali bar that was packed with surfers, rugby players and vacationers from this country. With 33 Australians confirmed killed and 140 still missing, the explosion is likely to become the nation’s worst single tragedy since World War II.
In many ways, it is Australia’s 9/11. The scenes are a grim replay of those that gripped the United States after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: death, heroism, near misses, the agonizing search for loved ones, the harsh verdict that nothing recognizable may ever be found.
The bomb pummeled the psyche of a nation that has long thought itself outside the line of fire in international discord. Australians considered themselves too good-natured and their country too far removed — geographically and politically — to attract such enmity.
Now, the bloody disproof has brought a harsh question: Is Australia paying for its fervent support of President Bush’s war on terrorism?
The radio talk shows and letters to the editor are afire with the debate. Critics say Prime Minister John Howard’s enthusiasm for Bush’s division of the world into “evildoers” and others has raised Australia’s low profile and made it a target.
“You stick your head up and pretty soon somebody is going to come along and kick it,” Joe
McKiernan, 48, said at the Sydney airport as he returned from a vacation in Bali that turned into a night of horror.
Howard and his defenders say the attack proves him — and Bush — right; that countries must attack extremism before it attacks them. “This idea that you purchase immunity from terror by saying nothing about terror is not only morally bankrupt, but it is also inaccurate,” Howard said in Parliament this week.
There is agreement on one thing. Like Americans were saying a year ago, the country will never be the same.
The stories from Bali are sewn with grief: six teenage daughters stranded on the roof of the Sari Club as their mothers burned below; a 15-year-old dancing in the club, a birthday gift on her last night alive; a wedding planned in Bali Thursday now without a groom; a teenager who lay unclaimed in a hospital and died before anyone learned her name; the surfing pals who formed a chain to help others from the fire but were forced back by the heat as friends reached out their arms for help.
Survivors straggled back to Australia this week with accounts of close calls.
“The guy I was with, a young Balinese boy, jumped on top of me when the explosion hit. He
probably saved my life,” said Leah Lee, 21, who was in Paddy’s, a bar across the street from the Sari Club that was also demolished.
“He never let my hand go,” she said. “He got me out of there. It was darkness and you couldn’t see anything. You had to crawl on the ground. All you could see was people with faces bloodied and burned.”
Craig Subakti, 13 and big for his age, was enjoying the forbidden thrill of being in a bar and
dancing with older girls at the Sari Club when the bomb went off. Metal fragments ripped into his leg.
“The guy next to me had his whole leg blown off,” Subakti related when he returned to Sydney Tuesday for further medical treatment.
McKiernan was on a two-week surfing holiday with a friend, Bob Settle, 48, and his son Brian, 16. They were at a small hotel near the Sari Club when the door of their room blew off. They raced to the bar and began hauling people away to lay them down in the parking lot of their hotel.
“We used anything we could — my surfboard, signs, doors from the hotel — to carry them,” he said. “There were so many burns. We set up a little triage. All we had was my surfer’s first aid kit, and we grabbed sheets and pillows and blankets from the hotel.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t believe human beings could be so badly smashed.”
The game called “footy” in some parts of the country is a national mania here. Rugby teams seem almost the underpinning of Australian society. Men are known for their past or present play on teams — not their daytime occupations.
After a season of weekend skirmishes, the teams traditionally celebrate by taking a vacation to heal their bruises. Australia’s pub culture is borrowed enthusiastically from the British, and the end-of-season holiday is typically at a place that promises fun, relaxation and cheap drinks.
Bali fits the bill. It is also a magnet for Australian students on spring break, honeymooners, and families trying to stretch the devalued Australian dollar into a foreign trip. Nearly 250,000 Australians go each year, according to tourism officials.
“The ordinary working man can afford to go to Bali,” said Dawn Smith, a pastor offering counseling to Australians returning from Indonesia. “For many of them, it’s probably the only overseas trip they will take.”
And in Bali, the Sari Club was the place to be. On Saturday night, it was filled with rugby teams having their end-of-season bash. On hand were nearly all 24 members of a team calling itself the “Platypi” — for Australia’s indigenous platypus — from rural Forbes, a small farming town 230 miles inland from Sydney. The team from Kingsley, near Perth, had sent 20 members to Bali, and most were at the club. It was the same for the Coogee Dolphins, from the cove-front community of Coogee Beach in Sydney — 11 members had raised the money to go and all but a few of those were at the club.
John Shaw, 38, a manager of the Forbes Platypi, was with the team. Just a few hours after they landed, they flocked to the Sari Club to get the celebrations started.
“I heard the first blast, and stood up. Then all I remember was seeing an orange haze,” said Shaw, who has two black eyes and punctured eardrums. “I don’t even know how I got out. All I remember was my mates telling me to go, go.”
Each of the teams lost members — three from Forbes, seven from Kingsley, all of whom are missing and presumed dead. Six of the Coogee Dolphins are missing.
Family members of the dead and living drifted this week into the Palace Hotel, a yellow Victorian building by the gentle cove, the team’s unofficial clubhouse.
“You have to understand that these clubs have friendships that have built over the years,” said Peter Blake, one of the founders of the Dolphins. “I’ve know some of these guys for 40 years, since we were playing together in school.”
“Can you imagine losing a kid?” he asked. “For a lot of us, there’s no difference. These were like our kids.”
For Australians, Saturday has become the day of innocence lost. It’s a popular saying here that Australians have been in 19 wars, but started none of them. The idea of being a quiet but dependable ally appeals to the national image, one in which “good bloke” is high praise.
“We are fundamentally good-willed, good-hearted people,” said Paul Gallagher, 46, who lost six friends in the bombing. “We’re not a nation that goes out to wield a big stick. That’s what’s
senseless about this.”
Australia fought on the side of the Allies in World War I, losing 62,000 soldiers. It lost 40,000 troops in World War II, 339 in the Korean War and 520 in Vietnam. People here generally considered those to be justifiable causes.
But dutiful loyalty to the United States and other big industrial nations has made Australia
occasionally uncom-fortable in the neighborhood of Asia. In 1999, it sent 5,500 peacekeeping
troops into East Timor, then part of Indonesia but now an independent country. That operation “created a lot of resentment in Indonesia,” said Greg Fealy, a lecturer on Indonesian policy at Australian National University in Canberra.
Regional suspicions have not been helped by Australia’s immigration policies. The country has
blocked boatloads of immigrants from coming ashore and jailed those who made it. With legal immigration from Asia growing, there is tension along ethnic fault lines. In Darwin, the rough-hewn Northern Territory city closest to populous Indonesia, some people talk about a “yellow peril” invading Australia.
Still, Australians do not expect to be targets. Politically, the most consistent topic of academic
debate has been geopolitical isolation, or put more simply, how to keep the rest of the world from forgetting the “down under” country.
Some say Howard’s right-leaning government has tried too hard to remedy the problem. He was on a visit to Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, staying in a hotel not far from the Pentagon. In the attack’s aftermath, Howard sent troops to Afghanistan, and the country has now firmly aligned itself with Washington on the issue of Iraq, winning effusive praise from Bush.
His foreign minister, Alexander Downer, dismissed opponents to an attack on Iraq as “fools.”
“Get the message,” responded Mark Byrne, a letter writer in Tuesday’s Sydney Morning Herald, one of several in the same spirit. “We don’t want you to suck up to George Bush. We don’t want your phony oil war with Iraq.”
For many Australians, the question is what to do now. The Bali blast was roughly equivalent in this country of 20 million people to the losses in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in the United States, a nation of 280 mil-lion.
Howard has appealed for calm, but the national mourning is souring into anger. “There’s no
mucking around now. We’re in the global war against terrorism,” said Michael Confos, a real estate lawyer in Sydney.
“There is going to be enormous pressure on the Howard government to act, to push Indonesia to get the perpetrators,” said Fealy, the university lecturer. “But that may not be easily realizable. I think it’s likely to be very difficult for the two countries.”
Just as in the United States, there are questions about whether the government could have averted the tragedy. A report in The Washington Post that a U.S. intelligence report listed Bali as one of several possible terrorist targets caused a flap in Parliament. Howard countered that the warning was “general.” He said, “At no time was it specific about the attack Saturday night in Bali.
“If there had been any forewarning, Heaven and Earth would have been moved to ensure it didn’t happen,” said the attorney general, Daryl Williams.
Some analysts say Australia must first tend its relations in Asia. “The bomb blast in Bali was a
fundamental wake-up call,” Derek Woolner, an analyst at the Australian Defense Studies Center in Canberra, told Australian television. “We live in this area of the world and although we may do some small-scale things to help America, the main fo-cus of our attention should be where we live.”
Andrew MacIntyre, director of the Asia Pacific School of Economics and Management at Australian National University, disagrees. “My hunch is that [public opinion] will ultimately go the other way,” he said. “Howard, like [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair, is calculating that the middle of the electorate believes the world is a dangerous place and Australia will have to pay some price for security.”
Nicole Lewis wanders the airport at Sydney, her face wet and puffy from tears. Airport officials and clergy from the Salvation Army offer to help the 22-year-old, but she remains here each day. She is too distraught to talk. She weeps alone at a table at the airport McDonald’s.
But she meets each incoming flight from Bali, meekly approaching passengers after they have been smothered by the kisses of waiting relatives. She gives them a flier with a picture of her brother, Danny Lewis, 19, and a friend, Craig Dunn, 18, still missing from their surfing holiday in Bali. She pleads for any information, any recollections that will put the young men among the missing or at least the found.
For many of the relatives, the finding is all that is left for them. A cold realism has replaced the fever of hope, as remaining patients in hospitals have been identified, leaving only charred and unrecognizable corpses waiting under ice in Bali.
Craig Salvatori rages at the wait. His life was spared when he took his girls back to the hotel and told his wife, Kathy, to go out dancing with friends to celebrate her 38th birthday.
On Monday, he sent his daughters home to be with their grandparents and aunts.
He said he believes he has identified his wife’s body from jewelry on one of the victims. But
Indonesian authorities will not yet release the remains. Salvatori, a big, burly former rugby star, complains to reporters in Bali, his grief put on hold.
“I can’t get her out of here,” he said.