All quiet on the Balinese front

Letter from Bali

BY RAFAEL D. FRANKEL, UPI Correspondent

Kuta, Indonesia—The government has arrested 17 suspects in the bombing. Peace concerts with famous musicians were held. And the wreckage of the Sari and Pati clubs on the main strip here was cleared away.

And yet still, the island is empty.

The Balinese have done just about everything to come to terms with and move on from last year’s Oct. 12 bombings which killed 193 people here, mostly tourists, including performing the Hindu cleansing festival.

And while spiritually they no longer dwell on the extreme violence which was brought to their tropical garden of Eden more than three months ago, business is so bad that every day life has turned into a struggle.

“I told my children they have to eat dried noodles now for breakfast,” said Martin Sitapu, 46, and the owner of an internet café and travel agency. “They used to have fresh bread and jam every morning.”

Like most businesses in Bali these days, Sitapu’s is on the verge of collapse. Businesses is down over ninety percent for him, and bankruptcy is only a year away barring a major pick-up.

As resourceful as the U.S. economy proved to be following the 9/11 attacks, Bali’s seems just that fragile following its own hell come to pass. Sixty-seven percent of its GDP in 2001 came from tourism.

Despite major discounts being offered by hotels in Bali, Indonesia Tourism Minister I Gede Ardika said Jan. 13 that Indonesia is projecting a maximum of 4.5 million tourists in 2003. That figure was revised downward by one million after the Bali bombings, and accounts for a precipitous drop in tourists visiting Bali which would have been around 1.5 million.

On the island, waiters at cafes sit and play cards amongst empty rooms of set tables and slowly rotating fans. And proprietors look crushed when tourists walk out of their shops without making a purchase. Even pricing sarongs at $1.10, one shopkeeper in Lovina beach on Bali’s northern coast told UPI she had not sold anything in five days.

Though the exodus of tourists in the days following the bombings was well documented, there is now an daily exodus of other sorts crushing Bali all the same.

Thousands of people who came from Java and across other parts of the Indonesian archipelago, to work in the once booming Balinese economy are packing up and going home.

“Bali is quiet now, and many people are sad,” said Yoyo Fredricko, 25, who owns the Toke’Surf Shop. “We are also very angry, really hate the terrorists.”

“Hate” would not have found its way into the Balinese vernacular before the bombings. But such is the reality of post-Oct. 12 Bali where one of the fastest selling items on popular Poppies Gang (street) is a t-shirt with two words in big, black, bold, print: “(Expletive) Terrorists!”

Rather than being a sharp wound where the pain was quick and the healing time manageable, the damage inflicted to Bali is beginning to resemble a slowly progressing disease with an uncertain prognosis.

The prospect of War with Iraq is not helping matters. After the bombings, the conventional wisdom in Bali was that business would be back to normal in three to four months. But with another international crisis looming, and a slew of Western governments issuing travel warnings to Southeast Asia, even the most hopeful are now sullen.

“Bali is safe, but maybe your people are afraid?” Sitapu said. “I don’t understand, and it’s very difficult because now the fear [of war] is in all our hearts.”

Despite all the gloom, the ingredients for a recovery are all here: an unambiguously friendly people, a stunning tropical setting, and a name that was once, and may well be again, synonymous with paradise.

The surfing community of the Pacific region was perhaps the hardest hit by the bombings, and are among the first to be coming back to Bali.

Australia in particular took the brunt of the blow, and that made it particularly difficult for Simon Ferguson, 28, from New Castle, Australia to come to Bali. “I always wanted to come here. Bombs don’t wreck reefs,” said Ferguson, who booked tickets to Bali the day before the bombings with his girlfriend. He wound up coming alone, and has met only three other Australians on the island which once served as the country’s back yard.

Gung-ho surfing attitude aside, Ferguson said it was not easy being here, and that he broke down in tears laying flowers at the wreckage of the Sari Club on Australia’s National Day.

“But the people are so friendly here and nobody is worried at all. I feel safer here than I do at home because the people look after you like you would a guest in your own house,” he said.

The Indonesian government is also optimistic about Bali’s long-term prospects. "Indications show that we are on the right track to recovery," Minister Ardika said. "By the end of 2003, the government of Indonesia hopes that the tourism industry would return to normal and be ready to expand."

"We want [tourists] to see for themselves that the perception that Bali is unsafe is not true. Bali is safe and is still the island of peace. Conditions have normalized," he said.

Perhaps he is right. Despite partying at the Sari club just three days before it was destroyed, and despite one of his friends dying there, Sean Conley, 25, from Port Angeles, Washington, decided to return to Bali on his way back to the United States after traveling around Asia and the Pacific for five months.

“It actually seems better than before. There’s less people, it’s more quiet,” Conley said. “I’ll be back for sure.”

©2005 United Press International