The first victims are the dead and maimed, and those who love them. Beyond that obvious acknowledgement, the pain should be private. But, reading the papers after the mass murder on Bali, we have been invited to wring our hands over a wide range of secondary victims.
Australia has “been robbed of its innocence” in a place its Prime Minister, John Howard, considers “our doorstep”. Mass-market and backpack tourism, grieve the travel writers, have lost a destination which offered “every service from beach massages to high-quality marijuana”. In the West, say business experts, “struggling tour firms” will lose bookings and jobs, and long-haul airline shares will plummet. The cargo trade, we are told, is also threatened. On the political front, pundits explain that Megawati Sukarnoputri, the Indonesian President, faces a policy nightmare, and President Bush a “renewed challenge”.
Can I really be the only one who is, first and foremost, sorry for the Balinese? Their island is not a daydream but a community. It has its own sorrows, its own odd ancient spiritual culture, its own needs. It is nobody’s mere “doorstep” or “destination” or pocket paradise. It is itself, and it is the most pitiable of the secondary, collective victims.
To worry about the Balinese is not to belittle the deaths of their visitors. What happened at Kuta Beach was an inexcusable mass murder of people — mostly young — whose only sin was to fancy a bit of brainless clubbing in a surfers’ paradise. The Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar were places designed explicitly to cater for First World hedonism. Look them up, and they are part of a strip whose names breathe a careless acceptance of the need to lure and flatter the people who have most of the world’s money. There is the My Way, the O’Barrell, the Hard Rock, Lips, Liquid, Planet Hollywood. The latest internet guide describes the Sari itself with a curt “Bit feral, but that’s what some people want. Top 40 music. Open 8.30-3.30pm”.
These were tourist-only bars, but Balinese staff presumably died in the blaze, not to mention the passers-by and vendors caught in the crowded streets between the bombs. As I write no Western media have mentioned the local dead much, but on yesterday’s internet “missing” lists there were rather more Indonesian names than British, and on the wounded list far more. We Westerners are free to scuttle home when such a thing happens, with airlines putting on extra flights and Foreign Office mandarins putting out advice to come home. For the Balinese families camping out at hospitals to tend their wounded, Bali already is home. Given the prevailing headline impression that the West only cares for its own, it is a relief to look at Indonesian websites and find that, in fact, a number of young Australians, Britons and Europeans decided to stay right where they are and help the Balinese, queueing up to give blood, raising money in café collections and deploying their hire cars to ferry blankets, towels, bandages and worried rural relatives to the Denpasar hospital.
Meanwhile, Balinese abroad pour out their grief and shame in chatrooms. “Our guests have died in our home,” writes Nila simply. And a student of tourism management, Wayan, writes of being on the phone home from a UK college when the blast went off: “Then I saw on BBC there was a news about my lovely place and afterwards I cried . . . I think it is over, the reputation of Bali as a safe place and island of paradise are history. I am worried too about my friends who are working in the tourism industry.”
I should declare a link: my sister-in-law has travelled to the island frequently on business for a decade, buying jewellery in small workshops for the Toko chain. She has inspired all of us with a burning desire for the place. It is not just a matter of beaches and coral, but of that curious, cut-off civilisation of animist Hinduism, intricate art, a gentle and complex spiritual and festival life in traditional villages, and an extraordinary warm, tolerant extension of friendship to even the most brash Western tourists. Perhaps it is because I was a child in Thailand that I long for Bali: anyway, a 3ft Garuda bird looms over my desk and the guidebook is on the shelf. This new peril does nothing to dim that longing.
Business traders have a wider perspective than the clubber or the surfer. Above all, my sister-in-law speaks of the domestic respectability and individual enterprise which lie just beneath the surface, even of gold-rush honeypots like Kuta. “You sit working in a café and look out, and the toyshop cycles past — a mass of carved toys . . . or you’re negotiating jewellery prices and the seller tells you all about his child’s tooth-filing ceremony. And the whole street still closes for a wedding procession.” Entrepreneurial, able to set up a myriad of tiny businesses in the teeth of the global tourist industry, Bali seems to have avoided the surly resentment of other paradises.
“Balinese giggle with you. Not childish, but childlike.” They also adapt to a startling degree to guests’ ways. “Once a waiter came up to my sister’s table and said ‘OK, what do you f***ing want?’ and then he was mortified when they looked surprised, and he realised they weren’t Australians . . .” One night last year, in a dim alleyway, Geraldine saw a man approaching with a glinting knife. It turned out that he just wanted to cut her a slice of pineapple. “It’s always felt safe. And if I had to be poor anywhere in the world, I’d be poor in Bali. They look after their families. When there was an outbreak of girls begging with babies, they were outraged. They said these were Javanese prostitutes, because no Balinese woman would be left like that.”
There may be a hint here of why Kuta Beach was attacked. The natural suspects are extreme Islamist groups, but commentators expressed mystification yesterday because the victims were not likely to be predominantly American or Jewish, but Australian. Yet there are two strong motives: one is Australia’s recent hard line with seaborne Muslim migrants, which can have made it few friends. The other is pure, obvious, fundamentalist contempt and outrage at the existence of boozy, underdressed resorts, on a religiously freewheeling island at the heart of a Muslim archipelago.
There certainly is longstanding resentment between Bali and some of its neighbours, notably Java. The stricter island envies the tourist prosperity of its neighbour, whose mores have always been closer to South Sea island tolerance than to any Islamic country. Once, standing in the street, my sister-in-law saw a large group of differently dressed Indonesians walking together, blocking the alleyway, and the shopkeeper she was trading with looked at her complicitly and snarled “Javanese!”. It was odd, she says, to be a white foreigner but nonetheless regarded by the Balinese Hindu as more of an ally than these close neighbours. It would not be difficult, in these conditions, for an extremist group to find bombers to strike right at the heart of the apparently godless, West-loving, hedonistic core of the Balinese tourist industry.
But it will hurt Bali, terribly. This is a kind island, and a hard-working one (again, my sister-in-law and partners have often dreamt of luring some Balinese to run their UK shops). But it is also an island where five dollars a week is a high income. Some, at least, of the prosperity generated by the hustlers, pedlars and bar-owners of Kuta currently finds its way to the poorest families in the countryside; some, at least, of the gorgeous carvings and ceramics find buyers who will pay good money directly without the intervention of exporters looking for a Western-scale profit.
But what will happen now? All Indonesia suffers from a fragile economy; again, the bustling popularity of Bali may have sparked off the envy of neighbours feeling the draught. But even when the timid Western tourists return, Bali will be locked into the culture of high security which blights life elsewhere. The big bland international chain hotels and clubs, which can afford ostentatious and aggressive security, will profit from this and no doubt tighten their grip on the good beaches. Local enterprise can only suffer.
But Bali, in art and nature and human culture, is a global gem. It needs true friends now, as surely as Venice or the rainforest. Let us hope it finds them.
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