It would be easier to wonder if the blast in Bali's Kuta Beach area on Saturday (October 12, 2002) had really been the work of al-Qaeda if it had not occurred on the anniversary of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen. But the date of the attack makes for the assumption that it is al-Qaeda...
Over 180 people are dead after a car bomb exploded Saturday in the Sari Club -- a popular night spot with Western backpackers in Bali. Most of the dead were foreign tourists.
No one has claimed responsibility. Indonesia has a number of independence movements to deal with at the moment. The province of Aceh in Sumatra has been fighting for independence for over a decade; separatists there want to become an independent Muslim state. East Timor has succeeded in gaining independence from Indonesia in the past few years. Muslims and Christians have been killing each other by the hundreds in Maluku Province recently. And Irian Jaya wants independence from Indonesia. Any of these groups could be responsible for the blast. But the question of who's responsible doesn't seem to matter much as tourists by the thousands flee the island.
The Indonesian government estimates that Bali drew nearly 1.5 million tourists in 2001 -- almost a third of the national total.
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The Bali Coast
Picture courtesy of
Manfred Leiter
Click on the picture for a larger view.
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Reports of the explosion in crowded Kuta speak of hundreds of square feet of devastation. Bali has been spared the turmoil of much of the rest of the country in the past decade. The national struggle for identity -- with individual ethnic groups and the powers of Islam wrestling with the government -- has left the largely Hindu island of Bali untouched. But Bali's tourism is Indonesia's economic life; and the opportunity to target Westerners there is obvious.
Perhaps it wasn't terrorism; that has yet to be shown. But hospitals in Bali are overwhelmed with the dead and wounded, and the Australian government is evacuating its citizens on C-130 Hercules air force planes and additional Qantas flights.
Until the cause of the blast is clear, Bali has become Paradise Lost. And tourism in Asia may become a causality of the War on Terrorism...
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