By Samantha Stayner
Tim Palmer had only been in Indonesia five days. Fresh from his previous posting in Jerusalem, he was just settling in as the ABC’s new correspondent in the region when the bombs struck.
“And that was it,” he says. “Indonesia changed for good for us, as reporters, and for most Australians generally.”
In his time as the ABC’s Middle East correspondent, Tim had covered more than 50 bombings in Jerusalem, reported from Lebanon and Syria to the Gulf States and Iran. In 2001 he was one of few reporters to report on war in Afghanistan from that country’s far west. But the scene in Bali shocked him on a far more personal level.
“I was staggered by the extent of the damage, the physical damage to the buildings,” Tim says. “Most of the bodies had been removed, at least of the survivors and intact bodies that could be found. The really horrible scenes were out at the hospital.”
“Here were people who’d spoken the same vernacular as me, who’d been on holidays just like I’d been on holidays there,” he says. “It was the Australianness of them that really was quite shattering for me”.
Arriving in Bali the morning after the attacks, Tim found a scene of confusion and chaos. Family members wandered the morgues and hospitals, searching for loved ones. Tim offered his laptop so that one family could arrange for dental records to be sent to Bali, a simple act, but one that lead to the first Australian victim being identified.
In the next months, Tim reported on the police investigation, the hunt for the bombers and their eventual trials in the Indonesian courts. His reporting took him to Java, where he visited the family of terrorist, Amrosi.
“We were struck by the pretty brutal poverty of where he lived,” Tim says. “One of the first things we realised… is that we had to speak Javanese to communicate with Amrosi’s mother.”
“I guess what we felt from that was just how provincial, and how remote from what the Indonesia that we looked at… we’d completely missed these sort of backwaters, pockets of an Indonesia that we just didn’t know, and a kind of extremism at the schools that we just didn’t know.”
Since 2002, news from Indonesia has continued to dominate our headlines. A car bomb exploded outside the lobby of Jakarta’s Marriot Hotel in 2003, killing 12 people.
Ten people died when the Australian embassy in Jakarta was bombed in September 2004. The next month, Schapelle Corby was arrested when four kilograms of marijuana was found in her luggage in Denpasar. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the Boxing Day tsunami at the end of that year.
In April 2005, the so-called ‘Bali 9′ were arrested at Denpasar after attempting to smuggle heroin. In May, Schapelle Corby was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years jail. Then in October, bombings at Jimbaran and Kuta claimed 20 lives including four Australians.
Now back in Australia, and executive producer of Media Watch, Tim reflects on how the 2002 bombings changed the region.
“Some people will scrub Bali, and more broadly Indonesia, off their agenda forever,” Tim says. “But other Australians will still go there and see the place has not changed, and see the Balinese haven’t changed, and that they shouldn’t be penalised any further for what happened.”
But, Tim says, good things are happening and that Bali particularly will rebuild again.
“Things are happening there that can only be good for our relationship within Indonesia, and which we can hope will be good for balancing the real needs for Indonesia to develop against these extremist voices that could otherwise emerge in the country.”
“Bali will go on being Bali.”
Source: http://www.abc.net.au
October 9th, 2007
A study predicts that global warming will further decimate the orangutan population in Sebangau National Park in Central Kalimantan, home to Indonesia’s largest orangutan habitat.
About 6,900 orangutans out of the estimated 14,000 on Kalimantan Island currently occupy the 567,700-hectare park.
“The rising temperature and rainfall will have adverse consequences on plant species in the park,” Chairul Saleh, the biodiversity conservation coordinator at WWF Indonesia, told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.
“The plants are sensitive to climate changes. This will threaten food supplies for the orangutans.”
Orangutans are reliant on the trees and fruit for their existence.
Chairul said that coupled with the long-standing problem of forest fires, global warming would affect the reproductive cycle of the orangutans.
“It will also trigger the migration of orangutan to other forests and affect genetics, the reproduction rate and health of orangutans,” he said.
Female orangutans in Kalimantan currently have an interbirth interval of between six and nine years.
Experts warn that orangutans are vulnerable to malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis and cholera.
The rising temperatures is expected to cause a big increase in the number of malaria cases.
The study on the impact of global warming on orangutan habitat in the Sebangau National Park was conducted jointly by the Jakarta-based, privately-run National University and WWF Indonesia in September.
The study says that temperatures in the Sebangau Park would rise by one degree Celsius by 2050 and three degrees by 2100 due to global warming.
Between 2000 and 2003, temperatures in the park were between 21 to 23 degrees Celsius.
The WWF will present the findings of the study at the international climate-change conference in Bali in December, which will be attended by representatives of the 191 signatories to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
Sri Suci Utami, an orangutan researcher from the National University, said that extensive land clearance and illegal logging had significantly reduced the orangutan population.
“Without global warming, orangutans are already very vulnerable to extinction thanks to rampant forest fires and illegal logging,” she said.
“Thus, global warming could further expedite the loss of orangutan habitat unless the government takes immediate protective measures,” she said.
The Sebangau Park is a combination of mixed swampy forest, transitional forest, lowland canopy forest and granite forest, where 106 species of birds, 35 mammals and several groups of primates can be found.
The government designated the Sebangau National Park as a conservation forest in 2004.
Sri, however, warned that those who cleared land by fire would use the global warming issue to expand their businesses as they could blame global warming for the loss of orangutan habitat.
The use of fire to clear land both for commercial and agricultural purposes is widely practiced in Indonesia.
The severe El Nino-induced drought in 1997-1998 led to a massive fire disaster that killed many orangutans.
“We estimate that about 2.5 percent of the 14,000 orangutans in Kalimantan were lost during the forest fires in the 1990s,” Sri said.
In addition, major forest fires in 2006 also killed about 1,000 orangutans. To make it worse, most of the dead orangutans were mothers and their offspring.
“Female and young orangutans will be the most vulnerable as they have the greatest difficulty in escaping,” said Sri.
The study recommends the establishment of monitoring stations to oversee orangutan populations, including their daily activities and food supply.
It is also recommended that local people be involved in the protection efforts being carried out in the Sebangau National Park.
Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Source: The Jakarta Post
October 9th, 2007