Bali will go on being Bali: Former ABC correspondent Tim Palmer
October 9th, 2007
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
Entry Filed under: World Tourism News
Trackback this post