The Sydney Morning Herald, October 3, 2005
It's all about the people: we must stand by our neighbours
Australia feels Indonesia's pain and has always been among the first to help, writes
Paul Sheehan.
I'VE never been to Bali. I feel a moral obligation to go there now. The purpose of the
murder campaign waged there over the past three years is the methodical economic
destruction of the island.
This is, below the surface, a civil war. In the eyes of the bombers, the great crime of
the Balinese people is to have successfully resisted the march of Islam. Bali is a
largely Hindu-Buddhist island in an Islamic sea. It is thus a haven for infidels. Its
greatest industry, tourism, serves Western infidels. Bali must be brought to its knees.
It is difficult to imagine the strong relationship between Bali and Australia surviving this
latest outrage after the battering it has received since the first blow was delivered on
October 12, 2002, when 88 Australians were among the hundreds killed and maimed
by Islamic terrorism. The timing of Saturday's co-ordinated attack was without
question a macabre anniversary of the 2002 event. So was the attempted destruction
of the Australian embassy in Jakarta on September 9 last year.
Since then have come the hammer blows of the tsunami, which caused havoc not just
to much of the Sumatra coastline but to all of Indonesia's reputation as a tourist
destination. There has been the made-for-television Schapelle Corby saga, which
caused real damage to Indonesia's standing with Australians. Then came the arrest of
nine Australians for drug smuggling, the "Bali nine", with the likelihood that the
alleged ring-leaders will be sentenced to death.
Then this: on May 28, the front page of The Daily Telegraph ran a photo of Abu Bakir
Bashir beside a banner headline that thundered: "NATION'S FURY - This terrorist
planned the murder of 88 Australians and got two years. Yesterday, Schapelle Corby
got 20."
That just about summed up the mood.
In August, another young Australian beauty, Michelle Leslie, was thrown into a Bali
jail for drug possession. Now Bali Bombings II, three bombs instead of two, with more
young Australians among the dozens minced by ball-bearings. The word "Bali" has
lost the connotation of tropical escapism that it enjoyed for 50 years. Australians kept
coming back after the bombings in 2002, after the tsunami, after Corby's ordeal, but
surely the flow will fall back to a trickle again, perhaps this time for a long time.
"Bali" now brings to mind drugs, death and danger. The Balinese will pay doubly for all
this.
Yesterday, the Prime Minister, John Howard, was saying the right things, but for all
his talk about national security, for all the cost of new security initiatives, for all the
compromises involved in the new security laws, all is undermined by the Howard
Government's intimate involvement in the military adventures of President George
Bush in the Middle East. Australia has become a higher target for terrorism. This is
self-evident. It is part of John Howard's legacy.
Howard is, however, a lucky politician. For 10 years, he has been aided by the
hysteria and ineptitude of his ideological enemies, who have constantly invented
causes to attack him which have merely served to strengthen him. Out in the
Australian electorate, the deafening campaign on behalf of illegal immigration was
dead on arrival. The hysteria over Iraq was dead on arrival. The fetish over the Taliban
sympathisers in Guantanamo Bay was dead on arrival. The latest concocted outrage,
the hysteria over new anti-terrorism laws, has just fallen at Parliament's door - dead
on arrival.
Now is the time to look back to an important moment in the relationship between
Australia and Indonesia, April 4 this year, when the new Indonesian President, Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono, whose younger son had recently graduated from an Australian
university, spoke to a large gathering in the Great Hall of Parliament House in
Canberra. This is the guts of what he said: "I am happy to be here, but I come with a
heavy heart. I am utterly devastated by the helicopter crash in Nias which killed nine
and injured two of Australia's finest. Please accept, on behalf of the people and the
Government of Indonesia, our deep condolences and profound sadness for this awful
tragedy. They died in glory: the glory of the ultimate sacrifice, the glory of a selfless
act to help the suffering of those in need...
"History also made me the first Indonesian president to visit Australia since 2001. I
have a long way to go to catch up with my good friend Prime Minister John Howard,
who has visited Indonesia 11 times ... who graciously attended our presidential
inauguration on October 20 last year, the first Australian Prime Minister to do so in
history...
"Every Australian in this room, and in the living rooms across Australia, who saw our
hardship, felt our pain and acted upon it, has every reason to be proud for what you
and your country have done for the tsunami victims. It is humanity and solidarity at its
best... When we in Indonesia were down and out, and when we needed help most,
you came and you stood by us...
"And that is the very purpose of my visit to your great country: to affirm our special
relations, and to make it even stronger... It is not enough for us to be just neighbours.
We have to be strong partners ... The partnership can only go far if it has
people-to-people links from all walks of life. Remember: it's all about the people."
He's right. We have to stand with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. We have to
stand with the Balinese. We need more and stronger links to Indonesia, which is
exactly what the medieval, racist, bigoted perverts behind the bombings don't want.
Copyright © 2005. The Sydney Morning Herald.
|
