Bali One Year On. by ABC News - (Anniversary Feature) 11:27am 11th Oct, 2003   October 13, 2003.    Thousands of mourners in Bali have completed a day of commemorations with a solemn ceremony at the site where the Sari club and Paddy's bar were bombed.    There was silence soon after 11:00pm local time, as many thousands flocked to Legian street in the heart of Bali's tourist district. On the now vacant sites of the Sari club and Paddy's bar, Australian survivors, families of victims and friends held candles and hugged and supported each other as they paid their respects.    During a day of commemoration, Indonesia's powerful Security Minister, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, issued a warning to terrorists.    "We will hunt them, we will bring them to justice," he said.    "These diabolical men and their brand of evil, simply, has no place in our society."    Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition leader Simon Crean will return to Australia today, as will many of the Australian mourners.    Earlier, dozens of Balinese and Australian surfers paddled out beyond the break at Kuta Beach carrying wreaths of flowers on their boards.    At sunset they formed a circle and threw their flowers into the sea.    "Bali One Year On". Reporter: Mark Bowling    (ABC Correspondents Report - Sunday, 12 October , 2003 ).    Today marks the first anniversary of the Bali bombings. On a hot tropical night, more than 200 people died, 88 of them Australians, when two bombs ripped through the Sari Club and Paddy's Bar in Bali's tourist strip along Kuta Beach.    This was Australia's traumatic introduction to the nightmare world of religious terrorism.    As well as the suffering of so many Australian victims and their families, and the effect on the wider Australian community, Mark Bowling reports that in Bali itself, life is still a long way from returning to normal.    MARK BOWLING: As survivors and relatives gather at Bali's ‘Ground Zero’ to remember and reflect, they do so in the midst of a deeply religious people who themselves are still trying to come to grips with a tragedy of massive proportions.    Central to Balinese life is the struggle of good against evil. It's the underlying theme in the island's most famous cultural performances.    A year ago, the world of Bali's predominantly Hindu population was turned upside down. The bombings meant the collapse of any balance in their lives. Those who carried out the attack represented pure evil.    A month after the bombings, when Amrozi, a Muslim from Java, was caught and interrogated, Balinese could for the first time put a face to the evil. He became public enemy number one.    This was at a time when Bali's biggest industry, tourism, had hit rock bottom. Hotels were empty, and there was a ripple effect across the island's economy. Village families were going hungry.    Even in the rice paddies in the idyllic Bali Mountains, farming communities were reported to be severely affected. Slowly, other leading bomb attack suspects were taken into custody and put on trial.    When death penalties were handed down, there was a communal sigh of relief. Finally on the island of the gods, the cloud of evil was lifting.    The impact of the bombings is, a year later, difficult to quantify.    Taxi drivers, stallholders and people on the street still say sorry if they know you're an Australian. They'll tell you how they're doing it tough, earning half what they did before the bomb attack and finding it hard to pay their rent and send their children to school.    The latest tourism figures show that a large chunk of Bali's holiday market has vanished. Australians are only now starting to come back. Travel to all of Indonesia has dropped by 34 per cent.    But Bali still beckons after a year of pain.    Kuta Beach is back in business. Throngs of Japanese and Taiwanese travellers enjoy the famous sunsets, and a few hundred metres from the bombsite, along Legian Street, a cluster of new nightclubs attract Dutch, British and Australian beer drinkers.    There's even a new Paddy's Bar.    Talk to the midnight beer drinkers here and it's clear they feel comfortable to be back. “We can't let the terrorists win”, one man tells me. “We feel as safe here as we do driving across the Sydney Harbour Bridge”.    Despite official travel warnings from Canberra, Bali has a seductive influence on many Australians. It's not only close, it's long been a place that echoed a search for a good time.    Clearly, there's been a wary return to paradise.    The people who lost the most at Kuta are back in Bali, and while the occasion is sad the island feels better for it. By ABC Indonesia correspondent Tim Palmer    For months after the tragedy on Legian Street, entering Denpasar Airport was a dispiriting business. Swarms of porters would descend on the very few passengers; one or two taxis would whisk them away to near empty hotels.    Police and reporters pursuing the dark story that blighted Bali outnumbered those on the island for fun. Listless shop owners could barely bring themselves to spruik the few foreigners who walked Kuta's strip.    Strangely, when we came to Kuta just a few hours after the bombs that ripped the place apart things seemed much more normal. This was the hiatus between explosion and exodus.    Driving towards the Sari Club, still hundreds of metres away, even as we began to see whole streets littered with the blown out glass from Bali's glitzy surf shops, there were still groups of backpackers and package tourists having coffee in street side shops as if the events of a few blocks away might not interrupt their two-week break.    But closer to the scene there was shock and distress. Water had flooded the deep crater gouged by the car bomb. The Sari club was deep in sodden ash and half burnt wreckage.    Rescuers were still finding the remains of those who had been trapped in the inferno.    Above, framing the whole scene in chaos, hung the mangled steel structure of a massive sign.    A few hours later at Sanglah Hospital I met a man wandering the hotels long outdoor corridors, looking for a teenage daughter. I have no idea who he was or if he found her alive.    Another man carried pictures of two boys from the New South Wales south coast, who he had brought to Bali on their dream surfing trip.    Surviving members of football teams waited for word of their friends.    Wives, sons, mothers, friends - a growing mosaic of photos and signs began to show the scale of what had happened.    For weeks it would go on like this. Uncertainty, searching, grief - then the inevitable, painful departure from the Island of the Gods.    Twelve hours after the blast a hundred metres from the Sari Club wreckage, clutches of Australians sat in the hotels they had picked out of glossy brochures, talking almost inaudibly or staring silently across the swimming pools.    They seemed too shocked by this unspeakable end to their holiday to know to pack and leave. Many had trouble hearing. Some explained how they had spent the night fetching hotel sheets and blankets to carry away the injured and dying.    One group of boys around 17 sat in their hotel swimming pool, three of them still shaking with the trauma. After one of them told of how they fled a club next door to the explosion, I asked what he thought of whoever had carried out the attack.    "They ought to have a good look at themselves," he said with the singular understatement of Australians of his age.    But the men who had carried out the bombing were doing anything but that.    Hide-out    The flight from Bali to Jakarta is, for the first half hour at least, one of the most spectacular short hops imaginable, passing over the chains of volcanos that leap up out of East Java, sometimes seeming to sail straight over the steaming caldera of Mt Bromo and the Fuji shaped peak of Semeru.    After that the jet traces the dull flats and fish farms that make up Java's muddy north coast. What we did not know as we flew home to Jakarta was that right below, in one of the least attractive villages in that desolate stretch, Amrozi and his brother Ali Imron were back home, sure that they had covered any tracks that could lead police from Kuta to Tenggulun.    Of course they were wrong. Good police work found the link with the bomb van that the bombers had failed to conceal.    Just a month after the catastrophe, we discovered Amrozi and his brothers, then Imam Samudra and a growing list of other names, each with enough aliases to confuse all but the most pedantic analysts of the plot.    The warnings from countries like Singapore that Indonesia harboured an international terrorist threat were suddenly made real, though noone would have guessed that Al Qaeda's version of jihad had taken root amongst the corn farms in the tiny town of Tenggulun.    In the months that followed we would learn more about Tenggulun.    We learnt how the school there was an offshoot of the Ngruki college run by the Christian-hating Abu Bakar Bashir; how the lessons in anti-Americanism and bomb-making from Afghanistan had drifted to this remote part of Indonesia, and of how entrenched the beliefs there were.    Even months later, when the trial of Amrozi was due to start, we filmed one boy wearing an Imam Samudra t-shirt. The headmaster told us the Bali bomb cell should be hailed as heroes, not sentenced to die.    But less than a year after they sent two young men to kill themselves and flatten Kuta, three of the Bali bombers are on death row.    Their trials were at times harrowing, with evidence from a handful of Australian victims and from those Balinese who had lost husbands, or pulled the near dead from the burning wreckage.    The bombers themselves chanted defiance at every turn, spitting hatred at everything from American Middle East policy to the immodest attire of Australian tourists to Bali. Then when the sentencing loomed the defiance wilted as each sought to diminish his role.    It was a relief when the tedium of the main trials was finally over with the sentencing of Mukhlas less than two weeks before the anniversary of the bombing.    But there remain so many disturbing signs that the poison that delivered the Bali attack has spread way beyond the 30 or so people jailed or still before the courts for the Bali bomb.    The mid-year discovery in a house in Semarang n central Java of enough explosives to build four Bali bombs, along with rocket launchers, rifles and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition shocked Indonesian police into accepting that Jemaah Islamiah was far from a spent force. That was driven home by another suicide bombing, this time on Jakarta's Marriott Hotel.    Just how large the group is, and how much sympathy the anti-Western ideology has in Indonesia is still hard to assess, but already there are signs from as high as the Vice-President's office that the political will to pursue the extremists could falter in the face of next year's presidential election.    In Bali though the sense of threat has largely passed, despite the enormous security considerations in place ahead of the anniversary.    Suspicion    "Immigrants" from Java are now searched as they leave the ferries that glide across the narrow straits to Bali.    Hindu Balinese prejudice and suspicion probably has even more influence than any such precautions in making it unlikely that a group of radical Muslims could organise here as they did last October without being noticed.    The Balinese themselves have accepted what the Gods delivered last October, absorbed it through elaborate ritual and moved on with the cycle of life and death that is so familiar to an island wracked in the past by the deaths of tens of thousands in political purges, volcanic eruptions and famine.    Of course the effects are still here. Aside from the Balinese killed and maimed, the economic loss here is felt in places as a matter of life and death.    Even a reduction of a few per cent in the size of the economy here would see people die from tuberculosis, and other conditions related to poverty, or simply from choosing not to see a doctor because the family cannot afford it.    Maybe that is why the Balinese so often confused and occasionally angered Australian journalists when they cited the damage to their livelihoods ahead of the loss of life when asked their feelings about the actions of the Bali bombers.    In the past month though, taxi drivers, shop owners and hotel staff have stopped feeling the need to punctuate every sentence with discussion of how quiet Bali is and how hard a living they are making.    The tourists, some of them at least, are back.    Fat silver surfboard bags are again being dragged off the conveyor belts at the airport.    Girls are falling victim to henna tattoos and hair braiding. Young Australian boys in boardshorts again wander unsteadily through the back lanes of Kuta at night clutching bottles of beer and calling out the names of the stragglers in their group.    The rite of passage that was Australia's relationship with Bali is being formed again.    It is a more comfortable background for the arrival of the survivors, and family members of victims coming back for the memorial service.    They came out of the airport, some in wheelchairs, some carrying boards. Most looked happy, distracted and almost excited, just as any Australian tourists walking into the heat and confusion of a foreign land might. Their arrival felt like something of a victory.    TRANSCRIPT: ABC TV Lateline. (Broadcast: 10/10/2003)    This time last year, thousands of holiday-makers were preparing for a weekend of partying on Bali. None could have imagined the carnage and horror which was about to happen. One year on and Bali is readying itself for a weekend of ceremonies and reflection.    TIM PALMER: 88 candles, each bearing a face and a name. It spread out across the now bare plot that was the Sari Club to spell out a message against the hideous act here of a year ago.    Sandra Thompson is here with her family to remember a son and brother, Clint.    SANDRA THOMPSON, VICTIM'S MOTHER: It's a ritual and, as most of us are Christians, we do celebrate people's anniversaries and we rejoice that we had them at all, no matter how long it was for, short as it may have been, but at least we had them.    TIM PALMER: It will all culminate in Sunday's ceremony, to be led by the same man who conducted a service in Bali just days after the blast.    Senior chaplain Richard Thompson says at that time all he could do was try to bring people to terms with the dreadful shock and loss.    RICHARD THOMPSON, SENIOR NAVY CHAPLAIN: This year we have moved on 12 months and it's really about hope, it's about future, it's about saying that that act, that singular act 12 months ago didn't stop these people.    It took some out as it were, but it didn't stop Indonesia or Australia being a people that are life giving, not life taking.    AMELIA ARMITAGE, WIDOW: It really is a celebration of innocent lives and I think it's --    And I like being part of that, I guess, for Adam and for his family and for the other families.    TIM PALMER: Now, though, the pilgrimage back to Bali isn't an entirely solemn affair.    WOMAN: I'm fine, I'll survive.    TIM PALMER: The relatives of the Coogee Dolphins players lost are typical in wanting to see Bali as those who died here did.    Others are surfing or going out to clubs.    It's a time to laugh as well as a time to cry.    WOMAN: I want to find that about Bali, really, and what he loved about this place...    Click on the link below to visit the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's News Online Special Bali Anniversary page. 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