Tragedy in Bali: A Personal Account of the Bali Bombing, by Alan Atkinson
On a late Saturday night, the 12th of October 2002, two bombs exploded in the heart of the club and bar district of Kuta Beach, Bali’s most popular tourist area.
The effects of the blasts were devastating, resulting in an appalling loss of life and terrible injuries. For many nationalities, and in particular the Balinese, it was a calamitous event that would have long-lasting effects on the life and culture of the island. Paradise had been visited by unspeakable terror and cruelty.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Alan Atkinson was at the tail-end of his holiday in Bali with his wife and two teenage children when he received a call early Sunday morning that something catastrophic had just occurred at Kuta. He was one of the first international journalists on the scene.
Atkinson studiously kept a diary of his holiday with his family before the bombing. The book begins modestly enough, giving a portrait of a prosperous resort island well on its way to recovering from the Asian monetary crises.
We follow the author’s family enjoying the street life, the antics of vendors, sipping smoothies at the swim-up bar, walking the beach, excursions to Sanur, Ubud and Lovina, the author waxing nostalgic about his 1982 visit and observing what had changed over the last 20 years.
Oblivious to the disgusting horror yet to come, Atkinson paints an idyllic picture of a typical day in Legian, perhaps more innocent than we who live here now had ever realized.
The family on that fateful night took a stroll down Jalan Legian through the throbbing heart of the entertainment strip. Early the next morning, startled awake by the ring of a telephone, his story then becomes electrifying.
Coming upon a scene of horrific devastation and suffering, Atkinson somehow keeps a clear head. He gets a hold of a phone in the gutted ruins of a building and makes a long-distance call to his newsroom in Adelaide.
From “Ground Zero,” he reports to Australian listeners heart-rending interviews and describes nauseous scenes – glass-strewn streets, rows of white-sheeted bodies, charred limbs, torn-apart buildings and general mayhem – reminiscent of a war zone.
His spare prose and fast-paced writing, after the style of a war correspondent, renders his tale all the more powerful because the reader’s imagination is so easily able to fill in the gruesome details. To seek quiet, he filed one story sitting on the toilet seat in his hotel bathroom.
Atkinson visits Sanglah Hospital and the morgue. He interviews doctors, volunteers, the wounded, traumatized witnesses, relatives of victims, Aussie footballers at the airport, dazed employees of burnt-out businesses, the Swedish Ambassador.
The book is eye-opening in its revelations of how the international news and broadcast media work: “Television is a lumbering beast that requires hundreds of slaves to drive it. Hours a day are expended by teams of people to produce a story lasting 90 seconds. Radio, on the other hand, has a wonderful simplicity to it. It’s often more immediate...the most basic requirement is a phone line that works. But it is voracious. Radio’s deadlines are on the hour, every hour, morning, noon and night.”
Not truly an eye-witness account, A Tragedy in Bali is rather a vivid report from someone who experienced an extraordinary event in Bali’s history, one that has changed the island forever.
Finally, six days after the tragedy the author breaks under the cumulative shock and stress, sobbing while walking along the tideline. His tears are a fitting way to end this tight little disaster chronicle as they are an allegory of how all lovers of Bali feel about this cruel and senseless outrage.
A Tragedy in Bali by Alan Atkinson, The Works, Bali 2003, ISBN 979-96940-2-7, 114 pages. Formatted in both English and Indonesian. Also featured are never-before published photographs by Bali-based photojournalists Danny Usman and Debe Campbell.
Available for Rp50,000 at Periplus Bookshops in the Bali Galeria in Kuta, Warung Made in Seminyak, Ngurah Rai Airport and in Gramedia bookstores in the Matahari in Kuta Square.
For comments and suggestions, please write : pakbill2003@yahoo.com
Copyright@2003 PakBill
You can read all past articles of Toko Buku at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz
