chaos to coherence

7/18/2019 Chaos to Coherence

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From chaos to coherence:

Critical comments on media coverageof the October 12

th bombing in Bali

by Dr. Richard Fox

email: [email protected]

Paper to the Third International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS3)

19 - 22 August 2003Raffles City Convention Centre,

Swissotel, The Stamford

Singapore

A copy of this conference draft is accessible online at http://www.berubah.org/chaostocoherence.pdf



Conference draft. Not for citation without prior permission from the author

© 2003 Richard Fox 1

…al-Qaeda has spread its network across the region, from the remote

islands of Indonesia, through the glistening city-state of Singapore, to the

jungles of the southern Philippines. It is a network that existed long beforeSeptember 11, and one that now appears to be growing, both in its

influence and its ambitions. The presence of al-Qaeda and its supporters

has set off a war for the hearts and minds of the Muslims of SoutheastAsia. And, at this point, it is unclear who is winning. So here now, Maria

Ressa, and a CNN Presents special investigation, ‘Seeds of Terror’.

- News anchorman, Aaron Brown, introducing the

CNN television special, ‘Seeds of Terror’.1

Belief that a clash of worldviews, values, and civilizations is leading to animpending confrontation between Islam and the West is reflected in the

headlines and articles with ominous titles … While such phrases capture

public attention and the popular imagination, they exaggerate and distort

the nature of Islam, the political realities of the Muslim world and its

diverse relations with the West. They also reinforce an astonishing degreeof ignorance and cultural stereotyping of Arabs and Islam. … Islam is often

equated with holy war and hatred, fanaticism and violence, intolerance and

the oppression of women.

- John L. Esposito (1999: 2-3)

In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends uponthe name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very

important respects, what they seem to be.

- Hubert H. Humphrey

In the earliest newswire reports from Bali on the night of October twelfth 2002, it was not

altogether clear what had happened. It seemed that a bomb had exploded near the US

Consulate in Renon, and a much larger explosion in Kuta was said to have destroyedseveral buildings, leaving numerous dead and many more seriously injured. A separate

bombing had been reported at the Philippine Consulate in Manado earlier in the day,

though it was uncertain whether this was in any way linked to the blasts in Kuta. A bombwas also said to have detonated in the central Balinese tourist center of Ubud, but –

despite appearing in both the Indonesian and Anglophone news media – there is every

indication that this was simply an erroneous report.2 If the details, however, were a little

1 Recorded at 11pm (EDT) on 21 June 2003. The program also aired two hours earlier, at

9pm that evening. The online transcript (available at

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0306/15/cp.00.html) for the program suggests thatit was initially broadcast at 8pm (EDT) on 15 June 2003.2 The earliest report of the bombing posted to CNN.com, for instance, includes the

following: ‘The explosions came at Kuta Beach and Ubud on Saturday night’. The Media

Indonesia website also carried a piece entitled ‘Lubang Ledakan Bom Di Kuta Sedalam 2





sketchy and often contradictory in the earliest reporting, there was one thing on which

most reports seemed to agree: the scene in Kuta following the blasts was ‘chaotic’.

The earliest report of the bombing that I have been able to find was an article entitled

‘Explosion in Kuta killed approximately 10 people’ that was posted to the Tempo website

about an hour and a half after the explosions. The article described ‘great commotion atthe location of the incident’, with tourists ‘milling about’ and ambulances rushing ‘back

and forth transporting the injured to Sanglah Hospital’ in Denpasar.3 A little less than an

hour later, a report from Reuters was published on the Jakarta Post website citing severaleyewitness accounts of the ‘chaos in the area near one of the explosions’.

4 Out of this

initial ‘chaos’, a more or less coherent – if not always consistent – account of events

would gradually emerge, in which the bombing would be made to take its place withinthe broader framework of ‘the war on terror’. In this paper I would like to examine this

mass-mediated process, and consider some of the regularities and disjunctures that arose

between the mainstream Anglophone and Indonesian media coverage. I am especiallyinterested in examining the underlying assumptions regarding Islam, its place in

Indonesian society and its role in the emergence and transformation of popularexplanations for the tragic bombings in Bali.

‘Primary definition’

This paper comprises one of the initial steps toward a much broader analysis of the mediacoverage of the Bali bombing. I have limited my analysis here to the first week of

reporting for two related reasons. First, there is the complexity of the coverage itself.

Representations of the bombing over the last nine months – and across different regionalmedia – have been anything but uniform. Since the twelfth of October 2002, I have

compiled an archive of media materials that includes over 300 digital television

recordings and some 30,000 articles, in both Indonesian and English, from sources in

Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, the UK and United States.5 The collection is focused on

M diameter 4,5 M (posted 13 October 2002, 03:28 Western Indonesian Time) thatincluded reference to an explosion in Ubud: ‘Ledakan bom lainnya terjadi di kawasan

Renon yang berjarak sekitar 100 meter dari Konsulat AS, dan di Ubud’.3 Hakim, J. (2002) ‘Ledakan di Kuta menewaskan sekitar 10 orang’. Tempo Interaktif .

Posted 13 Oct 2002, 0:0:35 Western Indonesian Time.4 The Reuters report would be replicated – almost verbatim and in its entirety – less than

two hours later in an article posted to CNN. See CNN (2002) ‘Bali explosions: “12

dead”‘. CNN.com. Posted 3:39 PM, Eastern Daylight Time.5 In addition to digital television recordings, I have systematically monitored on a daily

basis the websites for the following publications since the 12th

of October, 2002:

Republika, Tempo (daily and weekly editions), Kompas (online and print editions), Media Indonesia (online and print editions), Bali Post , Denpasar Post , Jakarta Post , Straits

Times, Sydney Morning Herald , Australian Broadcasting Corporation Online, CNN.com,

Los Angeles Times and New York Times. For each of these publications, a snapshot of thefront page as well as the full text and images for all relevant articles have been stored





the bombing, but also includes a wide range of materials related more generally to

representations of religion, violence and ‘the war on terror’. It is, to my knowledge, themost comprehensive archive of its kind. Second, there is the matter of what Jaap van

Ginneken discussed in his excellent book on Understanding global news in terms of the

‘primary definition’ of a news story:

three major world news agencies, the major American, British and French news-

gathering organizations [Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse], have a

quasi monopoly in providing prime definitions of breaking news in the world periphery.Even if they are not actually the first on the spot, they are usually the first to inform the

rest of the world. (1998: 114; bracketed addition mine)

And, once the story is framed, ‘there is a certain resistance to change. The Gestalt or

configuration will tend to perpetuate itself’ (1998: 113).6 Although I am not concerned

primarily with newswire agencies as such, an important aspect of my current research is

an examination of the processes through which complex events such as the Bali bombing

are made to make sense.7 On the basis of my research to date, I would tentatively proposethat – very much as van Ginneken suggested more generally – the early representations of

the Bali bombing seemed to set the parameters for subsequent coverage. In other words,

the broadly Euro-american configuration of the bombing in terms of ‘the war on terror’appears to have achieved a considerable degree of hegemony, largely disarticulating

alternative accounts of what happened and why.

Making sense

The initial processes of making sense of the incident were not entirely parallel in the

Indonesian and Anglophone media respectively. In addition to reporting on both the

physical destruction in Kuta and the number and nationalities of the victims, much of theearly Indonesian coverage seemed to be concerned primarily with the economic and

domestic security implications of the attacks, as well as with their impact on the image ofIndonesia in the eyes of the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the mainstream Anglophone

coverage was dominated in the first twenty-four hours of reporting by ‘eyewitness

accounts’ and what might best be described as anecdotal gore – descriptions, e.g., ofdismembered victims and other images of carnage. I have argued elsewhere that, in

addition to establishing a particular sense of ‘on the scene’ authority, this preponderance

of graphic detail underwrote the largely unsubstantiated (and grossly sensationalist)

digitally for subsequent analysis. I also retrospectively examined the relevant articles published in the Suara Pembaruan, Suara Merdeka, the Jawa Pos and others.6 An interesting comparison might be made with the earliest reporting on the outbreak of

violence in Ambon – particularly with regard to the changing position of ‘religion’ inaccounting for the conflict. I have written a brief overview of this early coverage which is

posted to http://www.berubah.org/Ambon.htm7 I take it as axiomatic that any given representation is underdetermined (Quine 1994) by

the events it purports to explain.





speculations on al-Qaeda responsibility that were so central to the Euro-american

coverage of the attack.8 Although the question of ‘terrorism’ – and it was a question –

figured prominently in the early Indonesian coverage, there were neither the ubiquitous

invocations of al-Qaeda responsibility, nor was there the preponderance of images of

‘horror and conflagration’ that dominated the mainstream Anglophone coverage.

If initially there was a degree of disjuncture between the Indonesian and Anglophone

press, a more or less consistent account of the bombing would gradually emerge in theweeks to come, tying the blasts in with a familiar set of post-9.11 representations of terror

and Islamic extremism. Although the Indonesian media were not always uncritical of this

drive to articulate the bombing within the framework of ‘the war on terror’, the gap between Indonesian and broadly western coverage – at least with regard to what might be

considered ‘the facts’ of the incident – seemed to grow progressively smaller as the days

passed.9

Competing frames?

A rather interesting point of disjuncture may be discerned in the reports published by two

leading newspapers – one British, the other Indonesian – on the morning of the 14th

of

October 2002 – that is, two days after the bombing. That morning’s London edition of

The Daily Telegraph carried the front-page headline ‘Al-Qaeda link to club bombing’.

Beneath the headline, there was a large and rather dramatic photograph of a bloodied and

shirtless young man picking his way through the rubble with a woman of similar age,

against the backdrop of a flaming car.10

8 See Fox (n.d.-b)9 There were, of course, notable exceptions to this trend; but that is something to which I

shall have to return in separate paper. For an example, see note 32.10

Incidentally, this same image was also carried on the front pages of several other

papers including, among others, the Australian edition of The Daily Telegraph, The

Advertiser and The Australian. I have elsewhere discussed this photograph at some length(see Fox n.d.-b).





Front page, The Daily Telegraph (14 Oct 2002).

The caption beneath the picture reads: ‘Injured victims of the Bali terrorist attack stagger

past burning cars on their way to safety after two nightclubs were destroyed on Saturday

night. Al-Qa’eda is thought to be responsible’. Articulating headline and photograph, the

caption brings together the two dominant elements of the front page: ‘injured victims’and ‘al-Qa’eda’. However, while the victims are discussed at some length in the article,

there is only brief – and decidedly inconclusive – mention of al-Qaeda:

No group claimed responsibility. But the attacks heightened concerns that the al-Qa’eda

network had regrouped after the war in Afghanistan and was behind them.

The killing of American troops in Kuwait and the Philippines this month and a suicide

attack against a French oil tanker have indicated that the network has launched a globaloffensive against ‘crusader’ targets, a code for those linked to America and its allies.11

11 It is worth noting in passing that, in this brief excerpt, each of the three incidents is

represented as an instantiation of ‘a global offensive’, while that ‘global offensive’ itself

emerges as the necessarily a priori framework for interpreting the incidents as itsmoments of appearance. In other words, in addition to articulating the Bali bombing in

terms of ‘the war on terror’ through little more than simple juxtaposition, the implicit

logic of the reporting is circular. Presumably one must break this interpretive circlethrough recourse to the assumption that the reporter knows something ‘we’, as readers,

do not. Sadly, this is an assumption that is required all too often in these Orwellian days

of ‘the war on terror’ – a point not unlike that made by Ade Armando in his piece for theIndonesian Islamic daily, Republika, entitled Kabar itu meragukan, or ‘The news is in

question’:For me, it’s not a matter of trusting or not trusting. What is at issue is that the validity of information

in these reports is questionable. The problem is that most of these articles contain information





Although there is scant mention of al-Qaeda on the front page (apart, that is, from

what I have just cited here), there is a piece printed back on the fourth page, entitled

‘Finger points to the men with al-Qa’eda links’. The latter cites Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)and Laskar Jihad as possible suspects, and it is accompanied by an aerial shot of

‘morning after’ destruction in Kuta.12 The article suggests that the ‘prime suspects are

from a hardline Indonesian Islamist group with links to al-Qa’eda’. Yet the actual ‘links’

that are cited in the article – previous accusations against JI, non-committal commentsfrom a terrorism expert etc. – are rather tenuous. But if the article is a little short on

evidence (or even serious circumstantial support) for a link to al-Qaeda, it is also

accompanied by a chronological survey entitled ‘The list of terror attacks’.

‘The list of terror attacks’ in The Daily Telegraph (14 Oct 2002), page 4.

Although not on the list itself, the Bali bombing implicitly emerges from this

juxtaposition as the latest of many ‘Islamic militant terrorist attacks since September 11’.

obtained not on the basis of journalists’ investigations but, rather, they are based primarily onintelligence reports. … That doesn’t necessarily mean the news is false. But, establishing its accuracy

is problematic, as it is difficult for anyone else to crosscheck the information when its sources are

confidential.12

In an earlier paper (Fox n.d.-b), I proposed a tentative typology of the images that were

deployed in the media coverage of the bombing. I labeled one particular set of photographs as images of ‘the morning after’, as they depict from various perspectives (in

amongst the rubble, from the air etc.) the physical destruction of Kuta, including burnt-

out buildings and the smoking remains of cars and other vehicles that were destroyed inthe blast.





The implications of this representation are perhaps best approached through a

comparison with a similar list published that same morning in the Semarang-based dailynewspaper Suara Merdeka. The latter – a ‘List of 2001-2002 BOMBINGS’ – came at the

end of an article entitled ‘Bomb explodes, Bali cries’ ( Bom meledak, Bali menangis).

‘List of 2001-2002 BOMBINGS’, Suara Merdeka website (14 Oct 2002)

Perhaps tellingly, there is not a single incident that is common to the two lists. The list published in The Daily Telegraph includes various attacks (in numerous countries)

that have been widely covered in the Euro-american press in connection with ‘the war on

terror’, while the Suara Merdeka list includes a string of bombings that occurred in

Indonesia during 2001 and 2002 (and which, incidentally, received very little attention inthe mainstream Euro-american media). The Suara Merdeka article also refers to the

attacks of 9.11, but the link is made through the similarity in consequence – ‘livesneedlessly cut short’ – not through the suspected perpetrators. So what are the

implications of this disjuncture?13

In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, there were isolated commentators in

Europe and the US – John Pilger and Jeffery Winters come to mind – who explicitly

questioned the ease and rapidity with which the attack was made to make sense within the

prefigured framework of ‘the war on terror’.14

It is important to remember that, at the

13 What would happen, for instance, if one took events in Indonesia – i.e., rather than

recent attacks popularly associated with al-Qaeda – as the primary frame of reference for

interpreting the Bali bombings? Unfortunately, this is a question that goes beyond thescope of this paper – though it is one to which I shall be turning my attention in

forthcoming research.14

In an October 14th

interview on National Public Radio, for instance, Jeffery Wintersremarked that,





time the initial reports were aired and went to press, there was no publicly available

evidence whatsoever for a connection to al-Qaeda – or even, to my knowledge, to‘international terrorism’ more generally. (In this connection, what happened subsequently

is, strictly speaking, irrelevant.) An al-Qaeda affiliate/look-alike/whatever may or may

not have been behind the bombings. But there was absolutely no way to know one way or

another at the time these stories were published. Yet the early allegations of al-Qaedainvolvement were made with a startling degree of certainty. So, on what were these

allegations based? How were they articulated? And, critically speaking, what were the

consequences?

Visually articulate

Having looked at two reports from the 14th

of October, I would now like to go back a

couple of days, in order to consider a short excerpt from the 6: 30pm segment of the NBC

Evening News, broadcast on the northeast coast of the United States (in Massachusetts

I have serious doubts that this was an al-Qaeda operation, and my reasons for saying that are the

following. First, while it’s true that there are people who have had contact with al-Qaeda figures in

Indonesia, as well as in Malaysia and the Philippines – contact that goes back to the war inAfghanistan against the Soviet Union and then all the folks involved in that went back to their

constituent countries – it is not the same thing to say that, because they had those contacts that they

are somehow direct operatives with al-Qaeda pulling the strings of Indonesian puppets in this case. I

think the explanation for what’s going on in Indonesia has much more to do with the domestic politics

of Indonesia. If we look at this attack, we have to understand that there were three clear targets.Someone wanted to hurt Australians, because whoever did this knew that the majority of people

inside that nightclub were going to be Australians. They would also want to damage Megawati, and

they would also want to further undermine Indonesia economically and politically. And I don’t think

any of these things fit into an al-Qaeda agenda. Megawati, if anything, has been beneficial to al-Qaeda because she has not been very helpful in closing down the Indonesian banking system as a system

through which money could be easily laundered and moved. And she has not been moving in any kindof effective way to shut down Indonesia as a porous place through which terrorists could move and

hide and so on. So I think we should be very cautious about jumping to the conclusion that this was

al-Qaeda. And if we have to ask the question ‘Who had the capacity to set off a detonation like this in

Indonesia?,’ well, it’s very likely the same people who set off more than a dozen bombs

simultaneously at churches in Indonesia on Christmas Eve two years ago, who blew up the basement parking garage of Indonesia’s stock exchange a little over two years ago, who blew up the Philippine

ambassador (sic) right in downtown Jakarta. What we need to understand is that Indonesia’s own

military has figures both active and retired who have an interest in destabilizing Megawati and

causing damage to Indonesia, and, most important of all, in hurting Australians, because it was theAustralians who led the United Nations force in East Timor to push out the Indonesians and push out

the Indonesian military. So there’s a lot of possibilities here that have to do with factors very much

inside Indonesia.

Winter’s remarks were more or less disregarded – almost rudely, to my ear – by the host,

Neal Conan, who seemed more interested in commentary on the possible ‘resurgence’ ofal-Qaeda from his other guest, Paul Wilkinson, a terrorism expert who has often appeared

on CNN. A copy of the transcript from the interview may be viewed online at

http://www.berubah.org/BaliBombing/Winters_1.htm . (See below, for the ‘resurgence’of al-Qaeda as a news story.)





and Rhode Island, I believe) the night of October 12th

. This excerpt aired roughly eight

hours after the explosions had occurred.

Transcript of excerpt taken from NBC Evening News with John Seigenthaler

12 October 2002

Segment Narrative Image

(1)

[Transition from coverage of the ‘DC

Sniper’.]

Anchor: Now to Bali, a major

international tourist destination wheretwo bombs exploded today killing

dozens of people. Authorities aretrying to figure out who is responsible

for the attacks.Image A-01

to 0:10

(2) The two explosions occurred on the

southern end of the Indonesian island.

And NBC’s Ned Colt reports.

Image A-02

zooms in to focus on Bali, to 0:16

*note ‘Sanu’ (Sanur?)

(3) Ned Colt: The explosions occurred

almost simultaneously, 11:30pm local

time…

Image A-03

pans out, to 0:22





(4) …when streets in the popular resorts

of Kuta and Sanur…

Image A-04

to 0:25

(5) …were packed with tourists. Two of

the blasts occurred outside dance bars, another just 250 yards from…

Image A-05

to 0:31

(6) …the US consular office. The worst

were the bar bombings.

Image A-06

to 0:34

(7) Flames burned for hours, so furiousthat one witness thought that a plane

had crashed.

Image A-07

to 0:38





(8) Close to 60 people are now confirmed

dead, and that number is expected to

rise.

Image A-08

to 0:44

(9) More than 120 people have been

injured, some of them Americans.

Image A-09

to 0:48

(10) Bali is a Mecca for foreigners…

Image A-10

to 0:51

(11) …and until now it has beenconsidered extremely safe.

Image A-11

to 0:54





(12) However, Indonesia, the world’s most

populous Muslim nation…

Image A-12

to 0:57

(13) …is home to a number of hardline

Islamic groups…

Image A-13

to 1:00

(14) …some of which have threatened USand other foreign interests.

Image A-14

to 1:03

(15) The US embassy in Jakarta has beenshut down frequently in the past

year…

Image A-15

to 1:06





(16) …due to terrorist threats. But…

Image A-16

to 1:10

(17) …no claims of responsibility yet for

this deadly terrorist attack. Ned Colt, NBC News, Hong Kong.

[Transition to segment entitled

‘Target: Iraq’.]

Image A-17

to 1:15

Although this segment was among some of the earliest television coverage of the bombing, it incorporated several key elements of the storyline that would come to

dominate the Anglophone media coverage of the bombing in the weeks and months to

come. (Here one may recall van Ginneken’s point regarding ‘primary definition’.)

The clip begins with a mid-range shot of the anchor, John Seigenthaler, standing

beside an on-screen title that simply reads ‘Explosions’. The background graphic consistsof an Indonesian flag set against a deep red background that is scored with a lighter-

colored grid. In passing, it is worth noting that, although this grid-scored background was

not used during any of the other parts of the program, it did appear in the subsequent

segment that was entitled ‘Target: Iraq’. Following this graphic continuity, andconsidering the common use of similar imagery in news, popular films and television

programs addressing global strategic and/or military-related subject matter, I would

tentatively propose that the grid suggests a certain sense of ‘strategic significance’. (It

perhaps, albeit several steps removed, exemplifies the surveillance – in both the commonsense and the etymological sense of sight from above – associated with longitudinal and

latitudinal lines.) It is against this backdrop that Seigenthaler introduces the story: two bombs killed dozens in the ‘major tourist destination’ of Bali; and ‘authorities are trying

to figure out who is responsible’. The scene then cuts to a map of the region, zooming in





on Indonesia and, eventually, Bali,15

as Seigenthaler explains that the ‘explosions

occurred on the southern end of the Indonesian island’. He then introduces thecorrespondent, Ned Colt.

The audio then switches to the correspondent’s voice (reporting from Hong Kong),

and the scene cuts to footage of the burning buildings and cars in Kuta. These scenes ofconflagration comprise four separate clips, spread over 19 seconds altogether (almost

30% of the duration of the entire report), with a short (3 second) interruption while the

scene cuts to footage of people milling about in the dark.16

While this footage runs, NedColt reports on the simultaneity, location and time of the explosions, noting that the

‘flames burned for hours, so furious that one witness thought that a plane had crashed’.

If, at this early stage in the reporting, the graphic inflection of the coverage was

comparatively subtle, it would not be long before the nature of the event was

overdetermined by supplemental onscreen visuals. On the MSNBC news magazine program, Hardball , for instance, ‘Al-Qaeda’s resurgence’ was the ‘Big story’ for the

evening of 14 October 2003. From a strictly visual perspective, the Bali bombingemerges unambiguously from this program as the latest of three ‘recent al-Qaeda

attacks’.

Selected screenshots from the MSNBC program, Hardball with Chris Matthews

14 October 2002

Map depicting ‘Recent al-Qaeda attacks’

13:04

Chris Matthews posing a question to one

of his guests. Here, as during much of the

program, the onscreen title reads:

‘AL-QAEDA’S R ESURGENCE’.

13:25

15 It is worth noting, in passing, that the label ‘Sanu’ is presumably a misspelling of

‘Sanur’, the southern Balinese beach resort not far from Kuta.16

See note 30, below.





Scene from ‘the morning after’

in Kuta, Bali.

14:32

File footage of OBL with a senior advisor.

The screen cut to this clip while an al-Qaeda

expert discussed OBL’s possible whereabouts

with the host, Chris Matthews.14:55

Although there was still, at this point, no publicly available evidence for who might have been behind the bombings (there were also, as yet, ‘no claims of responsibility’), a

‘resurgence’ of al-Qaeda was raised in connection with the sequential occurrence ofattacks on the French tanker in Yemen, the US soldiers in Kuwait and the bombing in

Bali. The link between these events was articulated primarily through a combination of

the host’s commentary with onscreen graphics and recycled video footage associated

through previous usage with a congeries of fears tied up with popular representations ofterrorism and the Islamic Other.

Here one is reminded of those ‘ominous titles’ that John L. Esposito described ascapturing ‘public attention and the popular imagination’, but also ‘exaggerat[ing] and

distort[ing] the nature of Islam, the political realities of the Muslim world and its diverserelations with the West’. As he argued, ‘They also reinforce an astonishing degree ofignorance and cultural stereotyping of Arabs and Islam’ (1999: 2-3). So, what is the

justification for such seemingly inflammatory onscreen graphics and the related

articulations of terror? Was this little more than ratings-driven sensationalism? Or,alternatively, might they actually be grounded in the kind of ‘resurgence’ they appear to

suggest? Interestingly, when the four ‘expert’ guests on Hardball were asked point-blank,

at the conclusion of the program, whether they thought the three incidents were

organizationally linked, the replies were somewhat less than apropos of the certaintysuggested by other aspects of the program.

Chris Matthews: We’re lucky to have four people who all are experts in different fields

of this question here. I want to ask you all in order, do you think these events are

connected. Steve Emerson – in Kuwait, Bali and the French Tanker in Yemen?

Steve Emerson: In the wider symbolic way, but I don’t think they’re tetherednecessarily by command and control.

Chris Matthews: Dr. Post?





Dr. Jerrold Post: I feel the same way. I think that this represents a resurgence of activity;

but not necessarily closely coordinated.

Chris Matthews: Simon Reeve, are the three connected in any kind of tangible way? In

other words, in terms of communicating – command and control – activity here?

Simon Reeve: I think, I think it is difficult to say whether they were all controlledcentrally; but certainly I think they all represent an al-Qaeda-inspired attack.

Chris Matthews: Back to you, Robin.

Robin Wright: They’re part of the same phenomenon, if not part of the same organized plot.

Chris Matthews: It sounds like you all believe the press was a little strong in saying

they were all al-Qaeda. Does anyone want to disagree with that? The press was too strong

today in saying this was all al-Qaeda connected?

Steve Emerson: Well, I mean, there is some merit to the fact that they are in… uh, asSimon Reeve said, al-Qaeda inspired.

Chris Matthews: Right.

Steve Emerson: So the question is: does inspiration mean a connection?

Chris Matthews: Yeah, well, thank you very much. It’s murky as hell, but that’s the life

we lead right now.

So, at least in this instance, there was considerable disjuncture between the narrative17

and onscreen graphic/visual components of the report. So what are the implications ofthis disjuncture? If, at this point in the coverage, ‘inspiration’ was all that could tie al-

Qaeda to the bombing in Bali – let alone to the incidents in Kuwait and Yemen – what is

one to make of the map labeled ‘Recent al-Qaeda attacks’? And, beyond reinforcing (to

use Esposito’s phrase) ‘an astonishing degree of ignorance and cultural stereotyping’,what purpose is served by the file footage of the notorious OBL? As a first step toward

answering these questions, it is perhaps worth a look at the some of the implicitassumptions regarding the island of Bali and its relationship to Indonesia.

Paradise lost

Returning to the segment from the NBC Evening News, the correspondent’s report may

be considered in two parts, the first ending here with the footage from the hospital, the

partial body count (which ‘is expected to rise’) and the estimated number of injuredvictims – ‘some of them Americans’. In passing, it is worth noting that, despite the fact

that it was already obvious that numerous Indonesians were killed in the blast,18

it is only

17 I should note that I am not using the term ‘narrative’ in any of its many technical

senses but, rather, as a shorthand for the transcribed oral/aural aspect of television news. I

have dealt with some of the philosophical issues involved in transcription of this kind inmy doctoral thesis (Fox n.d.-a).18

For instance, even the earliest lists of dead and missing included victims explicitly

named as Indonesian citizens. Yet Chris Matthews could still, as late as the 14th

, ask oneof his ‘expert’ guests, ‘Why this target, as you see it? A bunch of Australians, a lot of





the Euro-american victims who seemed to warrant sustained media attention. (Oddly

enough, this was also – at least to a certain extent – the case in much of the Indonesiancoverage.)

While, to this point, the report seemed to be primarily concerned with ‘the facts’ as

they were known at the time, the second half of the segment framed these facts in termsof a series of popular assumptions regarding – among other things – Bali, Indonesia and

Islam. With the cut to daytime footage from Kuta beach, we are told – perhaps ironically

– that ‘Bali is a Mecca for foreigners’, while the second beach clip accompanies thesuggestion that ‘until now [Bali] has been considered extremely safe’. Such

representations of Bali were pervasive in the coverage, and ranged from the somewhat

naïve to the positively inane.

Fox News Channel

Sunday morning, 13 October 2002

Female host: It’s probably no coincidence that the

attackers picked this specific spot in Bali, Indonesia,

which is a very famous resort area; it’s a famoussurf spot; it’s got a young nightlife. Our reporter out

there was saying that this is kind of the peace and

harmony and sort of kumbaya type of place where

people just go and kick back. It’s also frequented by

many, many Australians, because Australia is aquick flight away. Also the British, Italians, lots of

Europeans and Americans. And, apparently,

according to our reporter, seventy percent of thevictims were Australian.19

The two hosts in the Fox News studio.

Along similar lines, one frequently encountered the question, ‘how could this havehappened here?’, the idea being presumably that no one could have expected such a

westerners, not Asian people, but foreigners enjoying the good life in an Islamic country,

not following the rules of Sharia…’ (MSNBC 9:00pm EDT, 14 October 2002).19

Such representations of Bali and the Balinese have been around for some time.

Geoffrey Robinson cited an example that is not entirely out of synch with the Fox News

report cited above. The passage was taken from ‘a brief prepared by an officer of theBali/Lombok brigade (Capt. J.B.T. Konig) for an incoming battalion of Dutch shock

troops in July 1946’:The Balinese is a remarkable Oriental. He is very artistic and expresses this in music, dance, wood

carving, and silver work. Although he is a poor fighter, because he is cowardly, the Balinese is self-confident and therefore very free in his association with others, including Europeans, though he does

this in a pleasant way. He is good-humored and likes to join in a good joke. These character traits are

certainly part of the reason for the great success of tourism here. (Konig 1946; cited in Robinson

1995: 130)





terrible thing to occur in this tropical idyll.20

The island of Bali, we are told, is simply not

that kind of place – rather, it’s ‘the peace and harmony and sort of kumbaya type of placewhere people just go and kick back’.

‘Terror in paradise’

PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer

14 October 2002

MSNBC, Curtis & Kuby

14 October 2002

Front page, The Independent14 October 2002

Page 5, The Times, London

14 October 2002

20 Are such questions not always asked at the scene of a tragedy? How could children be

gunned down by their classmates in suburban Columbine? How could educated membersof the middle class have become suicidal terrorists? And so on.





CNN Online

13 October 2002Sydney Morning Herald Online

14 October 2002

Apart from the unabashed reiteration of stereotype, it takes little time perusing the

annals of Balinese history to recognize the absurdity of such idealizations. Whether oneconsiders the massacres of 1965-66, the matter-of-fact lynching of thieves, or the history

of colonial battles, internal warfare and other bits of internecine nastiness, it is rather

difficult to retain the paradisiac fantasy of ‘peace and harmony’ so pervasive throughoutthe Euro-american coverage of the bombing. If anything, Bali has been historically a

rather violent place.21

(Though I hasten to add that it is probably no more so than

anywhere else.) As Mark Hobart noted in an unpublished piece on violence in Bali,

Balinese village law deals extensively with punishments for various forms of violence to

others. Sanctions against fellow villagers for failure to comply with communal decisionsincluding sending to coventry, bricking up offenders’ houses and sentencing them to

death. During my fieldwork a thief in a nearby village was taken from armed police and

torn limb from limb. In another a man who insulted the village during a meeting was promptly taken and killed by pinning him to his own grave with an agricultural hoe

through his neck. Rival villages seem often to have engaged in fights of their own; and

bloodshed between irrigation associations over water was still not uncommon in the1960s. (Hobart n.d.-a: 7)

Yet, as historians of Bali have noted with increasing frequency, this small and densely populated island has long been on the receiving end of the displaced fears and desires of

Europeans, Australians and Americans. In other words, the (pre-bomb) image of Bali was

very much as Adrian Vickers (1989) described it: a paradise created.22

Now, with

21 In the preface to his book on political violence in Bali, The dark side of paradise,

Robinson remarked,At the outset I was confronted by two perplexing problems. The first was that I could not find a single

book or article that set out clearly what had actually happened in Bali in the previous century or so.

Frustration gave way to puzzlement. Why, I wondered, had no one bothered to write a political history

of this extraordinary place? The second problem was that the available sources made it clear that Bali

had suffered an unusually turbulent and bloody history. It was a picture that fitted very poorly withthe pleasing and romantic image of Bali with which I was familiar.

22 Robinson noted,





‘paradise lost’, Bali is imagined as having completed its Miltonian circle;23

and the

mainstream news media reports land up as little more than the latest permutation of atired and not terribly helpful bit of western mythology.

24

‘The world’s most populous Muslim nation’

If Eve, an apple and a snake were blamed for the expulsion from the Garden, this fallfrom ‘paradise’ was predominantly explained through reference to elements associated

with (the rest of) Indonesia – which, as we are frequently reminded, is ‘the world’s most

populous Muslim nation’.

Another eyewitness reported hearing at least three explosions on the island [of Bali] in

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Moslem nation. (CNN Online, 13 October 2002)

The paradise island of Bali lures tourists from across the globe with its white-sand

beaches and unique Hindu culture, and until now has been immune from the violence that

has wracked Indonesia over the past few years. (Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October2002)

For months, US and Singaporean officials have been saying that Al-Qaeda cells arehiding in Indonesia, a Muslim nation with porous borders and weak law enforcement.

(Straits Times, 15 October 2002)

Next door to Australia sits Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, andalso an unstable, fledgling democracy. (French 2002; in New York Times, 20 October

2002)

The image of a harmonious, exotic and apolitical Bali gained wide acceptance in the late 1920s, when

Dutch colonial power in Bali was at its height and the restoration of Balinese ‘tradition’ had become a

central feature of a conservative Dutch colonial strategy of indirect rule. By the 1930s, the

bureaucratic memoranda of Dutch colonial officials had, with a tedious uniformity, begun to describethe people of Bali as more interested by nature, in art, culture, and religion—dance, music, painting,

carving, ceremonies, festivals, and so on—than in ‘politics’. The generally unspoken assumption in

colonial circles (and in the foreign anthropological and artistic community in Bali) was the ‘culture’and ‘politics’ were mutually exclusive categories, and that a ‘cultural’ people could not at the same

time be a ‘political’ one. So long as ‘Balinese ‘culture’ remained strong, the reasoning went,

‘political’ influence would be weak. (1995: 5-6)

Ironically, it might be argued that in more recent years the image of Bali as a tropical

idyll has been maintained – at least in part – through the violence of ‘security’.23

In years past, Bali was alternately feared, loathed and also idealized – all with equalconviction. But, in each case, these representations tended to homogenize and

detemporalize the lives of the men women and children living in Bali, relegating them to

an exotic corner of the western imagination and, perhaps more to the point, excludingthem from becoming the subjects of their own history. Against this historical backdrop,

perhaps one should not be so terribly surprised to find little discussion of the Balinese

and other Indonesian victims of the bombing.24

As Hobart noted in another unpublished piece, Roland Barthes’ Myth Today (1973)

‘works singularly well to understand the political rhetoric of the media (because, I

suspect, they underpin his examples). Most of Barthes’ main figures appear in reportingthe Bali bombings’ (n.d.-b: 7).





Fox News interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the United

States Army, Van Hipp, Sunday morning, 13 October 2002

Van Hipp: I don’t think there’s any question that

there is a direct link to, uh, to terrorist activity here.Don’t forget that Indonesia, uh, has the largest

Muslim population of any country in the world, 174million. It has long been a hotbed of Islamic

extremist activity. Uh, you got an Island chain there

known as the Moluccan Islands, where betweenthree and five thousand Christians have been

butchered in the last 24 months alone. President

Megawati has tried to be, uh, helpful to us. But

she’s basically been surrounded by, uh, Islamicextremists in her own government.25

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary

of the United States Army, Van Hipp.

If we return to the initial segment from the NBC Evening News, we find that theinvocation of ‘hardline Islamic groups’ is accompanied by two short clips from what

appears on first sight to be a mass demonstration of some sort, with people both chanting

and waving flags and banners wildly.

Image A-12 (See above.)

So might this have been a scene from that ‘hotbed of Islamic extremist activity’? Perhapsa gang of ‘extremist’ Muslims off to butcher some Christians in the Molluccas?

25 Van Hipp went on to articulate the Bali bombing in relation to al-Qaeda, Iraq and then

‘weapons of mass destruction’:Van Hipp: And here’s the problem: you’ve got al-Qaeda cells in sixty countries. And I would say

that this [i.e., Indonesia] is one of the top, if not the worst of all the countries in the world. Uh, the

goal of al-Qaeda has been to disrupt, uh, the western economy. That’s why they did this, in myopinion in Bali, which is a non-Muslim area, uh, of Indonesia. Uh, and can you imagine if Saddam

Hussein is successful in being able to export his weapons of mass destruction to all of these countries,

particularly Indonesia, that has very active, uh, terrorist cells? I mean, what if that car bomb had been

a dirty bomb?





Closer examination of this footage would in fact suggest that the demonstration was a

peace rally. The banners themselves indicate that these were students demonstratingagainst the American invasion of Iraq. (For instance, the signs read ‘stop war’, ‘we

oppose war’, ‘no more blood’ etc.)26

Although, on reviewing the footage, the protestors

do look enthusiastic – even determined – they certainly do not look violent, let alone

‘hardline’ (whatever that would look like).

27

But, if there was any ambiguity in thefootage, it was quickly clawed back with the next clip in which two protestors (from the

same demonstration?) are depicted running alongside a pickup truck and carrying a sign

that reads (in English) ‘BUSH, BLAIR AND GELBARD GO TO HELL’.28

In subsequent broadcasts on other channels, similar video sequences articulated the same opposition

between Bali (Hindu, safe) and Indonesia (Muslim, dangerous).

Transcript of a segment from ‘Wolf Blitzer reports’ on CNN news,

14 October 2002

(1) Until now…

Image B-01

26 That many of the signs were in English might also suggest they were made with a

western audience (and mass media) in mind. Sadly, one might further argue that these

images were used here to the inverse of their desired effect.27

The closest tie to Islam is an only partially legible banner that seems to indicate the participation of the Executive Student Body of the Islamic University in Jakarta.

Underneath the acronym BEM (presumably ‘Badan Eksekutif Mahasiswa’), the banner

appears to read ‘Universitas Islam Negeri Jakarta’.28

I had to slow the footage considerably to make out the names. Playing at regular speed,

it is only the ‘Go to hell’ that is really legible. One presumes the footage is from the time

of Ambassador Gelbard’s tenure in Indonesia. Ralph Boyce was sworn in as the USAmbassador to Indonesia on 9 October 2001.





(2) …Bali had attracted an average of morethan a million vacationers a year,

Image B-02

(3) …most from Japan, Australia,

Image B-03

(4) …Taiwan and Europe.

Image B-04

(5) Until now, the island had been almostexempt from the turmoil…

Image B-05





(6) …lawlessness and government-issued

travel warnings that have long afflicted

Indonesia.

Image B-06

I would argue that both the footage of (‘Islamic’) protestors on the NBC segment, and

this (rather gratuitous) visual representation of Indonesian ‘turmoil and lawlessness’ on

CNN, paved the way for the articulation of a very particular kind of threat. Considering

the general tenor of such video sequences, it is perhaps not entirely surprising to find – a

couple of nights later – even the CNN anchor, Carol Lin, declaring ‘my sense of it, as anAmerican watching from overseas, is that people there [in Indonesia] hate Americans,

that there is a distinct anti-American, um, pro-Islamist movement going on in Indonesia’(14 October 2002, 1:35pm EDT). So perhaps Paradise and the Inferno may turn out to be

two sides of the same coin. Taken together, these clips certainly seem to suggest a

general sense of unrest and, more specifically, a threat of Indonesian (Muslim) disorderdisrupting previously peaceful (Hindu) Bali.

29 So what was the nature of this threat? And

how was it represented? (Or, critically speaking, can these two questions even be

distinguished?)

Following the footage of the (anti-war) demonstrations in the NBC segment, we are

told of the ‘terrorist threats’ that caused frequent closures of the US embassy in Jakarta.This is accompanied by a shot of an Indonesian soldier standing guard in front of the gateof what one presumes is the American Embassy, and then another short clip depicting

what appear to be (‘more’) Islamic protestors, waving large green flags. I would suggest

that it is not insignificant that the latter footage was filmed from behind a long line ofIndonesian security forces in full riot gear, thereby placing the viewing subject behind the

lines of defense. Yet, despite the preponderance of (Islam-related) suspicion and

29 The threat of disorder has long been a set piece for cultural and media studies’ analyses

of how the news articulates an ideological version of the world. van Ginneken

summarized the process nicely: ‘The overarching logic is twofold; on the one hand avivid evocation of new threats to convention, normality and order; on the other hand their

labeling, categorization and neutralization’ (1998: 188). Paralleling classical myths of

cosmogony, the news begins with chaos and ends with (white, male and upper-middle-class) order.





innuendo, we are told (yet again) that there have been ‘no claims of responsibility yet for

this deadly terrorist attack’.30

By any other name…

The western imagination of Islam has a long, complex and well-documented history

which has – in large part – been dominated by displacement, fear and misinterpretation

(see e.g., Said 1979, 1994, 1997; Asad 1993; Esposito 1999). Sadly, ‘the war on terror’

seems to have given new – and, most worryingly, institutional – life to many of the oldstereotypes and prejudices. Yet, while it is by now trite to declare that Islam has long

been maligned in the Euro-american world, it remains no less the case; and these

tendencies seem to have impinged seriously on the ability of the Anglophone news mediato engage critically with the Bali bombing as a complex international event.

31 While

focusing on the ‘conspiratorial’ aspect of the Indonesian coverage,32

much of the more

30 Perhaps unsurprisingly, this final line is delivered against the backdrop of burning

ruins. I proposed in an earlier paper (Fox n.d.-b) that the initial articulation of the bombing in terms of ‘the war on terror’ was perhaps more than a little parasitic on images

of what I tentatively labeled ‘horror and conflagration’. The speculations about al-Qaedainvolvement were repeatedly set against the backdrop of flaming cars, burnt-out buildings

and bloodied victims. I suggested that, if the former lacked substance, perhaps the latter

served to fill the gap.31

Without wishing to put too fine a point on it, one might argue that the bombing was precisely the opposite of what it was generally said to have been. Of course it was tragic.

But it was neither a ‘cowardly’ act, nor was it necessarily a senseless or irrational act of

‘evil’. On the contrary, there is every indication that this was a political act.Unfortunately, critical reflection on such an action is precluded by the dominant tendency

in the mainstream Euro-american media to collude with the state-institutional drive todisarticulate the bombing as an act of ‘senseless evil’. One should be able to condemn theaction without abdicating the responsibility to reflect on its desired ends and the socio-

political circumstances out of which it arose, and in which it was possible.32

Much has been made of the various ‘conspiracy theories’ that circulated in the

Indonesian media following the bombing. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald , forinstance, remarked that,

One conspiracy theory after another has hit the media or circulated around the Jakarta elite this week.

One front-page story had two prominent generals as masterminds of the Bali bombings. Another

theory pointed to former defence minister General Wiranto. On Wednesday, US ambassador Ralph

Boyce had to fend off renewed questioning from local reporters suggesting the CIA had a hand in theattack. On Thursday, newspapers quoted police chief General Da’i Bachtiar raising suspicions about

separatists in remote Aceh province. Way down the list of suspects, it seems, are the organisationsthat Western governments most strongly suspect: Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist group from

the Middle East, and Jemaah Islamiah, a similar-minded local group of radical Islamists who aspire to

create a pan-Islamic state including all believers in South-East Asia. (Sydney Morning Herald,

02/11/2002; compare Jane Perlez’ remarks in her 07/11/2002 article for the New York Times)

It should be noted, however, that one of the more popular ‘conspiracy theories’ discussed

in the Indonesian media was based on an Australian source. As Greg Fealy noted, in hisrather scathing review for Inside Indonesia, the ‘micro-nuke’ theory – that the bombing





serious and reflective Indonesian media commentary has been ignored by the

Anglophone press, thereby contributing to the disarticulation of a serious alternative tothe master framework of ‘the war on terror’.

33

There is every indication that the scene in Kuta following the blasts was ‘chaotic’,

with very little information available regarding what had actually happened. Yet, withinhours of the bombs exploding – and despite the absence of any serious and publicly

available evidence – Jemaah Islamiyah was named as the group most likely responsible

for the attacks, headlined as a ‘local branch’ or ‘affiliate’ of the now seeminglyubiquitous ‘al-Qaeda terror network’. On each successive day, there were new reports

based on the increasingly detailed (and often contradictory) information that was released

by police and other security agencies; and this mass mediated drive from ‘chaos’ towarda very particular kind of coherence marched on – unabated and largely unreflective –

eventually culminating in reports of the arrest of numerous suspects allegedly affiliated

with the JI.

In closing, I would note that, almost four months after the blasts (and still despite theabsence of publicly available evidence for a link to al-Qaeda), the Director of the CIA,

George Tenet, was able to list the Bali bombing – significantly, without further comment – as one of many recent attacks by al-Qaeda, in his testimony to the Senate Select

Intelligence Committee.34

One presumes such hearings are not without consequence. As

one unnamed ‘military official’ reportedly told CNN’s Barbara Starr: ‘it looks like al-Qaeda, it walks like al-Qaeda and it smells like al-Qaeda’.

35 So, perhaps things in ‘the

war on terror’, as Hubert Humphrey said many years ago, are ‘in very important respects,

what they seem to be’.

was actually the result of a mini nuclear device detonated beneath the street – was

originally put forward by an Australian ‘private investigator’:

In its search for far-fetched accounts of the bombing, Republika turned up the Western Australia- based Joe Vialls, whom it generously described as a ‘private investigator’ and ‘explosives andintelligence analyst’. Vialls might be more accurately labeled an extreme right-wing professional

conspiracy theorist. His website … is filled with virulently anti-Semitic and anti-US views.33

I am currently preparing an article that addresses the Indonesian coverage at greater

length.34

Full video footage from the hearing is available online at www.c-span.org/.35

CNN, 11:30AM, 14 October 2002.





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chaos to coherence

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