Trouble in paradise

The exquisite charm and unique culture of Bali have enchanted travelers for ages. I went to the island on vacation with my mother years ago and have only fond memories of that beautiful island.

Indonesians and Filipinos come from the same gene pool (people from what is now Indonesia were among the first settlers here) and of course the climate and natural scenery in Bali are very similar to the Philippines. But everything else, from the architecture to the Hindu way of life, is uniquely Balinese.

Walking on Kuta beach you felt transported to a tropical paradise — if you looked at the sea and stayed far enough away from the bars and souvenir shops teeming with tourists. Being world-famous of course made Bali touristy, but being in a commercialized tourist destination also gave visitors a sense of safety. In any place where the main industry is tourism, you expect residents to guard their main livelihood and keep away troublemakers.

That sense of safety has just been shattered with the car bombing yesterday that destroyed two nightclubs on Kuta beach. Australia, which lost many nationals in the bombing, blamed Jemaah Islamiyah, the Islamist group linked to al-Qaeda whose spiritual leader, Muslim cleric Abubakar Ba’asyir, lives openly in a town on the Indonesian island of Java.

At around the same time, our consulate in Manado, in Indonesia’s North Sulawesi province, was also bombed. My tourist guide during my vacation was from Manado, and he told me it was even prettier than Bali.

Despite the charm of Bali I swore to stay away from Indonesia after the rioting in Jakarta during the final days of Suharto, where ethnic Chinese were the main targets of looting and Chinese women were raped, a number of them in public. No one was arrested for those atrocities.

Bali was spared from rioting and managed to preserve its tourism industry, but it was still part of Indonesia. I couldn’t help suspecting that they wanted only white tourists in Bali. Now tourists of all races have reason to stay away, even from beautiful Manado.

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Filipinos can sympathize with the people of Bali. It will take heroic effort for our tourism industry to recover after the depredations of the Abu Sayyaf from Palawan to Sulu (and even Malaysia). Now we have bombings in Zamboanga and rumors of an alert in Metro Manila for bombings in malls and the Light Rail Transit.

The attack in Bali will also be bad for the Philippines. In all stories about Jemaah Islamiyah, our country is always mentioned as one of the group’s areas of operation.

But Filipinos seem impervious to terrorist threats. The malls are still packed and there are still long queues for LRT and MRT rides. Must be our supposedly fatalistic nature — if your hour has come, there’s nothing you can do about it.

We can take heart from the tourism marketing blitz that has been launched by Egypt. That’s right — the land of the pyramids, for years a popular tourist destination, has suffered from terrorist attacks targeting foreigners. Now Egypt is running tourism ads even on CNN.

Will you pay good money to visit Egypt? Why not, but only if it’s safe. Otherwise, tourists would rather go to Bali. Until yesterday. Suddenly Zamboanga seems a lot safer.

Last week President Arroyo told us that despite the terrorist threat, there were still several attractions in the country that have great tourism potential. First, of course, are the beaches and diving areas. Then there’s ecotourism. One interesting possibility: Metro Manila as a shopping mecca, with emphasis on Makati. Just make sure tourists are adequately warned about the Ativan Gang.

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Will this latest attack firm up international support for the looming US military action against Saddam Hussein? Washington will need more evidence linking Jemaah Islamiyah to al-Qaeda, and then al-Qaeda to Saddam. But who knows? Perhaps the attack will push Australia to the US side in the looming war on Iraq. So far Washington still hasn’t gotten France on board despite what appears to have been a terrorist attack on a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen.

To get its message across, Washington revived this year its public diplomacy arm. The job used to be handled by the US Information Agency, but the office was abolished in 1998 due to budget considerations. USIA’s functions were distributed among different offices of the State Department.

Some quarters have blamed the move for America’s slow response to anti-US sentiment and disinformation especially in the Islamic world after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 last year. Just as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency became complacent with the end of the cold war, so did America’s public diplomacy arm.

Now the State Department has an undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Under this office are seven assistant secretaries handling different regions across the globe.

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Is the US reviving its program to win hearts and minds around the world? Jeremy Curtin doesn’t want to describe it that way.

Curtin was appointed director of public diplomacy for the East Asian and Pacific Bureau of the Department of State only last August. He arrived in Manila last Wednesday on the second leg of an East Asian tour — his first in his new post. On Thursday he met with a small group of journalists in Manila. Curtin told us public diplomacy aimed to get the US message across and minimize misunderstanding.

Would this be something akin to US propaganda? Edward Murrow, USIA director in 1963, had this to say before a US congressional committee: "American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that."

US public diplomats also handle education and media programs, including the exchange visitor program. But these days they are kept busy explaining Washington’s stand on Iraq. Would the attack in Bali make their job easier? We’ll have the answer in the coming days.