What did those who exploded a massive car bomb on the Indonesian island of Bali and slew more than 180 people and maimed almost 300 others aim to achieve? What were their feelings as they watched the television news footage of bits of young people littering the street outside the targeted club, when they saw pictures of the maimed with blood pouring from hideous wounds which a lifetime of plastic surgery might never fix, and when they saw the corpses of the men and women they had killed, trussed up in linen in a temporary morgue?
Did they really feel triumph at seeing such wanton destruction of young and innocent life? Did they feel that a great, magnificent blow had been delivered on behalf of their cause, whatever it turns out to be? Did they imagine that they had now earned the respectful attention of the world? Did they suppose that the people in whose name they had taken it upon themselves to assemble, deliver and detonate this wicked bomb, would now consider them brave heroes? If they did feel any of these things, then they prove themselves madmen, whose support belittles any cause to which it is given, unasked.
Maybe, however, some among them looked on with sickened horror at what they had brought about. If they did, these men must be at risk from their demented and fanatical colleagues, whether they slip away guiltily to their homes or hand themselves in to the authorities.
It would, however, have been most terrifying of all if the perpetrators of this butchery had looked on dispassionately at the newscasts. For them, the numbers, the murdering and maiming 400 young people, both foreigners and presumably their fellow Indonesians, were nothing more than a route to bigger media headlines. Al-Qaeda got the world’s attention, and how, with the slaughter and disfigurement of thousands in New York and Washington. Was the Bali butchery merely another headline grabber? Terrorists know that headlines sow fear and distress and anger. They inflame cultural and ethnic differences. Because they are loud and short, they often ignore the important and advance the unimportant to a prominent position. Headlines scream loudest of a world in turmoil.
It is in this that the dispassionate terrorist becomes truly terrible. His bombs are designed to set peace-loving communities at each other’s throats, to inflame ancient rivalries and rekindle old disputes. He himself cannot have the slightest inkling of where these new confrontations will lead. He cannot be sure of any benefits to the cause which he is dishonoring with his support. He can only be certain that on all sides, there will be more death and misery and every other horror of conflict.
But this does not stop him. He has gone past sympathy and care for even his own people, into an icy-hearted no-man’s land where normal human feelings do not reach. This is indeed where terrorism steps up on to a plane where it becomes immensely difficult both to comprehend and target. Decent society has no arguments which will mean anything to such killers. They have become dedicated butchers, blind, deaf and dumb to all reason and all decency.
And the real victim of their crime must be the cause they seek to support.
