‘I hear a soft moaning': Inside the chaos of the 2004 Jakarta embassy bombing

Sydney Morning Herald

3 days ago

Peering through the smoke, I discern a figure on the edge of the garden's small pond. As I get closer, I recognise Johno, my DFAT colleague, fellow Bintang [local AFL club member] and all-round good guy. He is struggling to drag a limp figure from the pond's water. Cautiously navigating my way through the tangled mess of vegetation, I arrive at Johno's side. 'Let me help you, mate.' I place the first aid bags on the ground and grab one arm of the motionless body. Johno turns and looks at me but doesn't say a word. His eyes have a blank stare.
Together we pull, dragging the limp body clear of the water. I'm shocked to discover it's the embassy gardener, Suryadi, a gentle soul with whom I often practised my ­limited Bahasa while my language instructor took a smoko. Suryadi is alive, just. A quick scan of his body doesn't reveal any obvious injuries, but his heavy wheezing indicates he's struggling to breathe. I grab the first aid bag and pull out the face mask and small oxygen tank. Cradling his head, I place the mask on his face and turn on the tank.
Suddenly, Suryadi starts convulsing in my arms, his oxygen mask full of foam. I rip off the mask, revealing a steady stream of foamy bubbles flowing from his mouth. He must have severe internal trauma, no doubt caused by the force of the blast. He's in desperate need of proper medical attention.
As I cradle Suryadi, the anguished cries of others become clearly audible. I start to panic. What do I do? Do I stay with Suryadi until help arrives? Or do I go to help the other injured victims in front of the embassy? I'm so close, their tortured cries begin to haunt me.
A couple of guys from the embassy's defence section arrive. With their own medical kits, they are better prepared to care for Suryadi. (Later, I returned to find Suryadi still alive, barely breathing, and with some embassy colleagues helped lift his limp body onto a steel gurney and carry it to the waiting ambulance.)
Picking up the first aid bag containing the bandages, I start running towards the small security post at the front gate. Entering the severely damaged security post via the back door, I find my way blocked by the wreckage of the bag X-ray machine and other debris. I clear a path and scramble through the front entrance onto the embassy driveway. Everywhere I look, I see the dead, the mutilated, the dying. My small bag of bandages is hopelessly inadequate.
A short distance in front of me, the mangled torsos of dead Indonesian security officers, some missing arms or legs or both, lie spread across the driveway, their bodies distorted into unnatural arrangements like crumpled rag dolls. On the road itself, a motor­cycle is on fire, its rider trapped screaming and burning ­beneath. To the right of that is what appears to be a large bomb crater, and more charred bodies, some still smouldering.
I cover her body with some metal sheeting; dignity in death is the most I can offer.
A muffled moan at my feet snaps me out of my state of frightened paralysis. It's a small girl with a large gash bleeding profusely from her side. As I squat down and reach into my bag for a bandage, an Indonesian man appears out of nowhere, scoops her up in his arms and whisks her away, to the medical clinic just down the road, I hope.
The girl now gone, I see a woman, her face, naked torso and legs badly disfigured, lying about a foot away. I reach down to check her pulse, more for confirmation than hope. She's dead. I cover her body with some metal sheeting; dignity in death is the most I can offer. I hear someone howling in pain from the direction of a shattered police security post, about 10 metres away.
As I get close, I realise the anguished sound is ­emanating from the open drain behind the post. But before I reach it, another Indonesian man appears. Kneeling down, he lunges into the drain, as if to pick something up. He emerges holding a shorn-off arm, which he places on the ground next to him. He then reaches back in and pulls a critically injured policeman, minus an arm, over the lip of the drain and onto the footpath. Another two men suddenly appear, ­picking up the injured policeman and carrying him away, trailed by the original rescuer bearing the ­detached arm.
As I watch them go, my vision widens to reveal a large crowd of onlookers gathered on Jalan Rasuna Said about 20 metres away. Just standing there, ­silently. Turning slowly to my right, I find I'm surrounded by hundreds of these silent, motionless sentinels.
Out of the corner of my right eye, I again see the burning motorcycle, its rider still trapped. I grab some shredded tarpaulin from the shattered frame of the police post, hoping to douse the fire and pull the rider clear. But as I get close, the blistered and charred skin of the motionless rider indicates how futile this probably is. Undeterred, I cover the motorcycle with the tarpaulin, successfully smothering the fire, and then start a hopeful search for the rider's pulse. First the neck and then his limp wrist. Nothing.
One of the bystanders approaches me, newspaper in hand. He unfolds it, handing me some sheets. Silently, we cover the rider's scorched remains. As we do so, out of nowhere, an Indonesian policeman accosts me. Yelling and waving his arms, he's obviously not happy. But I have no idea what he's saying. Then he starts pointing at the embassy, bellowing, 'Go, go, go,' in staccato English. I'm not sure if he's concerned about my safety or just annoyed with my presence. But the message is clear: Go!
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And it appears he may not be the only one who wants me to leave. The large and growing crowd of bystanders is starting to get edgy. Once deathly silent, a low rumble is now clearly audible and growing with intensity, interspersed with the odd angry shout. I'm not sure who the anger is directed at, but the tension in the air is palpable.
Suddenly, I feel very vulnerable. Who's to say some of the terrorists who perpetrated the bombing, or at least those sympathetic to their cause, are not dotted throughout the large crowd now surrounding me? The mere thought sets my pulse racing, triggering a quick dash back across the road towards the embassy gate.
The crowd has now swelled into the hundreds, and the police are struggling to keep them under control. The situation is volatile.
I take a deep breath, closing my eyes. I'm exhausted. The adrenaline that has sustained me in the aftermath of the blast is ebbing away. And then I cry. First softly, before descending into body-shaking sobs, my face buried deep in my hands. My emotions finally unlocked by the tragedy that surrounds me. Dead. They're all bloody dead. I couldn't save anyone. What was I thinking? Me and a small bag of bandages. What a failure. What a f---ing failure.
Eleven dead, including the suicide bomber, and more than 200 injured, some critically, was the ­bombing's grim tally. Of the victims, two were ­embassy workers, including, to my great distress, the gardener Suryadi. The other was Sujarwo, a 23-year-old security guard stationed outside the embassy's front gate alongside his Indonesian police counterparts, of whom four died. Of the remaining victims, innocent bystanders all, two were the young Indonesian mother whose body I covered on the embassy driveway, and the Indonesian motorcycle rider whose body I also covered on the road out front. Both had been in the wrong place at the wrong time: the mother waiting in the visa line with her young daughter, and the motorcycle rider ­unlucky enough to be passing the embassy when the truck bomb detonated.
The bombing was a seminal moment in my life's journey. How could it not be? One doesn't experience such trauma without it leaving an indelible scar on one's soul. My life would never be the same again.
Unfortunately, the bombing was just one terrible disaster in a series of disastrous events that would ­consume me, Kristan and our young family in the next few years. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that devastated the northern Indonesian province of Aceh, killing, maiming and displacing hundreds of thousands, was the next major catastrophe. This was followed by bomb threats, being caught in an Islamist militant riot and the discovery of a terrorist website detailing the 'best places to assassinate Australian diplomats'. If normality existed in Jakarta, it did so only in the short interludes between the end of one unexpected crisis and the onset of the next.
But somehow, we persevered. Personal resilience, the ­support of friends and colleagues in the expatriate and embassy communities and black humour all played their part. Such antidotes, however, can only sustain one for so long. By early 2007, the grinding pressure of Jakarta's unpredictable and inherently dangerous security environment had taken its toll. Our nerves were shot. The problem was we were in denial and determined to serve out the remaining months of our posting to Jakarta.
Given my proximity to the bombing and plane crash, it was hardly surprising that I suffered a severe panic attack.
The crash of Garuda Flight 200 in Yogyakarta on March 7, 2007, changed all that. The crash killed 21, including five friends and embassy colleagues. I was supposed to be on the plane. But, in a twist of fate, I made a late decision to change my flight and flew to Yogyakarta the day before. I arrived at the airport shortly after the disaster and went straight to the crash site with the hope that all, or at least some of my friends and colleagues, had survived. It was a forlorn hope. I spent the rest of the morning next to the plane's burning wreck, waiting for their bodies to be recovered and co-ordinating the search for Australian survivors in the nearby hospitals. I'm still haunted by what I heard and witnessed on that longest of days.
Given my close proximity to the bombing, plane crash and other traumatic events, it was hardly ­surprising that I suffered a severe panic attack in October 2019. The strange thing is, when the attack occurred, it was quite unexpected. To be sure, in the immediate aftermath of each of these terrible events I had experienced semi-regular bouts of nightmares. But these had waned over time, to the point where I had convinced myself that, somehow, I had escaped the trauma of Jakarta unscathed. The 2019 panic attack brought that little fallacy crashing down, and I had no choice but to confront the hard reality of my fragile mental state. Writing Bomb Season in Jakarta was a giant cathartic step in my rebuilding process.
One question I often get asked is: could the embassy bombing happen again? It would be easy to say yes. Parts of Indonesian society still support radical Islamic conservatism. But the answer is not that simple, and there is ample cause for hope. At the time of the bombing in 2004, Australia's relationship with Indonesia was fractious. Suspicions abounded on both sides due to a series of historical events that had plagued the bilateral relationship. For Australia, the fate of the Balibo Five [five Australian-based journalists who were killed in East Timor in 1975] continued to stir deep passions, while Australia's ­intervention in East Timor in the late '90s was a major irritant for the Indonesians.
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The terrible spate of bombings in the early 2000s, particularly the Bali and embassy bombings, and Australia's generosity in the wake of the devastation wrought on Aceh by the Boxing Day tsunami, while tragic, were the circuit-breakers the bilateral relationship sorely needed. On the former, the Australian Federal Police's concerted effort to forge an effective working relationship with their Indonesian counterparts directly resulted in the arrests or deaths of the key radical Islamist leaders behind the bombings and the long-term degradation of their networks. And the Howard government's decision, alongside the outpouring of compassion from the Australian public, to contribute $1 billion for the reconstruction of Aceh was an outstretched hand of friendship that recast the bilateral relationship in an instant.
As a result of these terrible events, and Australia and Indonesia's joint efforts in response, the two countries have been able to develop a level of mutual trust that was previously absent. It's a hard-won trust that sustains the mature bilateral relationship we have today and provides important ballast when managing the periodic tensions that invariably arise.