FUNNY HOW A BOMBING CHANGES YOUR POLICY, EH?

Australia: awakes: It used to be a minor international player, but the Bali blast and action in the Solomons have changed that. (Nick Squires, 10 August 2003, Sunday Herald)

They were on the scene within hours of Tuesday’s devastating car bomb outside the five-star Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. Dressed in blue boiler suits and wraparound sunglasses, a dozen Australian police officers picked their way through the twisted metal, mangled body parts and shattered glass which littered the hotel’s horseshoe-shaped forecourt.

Along with their Indonesian counterparts, they began the painstaking task of looking for clues as to who detonated the bomb that killed 10 people and injured around 140 others.

Four years ago such co-operation would have been unthinkable. Not only did Indonesia have a deep distrust of Australia, arising from Canberra’s intervention in the bloody separatist conflict in East Timor, it denied it had a terrorist problem at all.

But the wounds left by Australia’s prompt and muscular military intervention against pro-Jakarta, anti- independence militias in East Timor in 1999 have begun to heal.

And Indonesia’s president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, has finally faced up to the threat posed by Islamic militants based in the sprawling archipelago.

In a speech to the nation’s top legislative body early this month, she admitted that home-grown terrorist groups posed “a terrifying threat” that had to be “cut off at the roots”.

Australia and Indonesia, despite lingering cultural, political and historical differences, have rarely been closer. [...]

The relationship began to improve, ironically, after the fireballs that engulfed the Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar in Bali last October, killing 202 people, 88 of them Australian.

That's a strange place to insert the word "ironically". Of course the attention of these two governments was seized by the bombing. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 17, 2003 6:53 PM