He taught his brothers, the Bali bombers, how to make bombs. She lost her husband in the attack. Can they reconcile? By KristenGelineau
Ni Luh Erniati, left, laughs with Ali Fauzi during her visit to Fauzi's house in Tenggulun, East Java, Indonesia, on Saturday, April 27, 2019. Erniati, whose husband was killed in the 2002 Bali bombings, and Fauzi, a former bombmaker whose brothers helped orchestrate the Bali attack, have reconciled as part of a peacebuilding program bringing together ex-terrorists and victims.
What would happen a decade later between her and Amrozi’s brother — the man who had taught Amrozi how to make bombs — was unthinkable in that moment. Unthinkable that they would come face to face in a delicate attempt at reconciliation. Unthinkable that they would try to find the humanity in each other.
“It’s difficult for everyone to go through this,” says Gema Varona, a Spanish researcher who studied reconciliation meetings between militants from the Basque separatist group ETA and their victims. “But it makes sense, because in terrorism, victims have been objectified. … So we need that empathy.” As a father, Gede was kind and doting. He took the family to play soccer at Kuta Beach, and to their favorite park. That park is the source of one of Erniati’s most precious memories: of her younger son Made taking his first steps and starting to tumble, and of Gede catching him.
When he didn’t, she grew frantic. She wanted to search for him, but couldn’t leave their sons — aged 9 and 1 — home alone. So Erniati, a Hindu, prayed for Gede until a friend arrived to watch the boys. As she sped toward the club on another friend’s motorbike, she reassured herself: “My husband is alive. My husband is alive.”
“We probably identified about 70% of him,” the officer replied. They had not found his head or his forearms or his abdomen or anything from the knees down. He was raised in the east Java village of Tenggulun, which would become an epicenter of Islamic extremism. His radicalization, he says, was heavily influenced by his big brother Ali Ghufron. Ghufron, who often went by the alias Mukhlas, studied at an Islamic boarding school under the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah.
Four years earlier, a suicide bomber had detonated his devices in the Jakarta JW Marriott lobby lounge, where then-33-year-old Boon was attending a business breakfast. Police suspected the attack had been orchestrated by Jemaah Islamiyah. Fauzi, meanwhile, had been working to help deradicalize Islamic militants across Indonesia. Which is how he ended up shaking hands with Boon at a terrorism awareness conference in 2013.
At the airport the next day, Fauzi sailed through security. But Boon’s prosthetic legs set off the metal detector, forcing him to endure a pat-down. Boon turned to Fauzi and quipped: “So the former terrorist they let walk through, but the victim they have to control.”They had found the humanity in each other. Boon could only hope that when the others met Fauzi, they would find the same.Erniati was filling her plate at a hotel buffet when Fauzi first approached her. Her heart pounded.
But now, staring at Fauzi inside the hotel where she and four other victims had gathered to meet him, she had no idea what to ask.Erniati bristled. How could he smile after what he had done?“I’m sorry,” he said. “I apologize for what my brothers and my friends have done.”They hate me, he thought.That night, Fauzi couldn’t sleep. He lay in bed, fretting over what to say to Erniati and the others at their first official meeting.
What he said meant less to her than what he felt. To Erniati, apologies are just words. But the ability to understand another person’s suffering, she says, goes to the core of who you are.Fauzi excused himself to wash his tearstained face. When he returned, he told his own story, about his path in and out of radical ideology, and his commitment to peace.Fauzi understood. Were the situation reversed, he says, he doubts he would be as accepting as Boon and Erniati.
When she arrived at Fauzi’s home, however, she found it reassuringly normal. There was laundry scattered around, just like at her house. Fauzi introduced her to his wife and children and showed her his goats.
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