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Subject: Article from AP, Aussies Mourn Bali Victims
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 01:44:45 -0400

Aussies Mourn Bali Attack Victims

By EMMA TINKLER
Associated Press Writer

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) â?" Relatives and friends nervously sit by phones
waiting for news of missing loved ones. Others clutch photos and dental
records as they travel to hospitals and morgues. Some pray and leave
flowers and notes where a terrorist attack on a Bali nightclub ended nearly
200 lives.

The same anguish that poured across the United States after the Sept. 11
attacks now washes over Australia, whose citizens are believed to be the
vast majority of the victims of Saturday's bombings.

``Oct. 12, 2002, was Australia's 9/11,'' wrote columnist Piers Akerman in
Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper.
AP/JOHN MOKRZYCKI [21K]

With most of the mutilated and burned bodies still unidentified, dozens of
anxious family members have flown to the Indonesian island of Bali, and
many expect the worst.

``It's day-by-day for as long as it takes to find him,'' said David
Marshall, whose father was inside the packed Sari Club disco when a massive
car bomb exploded just before midnight Saturday. ``We are not coming home
without him.''

By Wednesday, 30 of the 39 bodies identified so far were Australians, while
scores more Australians were unaccounted for.

``The Australian death toll will rise considerably as the authorities work
through and further identification takes place in relation to the
missing,'' a grave Prime Minister John Howard told Parliament in the
capital, Canberra.
AP/Muchtar Zakaria [19K]

Howard and other Australian officials believe the Bali bombings may be the
work of a shadowy pan-Asian Islamic group, Jemaah Islamiyah, said to have
links to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

Before Saturday's bombings, Australians had believed their democratic,
multicultural and relatively crime-free way of life, along with geographic
isolation from the world's trouble spots, would keep them immune from such
horror.

Just a four-hour flight from northern Australia, Bali had long been
considered a safe playground for Australians. Hundreds of thousands have
traveled there over the past three decades, a fact the Australian rock band
Redgum parlayed into a hit song, ``I've been to Bali too.''

Australian networks have given blanket coverage to the aftermath of the
Bali bombings, with footage of families and friends weeping, posting photos
of missing loved ones on hospital walls and laying flowers at the blast site.
AP/Brian Cassy [25K]

Across the country, flags fly at half-staff and churches hold memorial
services. The government has declared Sunday a national day of mourning.

Americans who were touched by Australia's response to their pain on Sept.
11 now send messages of support.

``The war has come to you,'' wrote Douglas Eifert, of Fort Shafter, Hawaii,
in a letter to The Australian newspaper. ``When you start chasing down the
terrorists who did this, you can expect our help.''

A staunch ally of the United States, Howard warned after Sept. 11 that
Australia might one day be attacked in the same way. The nightclub bombings
proved him tragically correct.

``People should get out of their minds that it (terrorism) can't happen
here. It can, and it has happened to our own on our doorstep,'' Howard said
Monday.

``This attack, its scale, its horror and its proximity, the fact that Bali
is in a sense almost a little Australian colony, will bring home to people
that terrorism is something we need to deal with here,'' said Hugh White,
who heads an independent think tank, the Strategic Policy Institute.

For some, that reality has already sunk in.

Dianne Salvatori, whose daughter-in-law, Kathy, was killed in the Bali
bombings, says she can now empathize with those who died in New York,
Washington and Pennsylvania 13 months ago.

``You hear of Sept. 11 and how our hearts went out and how we cried. But
until it comes, hits your own family, you don't really, truly understand
how those people did feel,'' Salvatori said.