This is yet another book I’ve discovered via listening to ABC’s Conversations.
The subtitle of Bomb Season in Jakarta is A personal account of a turbulent period in Australian diplomacy, and Grant Dooley is not kidding when he writes this. Back in 2004, Dooley and his family had moved to Indonesia to start a three year stint working at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. This was a few years after the 1999 East Timorese crisis and only two years after the 2002 Bali Bombings, Indonesia’s worst terror attack on record. Things were rough there, and Australia and Indonesia’s diplomatic relations were still choppy, to put it lightly. In addition, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the group that claimed responsibility for the Bali event, was still active. Dooley was aware of the tight security situation and the fact that this was not going to be a quiet embassy posting.
Even with the knowledge that the Australians were moving their residential compound closer to the Embassy due to potential bomb threats, I doubt Dooley could have predicted that he would have to be dealing with the aftermath of a terrorist attack so soon. Dooley was still undergoing language training on the 9th September 2004, when he dropped by the embassy to pick up his election observer badge; Indonesia was about to have its first proper direct presidential election, and Dooley was to be an observer.
And then, just as he was turning to leave, the bomb went off, partially destroying the embassy compound. And Dooley found himself acting as a first responder. No Australians were killed; many embassy staff were probably saved from the worst of the bomb due to the fact that in the aftermath of a shooting a number of years earlier, all the windows and doors had been replaced with bullet-proof glass. Sadly, eleven people were killed in total. And all were Jakarta locals.
Dooley’s account is written in the first person present, so it feels like you are reading about the aftermath of the bombing in real time—and Dooley’s thought process as well. His wife, Kirsten, is also a high ranking official at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and their two young kids are in Jakarta with them. Many of his co-workers are in shock; Dooley is probably not much better, going by his own account. But he still has work that need to be done; medical care needs to be arranged for those that were injured—Australian and local workers both. The press has started to descend, and the foreign minister, Alexander Downer, will of course, be flying out. Dooley ends his day having a breakdown in the street out the front of a local hospital.
But this is not the only major event that occurs during Dooley’s three year posting. It’s A personal account of a turbulent period, after all. The 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami occurs only a few months later. This is also the same period in which Schapelle Corby and the Bali Nine—all Australians—are arrested on drug charges. Corby gets the lion’s share of the media attention, but it’s the Bali Nine case that’s more serious; the death penalty was fully expected to come to play at this time*.
You wouldn’t think that things could get any more harrowing than Dooley’s first days at work though. You would be wrong. In the aftermath of the crash of Garuda Flight 200 in Yogyakarta on March 7, 2007, near the end of his placement, Dooley found himself acting as a first responder yet again. This time it’s even worse; twenty one people have been killed. And five of them he knows personally; his friends and colleagues. Dooley had only made the decision to fly in a day earlier at the last moment. He himself could have been on that plane.
While all these events are harrowing, they are not the only focus of the book. Dooley gives us plenty of detail about the day-to-day lives of the diplomats and what people got up to in their down time. Football was a huge focus, along with dress up parties. The atmosphere does come across as a bit bloke-y at times, but honestly, not at all surprised by that. There is also a lot of talk about Jakarta as a city as well; it it almost as if the Big Durian was a character in and of itself. And what Dooley says here about working in Jakarta tracks well with what a friend who works in the German diplomatic service has told me about her experiences in the city, so maybe not much has changed in the last 15-20 years.
There are also some fantastic insights here into the politics behind the choices made by diplomats in their line of work. This was most clear in the chapters about the 2004 Tsunami. Why, you might ask yourself, would the media or the foreign minister have you spending so much time chasing down the whereabouts of one lost Australian surfer when there are Acehnese who have lost their entire families? Why would some poor old diplomat be sent on a wild goose chase trying to clear the import of elephant suppositories? Let me assure you, these are not choices they’ve made themselves; you just can’t ignore instructions that come from higher up. And higher ups frequently don’t have their feet on the ground. A recipe for questionable priorities.
Some of these decisions come across as especially insane once you consider all the delicate moving parts in the aftermath. And they really are delicate. Within days of the tsunami, the Australian government announced a five-year, $1 billion assistance package to Indonesia. In addition, a lot of well meaning people—in many countries—attempted to make donations to assist those who had lost everything in the disaster. This is a huge amount of money, and care needs to be taken to make sure it is handled correctly.
During this period, I remember some whispers from some members of the Australian public insinuating that there was a lack of immediate gratitude from those receiving the benefits of the donations. And other complaints of a lack of transparency in regards to aid money. Dooley does quite a bit here to explain what’s happened on the ground during this time; sometimes it is very hard to organize the transport and distribution of goods to a disaster ravaged area if all the basic infrastructure has been destroyed. If the ports are not operational, your second hand goods are probably not going directly to the people in need. And if you sent the very Muslim Acehnese cans of Spam… well, that’s probably not going to be very welcome. You should have thought that through a little better.
This is why so many charities ask you for money and not goods!
One thing that Dooley also mentions here that I felt went underreported (I think, very deliberately, on both sides) was that there was a thirty year long insurgency in Banda Aceh that was still going on at the time the tsunami struck. I only knew about it because our high school Indonesian language teacher took the time to explain this to us**. Yes, trying to provide aid to a region that has been undergoing a long civil war is going to be a difficult process. And the details behind that are probably not going to be put out in the open, for security reasons.
Yes, I’m a little cross about the elephant suppositories on the embassy’s behalf.***
Despite the often horrific events described in this book, I found Bomb Season in Jakarta utterly absorbing. I finished the audiobook in three days. The book was very well narrated, and effort has been put in here to get the Indonesian pronunciations right. And take the piss out of some rather annoying countrymen. An excellent read—if not exactly an excellent ad for working for DFAT.
And I hope Dooley and his family are doing well now.
For cbr17bingo, this is B. For Bomb.