The horrific atrocity at Bali, which claimed the lives of
so many innocent young people, a large proportion of them
Australians, is the latest example of the evil of terrorism.
The world saw it on September 11 last year in New York, and
before that, 30 years of the same sort of terrorism in Northern
Ireland.
The only difference between the atrocities in New York and
Bali and those in Northern Ireland in events like La Mon House,
Kingsmill, Shankill, Enniskillen, Omagh, Donegall Street,
and the Oxford Street bus station was the scale of the atrocity.
Otherwise, it was the same scenario – the horribly mutilated
and burned remains of the victims being retrieved from charred
buildings. The world recalled with horror the sight of human
remains being scraped off the roadway in July 1972 after Bloody
Friday, and the same thing at La Mon House, a building reduced
to ashes by an I.R.A. firebomb.
Sadly, the 3,500 deaths in Northern Ireland from the Troubles,
60 per cent of them caused by the I.R.A., failed to make the
same impact on the world as the New York and Bali atrocities.
But security chiefs and experts on terrorism who studied the
Ulster murders had no doubt that this would be the forerunner
of similar terrorist attacks throughout the world.
Terrorists may have diverse loyalties and operate under their
own national identities, but they share a common modus operandi
– the inflicting of huge casualties on unsuspecting people,
whether military or civilian, to further their cause. They
are bedfellows in a terrible cause, and their means of achieving
political objectives can never be justified.
The car bomb at Bali was the same type of devilish device
which reduced many Ulster towns and villages to rubble in
the 1970s and 1980s, and no doubt its horrific effects were
studied by terrorists in other countries who have adopted
the same tactic to suit their purpose.
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