Kuta – Indonesian Vice-President Hamzah Haz yesterday paid his first visit to the scene of the devastating Bali bombing and said the attackers aimed to break up the country and wreck its economy.
"This action is uncivilised, it's aimed to break up Indonesia and to paralyse the economy," said Mr Hamzah, who until the Bali bombing had denied the existence of terrorism in the country.
"They don't want to see any recovery in the Indonesian economy and want to distance Indonesia from the rest of the world." He told reporters that the nightclub bombing, in which more than 190 are confirmed dead, would deal "a severe blow" to the economy, both in the resort island and the rest of the country.
"We'll face tremendous economic pressure into 2003. Whoever is the terrorist, whoever is involved in the attack, including ulema, we will not protect them or forgive them," he said, in reference to Muslim religious scholars.
Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, whom Mr Hamzah supported previously, is under detention in hospital. Police are waiting for him to recover from respiratory and other problems so that they can question him on earlier bombings and an alleged plot to assassinate Ms Megawati Sukarnoputri before she became President.
Mr Hamzah, who leads the country's largest Islamic party, is acting head of state while Ms Megawati attends an Asia-Pacific summit in Mexico.
Asked if he believed that terrorists exist in Indonesia, he replied: "It is clear there are terrorists with this attack." He was scheduled to go on to Sanglah hospital where most of the injured are being treated. He had visited Bashir's boarding school at Solo in Central Java earlier this year and declared afterwards that there was no Islamic terrorist network in Indonesia. The Bali blast is seen as having damaged his political standing.
"The government urges that statements that are not objective, that there are no terrorists in Indonesia, should not be repeated again," Top Security Minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said shortly after the bombing, in an apparent rebuke to Mr Hamzah.