BALI'S police chief has called for calm amid a phone-message campaign urging Balinese Hindus to kill all Muslims on the island in retaliation for the triple suicide bombings by suspected Islamic extremists. A mobile phone text message received by the AAP wire news service urges Balinese people to "wake up from a long sleep".The majority-Hindu holiday island had been invaded by Muslim settlers, mostly from neighbouring Java, the message says. Calling on all recipients to gather en masse and attack Muslim street-food sellers and anyone else of Islamic faith, it reads: "Destroy the Bali destroyers from outside Bali. We'll burn a group of Muslim bakso (meatball) traders, Muslim satay sellers and anyone else with Muslim identity," the anonymous text says. Raze to the ground all these groups so they won't live in Bali. We ask for your support."
It did not give a date, but circulated a day before the main Muslim prayer day of Friday. A similar text campaign last week urging Balinese to gather together and demand the immediate executions of the original Bali bombers was answered by more than 2,000 people and turned into a violent demonstration that had to be countered by riot police.
Bali police chief General Made Mangku Pastika said the text campaign threatened Bali's bomb-battered reputation for religious tolerance, warning it could turn Bali into a new Ambon. The eastern province of Maluku based in Ambon was wracked by a five-year conflict between Muslims and Christian bloodshed in the late 1990s and 2000, attracting extremist Islamic militias into Ambon from other parts of Indonesia. Bali counts almost 3 million Hindus and only 186,000 Muslims, an anomaly in the world's most-populous Muslim nation, which counts 180 million people of Islamic faith.
"I'm worried that terrorists have successfully used the situation," Pastika told the Bali Post newspaper. "It would not only be Bali which would be destroyed, because the whole of Indonesia would be paralysed. This SMS (text) with the scent of tribal, customs, race and religious intolerance is a new model of terror to make the situation in Bali worse." Pastika said he planned to meet immediately with senior representatives from all religions in Bali to keep a lid on fresh outbreaks of violence in the emotionally charged atmosphere after the latest attacks, which killed 20 innocent people, among them four Australians.
After the 2002 bombings, Bali's Government also boosted the powers of village guards, known as pecalang, to search strangers and immigrant workers, angering many Muslim residents. "Thank God, up to now, we haven't received any reports from Balinese communities which have been provoked," Pastika said. "This is what we expect and we hope once more Balinese people will not be persuaded with this call."