Demolition man !

Survivors of the Bali bombing and relatives of those killed will have mixed feelings about the twenty year sentence handed down to Umar Patek, the master bomb maker who helped construct the car bomb used in the October 12, 2002 blast.

Known as " Demolition Man", Patek admits that he helped construct the bomb that killed two hundred and two people, eighty eight of them Australian.   He expressed regret for his past actions and it was noticeable that he sat quietly throughout the long hearings and there were no outbursts of Islamic tirades against westerners or perceived injustices.  This was obviously taken into account by the presiding judges.

Patek is forty-five years old and with good behaviour and parole, he will probably be released after fifteen years of incarceration.  If he walks out the prison gate at age sixty he will have served a vastly lesser punishment than the execution carried out on Amrozi, Mukhlas and Iman Sumudra, the  three people who actually placed and detonated the bomb.

This October will bring the tenth anniversary of the bombing and much has changed in Indonesia in that time. The Indonesian state has cracked down hard on terrorist cells and on the wider scene al Qaeda has taken some powerful hits with the elimination of Osama bin Laden and many of his key associates.  Terrorist cells are still active in Africa and the Middle East, but the former frenetic energy is missing from the Indonesian scene.

If that is the sign of some form of truce it is welcome.  Indonesia is one of our closest neighbours and the fact that it is a predominantly Muslim country should be no obstacle to a close trading relationship. We fought a bitter war with Japan within living memory and now that country is one of our biggest trading partners. Hopefully,  Indonesian religious activists may be starting to realise that Australia poses no threat to their religion and that the only hope for world peace is a world where many religions live in peace with one another.

The tenth anniversary of the Bali bombing may be the time to draw a line.   The guilty have been punished - and now the world has moved on.