BALI, INDONESIA, November 15, 2002: Amid charred vehicles and piles of rubble, Balinese worshippers presented elaborate offerings of grain and fruit in a cleansing ceremony Friday at the site of last month’s nightclub bombings in Bali. The Hindu ceremony was also attended by ministers, ambassadors and victims’ families. Other rituals were performed on a nearby beach in the tourist town of Kuta. Religious leaders sprinkled the bombing site with holy water and burned incense next to pictures of the victims. After the terrorist blasts, Balinese elders and religious leaders consulted sacred texts and decided to hold Friday’s ceremony to “place the souls of the victims in the correct plane, to purify them and show them the right way to enter the next cycle,” said Ngurah Gede, one of the organizers. The ceremony is “a very specialized ceremony that has never happened before,” he added. The ceremony is done following war. Smaller ceremonies led by Balinese Hindus also were being held Friday and Saturday at the site of the World Trade Center attack in New York and in London, Sydney, Toronto and San Francisco. Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation, though Bali is predominantly Hindu.
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