“Sometimes I was happy and laughed, but now that almost never happens,” Nyoman Rencini tells Dateline in part one of Meet the Terrorists. “My laughter isn’t real, it’s not pure. It’s just a show I put on for people.”
She found it especially difficult to come to terms with the death of her taxi driver husband Ketut. He’d been waiting on Legian Street when the bombings happened.
It took two months for her to receive confirmation of his death, leaving her to bring up their three children alone.
Nyoman (left) and fellow widow Ni Luh Erniati at the Bali bombing memorial in Kuta. Source: SBS
“Why did the teacher give them this knowledge to destroy things?” she asks the man who trained the Bali bombers, Nasir Abbas, in a meeting also attended by another widow, Ni Luh Erniati.
But what will she say to the man who drove the van containing one of the bombs?
“People said he’d be half-man, half-animal,” she says when she meets Ali Imron in part two of the story.
“Some friends told me to take a knife or other sharp object and use it on the perpetrators, but my conscience wouldn’t let me do anything so cruel.”
During the meeting with Imron at a Jakarta prison, Nyoman carries her husband’s photo with her.
Nyoman breaks down during one of the meetings, as she hears the story behind the bombing that killed her husband. Source: SBS
“Isn’t he handsome? I don’t cry because he was handsome,” she says clutching the picture.
“It’s time I forgot about things that are in the past, but to be honest, in my heart I still can’t accept it.”
