Truth is rarely heard

No Literary Elegance or Flamboyant Imagery on this Night
by Duane Locke (b. 1921)

Truth is rarely heard
If one spends his time
With priests, professors, and the people.

But the truth exists, although truth
Is rarely known by anyone.
Oaks can speak truth.

Castoff objects like broken beer bottles;
Frogs, sparrows, stones can speak truth,
Most people are deaf when truth is spoken.

The hearing of people improves,
They hear acutely what is said
When lies and illusions are spoken.

People clap their hands
When they look in mirrors, see mirages.

Lost from the Baghdad museum: truth

Lost from the Baghdad museum: truth
by David Aaronovitch, The Guardian
Tuesday June 10, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,974193,00.html

Civilians inspect Torah scrolls stored in the vault of the National Museum in Baghdad

When, back in mid-April, the news first arrived of the looting at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, words hardly failed anyone. No fewer than 170,000 items had, it was universally reported, been stolen or destroyed, representing a large proportion of Iraq's tangible culture. And it had all happened as some US troops stood by and watched, and others had guarded the oil ministry.

So, there's the picture: 100,000-plus priceless items looted either under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem with it is that it's nonsense. It isn't true. It's made up. It's bollocks.

Not all of it, of course. There was some looting and damage to a small number of galleries and storerooms, and that is grievous enough. But over the past six weeks it has gradually become clear that most of the objects which had been on display in the museum galleries were removed before the war. Some of the most valuable went into bank vaults, where they were discovered last week. Eight thousand more have been found in 179 boxes hidden "in a secret vault". And several of the larger and most remarked items seem to have been spirited away long before the Americans arrived in Baghdad.

Professors wrote articles. Professor Michalowski of Michigan argued that this was "a tragedy that has no parallel in world history; it is as if the Uffizi, the Louvre, or all the museums of Washington DC had been wiped out in one fell swoop". Professor Zinab Bahrani from Columbia University claimed that, "By April 12 the entire museum had been looted," and added, "Blame must be placed with the Bush administration for a catastrophic destruction of culture unparalleled in modern history." From Edinburgh Professor Trevor Watkins lamented that, "The loss of Iraq's cultural heritage will go down in history - like the burning of the Library at Alexandria - and Britain and the US will be to blame." Others used phrases such as cultural genocide and compared the US in particular to the Mongol invaders of 13th-century Iraq.

Back in Baghdad there was anger. On April 14, Dr Donny George, the museum's director of research, was distraught. The museum had housed the leading collection of the continuous history of mankind, "And it's gone, and it's lost. If Marines had started [protecting the museum] before, none of this would have happened. It's too late. It's no use. It's no use."

A few weeks later - in London to address a meeting at the British Museum - George was interviewed for this newspaper by Neal Ascherson. George, said Ascherson, did not throw blame around, but did remark that most of the looters responsible for the damage were not educated.

On June 1, George was reported in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag as reiterating that witnesses had seen US soldiers enter the museum on April 9, stay inside two hours and leave with some objects. When asked whether he believed that the US military and international art thieves had been acting in concert, George replied that a year earlier, at a meeting in a London restaurant, someone (unnamed) had told him that he couldn't wait till he could go inside the National Museum with US soldiers and give it a good pillage - ie, yes.

So, there's the picture: 100,000-plus priceless items looted either under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem with it is that it's nonsense. It isn't true. It's made up. It's bollocks.

Not all of it, of course. There was some looting and damage to a small number of galleries and storerooms, and that is grievous enough. But over the past six weeks it has gradually become clear that most of the objects which had been on display in the museum galleries were removed before the war. Some of the most valuable went into bank vaults, where they were discovered last week. Eight thousand more have been found in 179 boxes hidden "in a secret vault". And several of the larger and most remarked items seem to have been spirited away long before the Americans arrived in Baghdad.

George is now quoted as saying that that items lost could represent "a small percentage" of the collection and blamed shoddy reporting for the exaggeration.

"There was a mistake," he said. "Someone asked us what is the number of pieces in the whole collection. We said over 170,000, and they took that as the number lost. Reporters came in and saw empty shelves and reached the conclusion that all was gone. But before the war we evacuated all of the small pieces and emptied the showcases except for fragile or heavy material that was difficult to move."

This indictment of world journalism has caused some surprise to those who listened to George and others speak at the British Museum meeting. One art historian, Dr Tom Flynn, now speaks of his "great bewilderment". "Donny George himself had ample opportunity to clarify to the best of [his] knowledge the extent of the looting and the likely number of missing objects," says Flynn. "Is it not a little strange that quite so many journalists went away with the wrong impression, while Mr George made little or not attempt to clarify the context of the figure of 170,000 which he repeated with such regularity and gusto before, during, and after that meeting." To Flynn it is also odd that George didn't seem to know that pieces had been taken into hiding or evacuated. "There is a queasy subtext here if you bother to seek it out," he suggests.

On Sunday night, in a remarkable programme on BBC2, the architectural historian Dan Cruikshank both sought and found. Cruikshank had been to the museum in Baghdad, had inspected the collection, the storerooms, the outbuildings, and had interviewed people who had been present around the time of the looting, including George and some US troops. And Cruikshank was present when, for the first time, US personnel along with Iraqi museum staff broke into the storerooms.

One, which had clearly been used as a sniper point by Ba'ath forces, had also been looted of its best items, although they had been stacked in a far corner. The room had been opened with a key. Another storeroom looked as though the looters had just departed with broken artefacts all over the floor. But this, Cruikshank learned, was the way it had been left by the museum staff. No wonder, he told the viewers - the staff hadn't wanted anyone inside this room. Overall, he concluded, most of the serious looting "was an inside job".

Cruikshank also tackled George directly on events leading up to the looting. The Americans had said that the museum was a substantial point of Iraqi resistance, and this explained their reticence in occupying it. Not true, said George, a few militia-men had fired from the grounds and that was all. This, as Cruikshank heavily implied, was a lie. Not only were there firing positions in the grounds, but at the back of the museum there was a room that seemed to have been used as a military command post. And it was hardly credible that senior staff at the museum would not have known that. Cruikshank's closing thought was to wonder whether the museum's senior staff - all Ba'ath party appointees - could safely be left in post.

Furious, I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that - these days - you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed.

Lover's Socks

Lover's Socks
by Annie Wang, SCMP PRD
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/anniewang/ZZZINSY5PGD.html

AFTER LULU QUITS her job at the fashion magazine, it takes her seven months to finish her first book - Lover's Socks, a title inspired by Sade's Lover's Rock. The book is based on her own six-year on-and-off relationship with former boyfriend, Ximu. In Lover's Socks, the male character Daiwu, like Ximu, goes to France to study fashion with his new wife after graduating from a top Chinese university. Like many Chinese emigre couples, the wife abandons the husband, marries a Frenchman, and stays in France. Somehow, the wife's decision sets Daiwu free.

He returns to China and soon emerges as a top fashion designer. He has no difficulty hooking up with young model-type women. But his soulmate and confidante is a young fashion magazine editor named Jade, who worships him wholeheartedly. Smart and understanding, Jade never pushes Daiwu to marry her because he claims to be a free spirit who does not want the shackles of marriage.

But Daiwu betrays Jade by secretly marrying a woman who is half-Chinese and half-French. This is his way of getting even with his ex-wife.

The publisher is keen to promote Lulu, the young, fashionable and talented author. The plan is to make the book semi-autobiographical - a method sure to generate more buzz and sales. But Lulu wants to change the location from France to Japan to give the characters anonymity, and cut some of the things that happen to the man.

Her editor tries to dissuade her. ''Don't be afraid of revealing your private life. Even Hillary Clinton had to write about Monica Lewinsky in order to sell her book. Victims like her, and like Nicole Kidman, get a lot of sympathy. I bet your book will be a tear-jerker. You'll get a lot of supporters, especially sympathetic female readers who'll rally behind you against these heartless womanisers. But to get this, you have to make them believe it's a real story.''

''But I'm not concerned about my own privacy,'' Lulu says. ''I'm concerned about Ximu's.''

''If you're worried about lawsuits, don't be,'' the editor says. ''We'd be thrilled if he sued us - it's called free publicity. If he were to sue, we'd invite all the journalists to press conferences - much more effective than book signings to pump up sales.''

''But I just don't think it's fair to Ximu,'' says Lulu.

''Was he fair to you? He lied to you and then cheated on you. Why are you still treating this shameless man kindly?''

As they are debating, the telephone rings. Lulu picks it up and gestures to her editor that it is Ximu. The editor puts the speaker on so she can hear what he says.

''So I heard you wrote about me,'' Ximu says to Lulu.

Lulu doesn't deny a thing. ''Yes. Do you mind?''

''No. Not at all.'' Ximu sounds happy. ''As a matter of fact, I'd prefer you use my real name.''

''But the character is not an honourable man, as you know better than anybody,'' Lulu mocks.

''It's flattering to be written about by a young, beautiful and very promising writer. I'd rather be notorious than be normal. If you want, I can help you find investors who might be interested in turning the book into a movie. Our story might become a legend.''

Hearing his words, the editor gives Lulu an I-told-you-so look.

''You're treating my book like free advertising for your fashion designs,'' Lulu says.

''Why not? The most difficult thing nowadays is to be taken seriously. Actors, designers and pop singers reinvent their love lives to promote themselves. We have a real one, why not go for it? Lulu, let's make some noise and sell our past together.''

For a moment Lulu says nothing. Then she says: ''What do you mean, 'Our'? You didn't have any trouble going your own way before. You wanted to write some new chapters in your life without me. Now I'm the one writing it, so I'll be the one selling it. Bye bye!''

As a Dam Closes, Chinese Tally Gain and Loss

As a Dam Closes, Chinese Tally Gain and Loss
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/09/international/asia/09CHIN.html

FENGJIE, China, June 7 — There's an odd calm along this part of the Yangtze, no jubilation and no weeping, as the tawny waters lap several feet higher each day and a 350-mile stretch of this mightiest of rivers is finally transformed into a long narrow lake.

After decades of bitter debate, years of heavy construction and the uprooting so far of 700,000 people, the Three Gorges Dam has closed its gates.

On June 15, the reservoir will be filled to its interim level of 135 meters, or 443 feet above sea level. The next day, the first commercial ships will pass through the locks, heralding the eventual passage of ocean vessels hundreds of miles upstream to Chongqing, a booming metropolis in central China.

In August, two initial turbines from what will be the world's most colossal array of generators are to start spinning electricity — a down payment on the promised riches from a $25 billion megaproject with gains and perils that may be forever disputed.

"For the country as a whole, this project might be worthwhile," said Yang Hongwen, who runs an ailing small business in Fengjie, a city some 150 miles upstream of the dam.

"But from the perspective of the ordinary people around here, it was a mistake," he said, surveying what had been the lower half of a lively town of 100,000 and now resembles ground zero of an atomic blast, flattened for service as the lake bed and teems with people slaving to scavenge every ounce of steel.

Many of those resettled up to now — another 430,000 or more people must be moved from the area before the project is completed in 2009 — are already hurting for good land or jobs. For some longtime residents like Mr. Yang, nostalgia runs deep for the lost ancient city and the nearby scenic gorges that will soon be a little less deep and majestic.

But not everyone is unhappy. In a pattern repeated throughout China in this age of ebullient construction, the quick and the connected are making out fine, while the slow, the poor and the aged eat dust.

A few miles up river from the old town, a bright, new, high-rise Fengjie has sprung up in a miraculous six years. It is already home to 80,000 people and starting to bustle with characteristic Sichuanese color and cheer. Throughout the region, some enterprising types have made fortunes off the billions being spent on new towns, highways and bridges.

Worried most about their own livelihoods, few people here share Mr. Yang's concerns for the loss of scenery or cultural relics or the effects on the environment downstream, and few have thought about the pollution that many experts now see as the biggest headache for the project. Already, with the river waters stilled for little more than a week, a jump has been registered in E. coli, the bacterial marker of sewage contamination.

The closing of the dam on June 1 was a key turning point in a project that, by 2009, will see the lake surface raised by yet another 130 feet, flooding huge additional areas of town and country.

A visionary project long ago extolled long ago by Mao Zedong himself, the dam has come to symbolize the Chinese Communist Party's drive to conquer nature, and it is still touted as the mark of a great nation's arrival.

Any grandeur is hard to find in the fractured old town of Fengjie. A half-mile-wide swath of what had been a dense, decrepit, but happy warren of homes and markets and small factories has been blasted to rubble.

Here, the giant engineering project has produced a scene out of the 19th century. Hundreds of men and women pound away at the tangled sea of concrete with picks and sledgehammers and bare hands, salvaging steel rods and bricks to earn perhaps $25 for a month of work.

Li Shinli, 51, heaved his pick under a slab of concrete that hung dangerously above him but was tantalizingly replete with steel rods.

"I'm trying to save up some money so my son can go to college," said Mr. Li, who like many of the rock-pile workers was from a nearby village where he earns little from growing grain.

"Yes this is dangerous," he said, waving to the hovering slab, "but we can't do anything about that."

"The people in my village don't really have any strong feelings about the dam," he said. "But at least it has given us a chance to earn a little money."

Shopkeepers and remaining residents on the ragged new edge of the dying town, laggards who will mostly have to move in the next year or two, grumble about stingy relocation funds and corruption.

"We've lived here for 20 years and this is our home," said Li Changshu, a woman in her late 50's who runs a small herb shop just yards from the edge of the rubble. By this week, she was more resigned than angry.

Because she and her husband never did obtain official classification as urban residents, she said, they have not been given an apartment or shop in the new city, as more fortunate Fengjie residents were. Now they wait for the paltrier compensation being offered to farmers and wonder, she said, where they will end up.

"There are lots of people here in this position," said Mrs. Li, who added with a chuckle that over the years she has sold aphrodisiacs from this now-condemned spot to all kinds of characters, police chiefs and criminals alike.

Like megaprojects anywhere, this one has been dogged by controversy and its true costs and benefits are as murky as the silt-laden Yangtze waters.

The benefits to shipping seem clear enough, though some worry about a potentially disastrous build-up of silt at the reservoir head near Chongqing.

As the world's largest hydroelectric project, if all goes to plan, the dam will support China's development and replace dozens of large coal or nuclear plants, an environmental plus.

The 1.4-mile wide dam, promoters long claimed, will tame the floods that have devastated the Yangtze basin for millennia. Hydrologists now say it will prevent some floods but that others, such as the most recent disastrous surge in 1998, may be little affected because they rise from swollen tributaries downstream of the dam.

The famed Three Gorges, honored through the centuries by painters and poets, will be diminished but still an attraction. Hundreds of tourist ships, now docked because of SARS fears, expect to ply the new lake.

Perhaps the greater cultural loss will be the archaeological sites, graves and temples that are being inundated. Some of the most prominent temples and relics have been moved, but countless more, including those never excavated, will be lost for good.

One of the chief sites, the White Emperor Temple, is on a hilltop near Fengjie, at the entrance to the famed gorges. Its main buildings lie just above the water line projected for 2009, but some lower buildings have already had to be demolished. A cave that had contained an important Buddhist sculpture has been cemented over, the figurine cut off the rock and moved.

"The temples and relics aren't a problem because they are being taken to high ground," said Pu Dongping, a 40-year-old rural woman who was overseeing construction of a huge retaining wall on the hillside below the temple.

Eighteen years ago, as early construction began, her husband parlayed his building skills into contracts that have gradually become larger and more complex. "We were just ordinary farmers, but we've gotten rich from the Three Gorges project," she said.

Within the last several years, as it became clear that the dam would actually be built, scientists have raised grave concerns about the industrial poisons, farm chemicals and sewage that have long poured into the Yangtze and out to the sea.

The government has belatedly scrambled to curb pollution and has plans for at least 19 new sewage treatment plants along the upper Yangtze, mainly in larger cities, but most are not yet complete, said Lei Xiongshu, a retired engineering professor, former national legislator and longtime skeptic about the dam.

"It's not enough just to have treatment plants," he said in a telephone interview. "You need to insure that all industrial and domestic waste, including sewage, is diverted to them for proper treatment, and we're a long way from that."

Already, he said, worrisome levels of E. coli bacteria have been registered in water backing up from the dam, which may render the lake water undrinkable.

But so far, the most nettlesome problem has been the resettlement of hundreds of thousands in a region of steep, overexploited land and a country with little empty arable areas.

According to official estimates, close to 700,000 people have already been moved, some to new and existing cities, some to farming areas and some to distant provinces. By 2009, officials say, the number must reach 1.13 million, including many people like Mrs. Li, in Fengjie, who have no obvious place to go.

Chinese Shipwrecks Yield Treasures and a Dispute

Chinese Shipwrecks Yield Treasures and a Dispute
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/national/06TREA.html

Emory Kristof could not believe his eyes. Crammed into a nondescript house in suburban Los Angeles were 10,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain and pottery, some 2,000 years old, so densely packed that any movement threatened to send them crashing to the floor. Some were encrusted with coral, evidence of their hidden life for centuries under the sea.

"It blew my socks off," Mr. Kristof, an undersea explorer and photographer, said. "It was absolutely incredible, the mother of all treasure."

It is now also the subject of an emerging dispute between the entrepreneur who assembled the trove, working quietly in the Philippines while employing hundreds of locals to retrieve the old riches, and archaeologists who say he is plundering the world's artistic patrimony to line his own pockets.

The entrepreneur is Phil Greco, a former New Yorker who became interested in Asian culture while serving in the Vietnam War. He lived and worked in the Philippines for more than a decade salvaging old Chinese shipwrecks.

From his home in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, Mr. Greco is shipping his discoveries back East, where they are to be put up for auction.

Some 7,000 of the artifacts have so far reached a warehouse in South Kearny, N.J., across the Hudson River from New York City. Some 3,000 are en route. They will be sold in September by Guernsey's, an auction house on the East Side.

Art experts who have seen the collection call it impressive.

"It was mind boggling," said Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey's, who visited Mr. Greco two months ago to assess the assembled pottery.

"If anybody has been witness to massive collections, it's probably me, because that's become our specialty over the decades," he said. "Nevertheless, you never cease to be amazed and overwhelmed when you're introduced to a fabulous collection like this."

But Donny L. Hamilton, president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, a top preserver of old shipwrecks and their artifacts, said archaeologists worry when private salvors excavate potentially important undersea sites. They "recover just what has a market value," Dr. Hamilton said.

"The other material is ignored or left behind, so you only learn about the ceramic trade but nothing about the people on board, what they were eating, their armaments, the games they were playing," he added.

The ceramics are insured for $20 million, Mr. Greco said, though Mr. Ettinger said the appraisals had not been finished.

Mr. Ettinger said the pieces were 500 to 2,000 years old, many from the Ming and Song Dynasties. Many, he said, are in remarkable condition, from the smallest powder jars to the largest vases. He said the collection included blue and white Ming porcelain, and other pottery and porcelain in earthen tones, browns and burnt oranges and a spectrum of greens, from pale to intense. Photographs of some are posted on Guernsey's Web site, www.guernseys.com.

Victoria Johnson-Campbell, chief of Aurora Galleries International, in Bell Canyon, Calif., said she had seen the collection at Mr. Greco's home and found it extraordinary. "It's a stunning array," she said. "This collection by itself is going to expand our knowledge of Chinese porcelain. Some of the pieces are very, very seldom seen, and are in a form not viewed before."

Mrs. Johnson-Campbell noted that the collection included porcelains painted in reds. "Only a few are known," she said.

But Dr. Hamilton, who viewed the collection on the Web site, said he was disturbed by the excavation.

"Here we have only a small fraction of what we could have learned from the sites if they had been properly excavated and documented," Dr. Hamilton said.

"Along with all this porcelain, there's a lot of metal artifacts and organic articles," he said. "These have to be conserved and that takes a lot of time and expense."

Mr. Greco, a former marine who earned two purple hearts in Vietnam, bristled at such criticism. He said archaeologists did not have the money or skill to save such rich history from the ravages of the sea.

"They say it's outrageous that I'm pillaging all these national treasures," Mr. Greco said. "But if you're archaeologically correct you could never ever bring this kind of show to the world. It's impossible. It's too much. It's a bridge of 2,000 years of Chinese art and history."

Mr. Greco says his story is one of hard work and penny pinching entrepreneurism that succeeded because he developed close personal bonds with Filipino living in remote villages near the islands of Panay, Mindanao and Busuanga. "I stayed with the natives, the fishermen," he said. "And they led us to the sites."

The shipwrecks, he said, are embedded in reefs off Philippine islands in the South China Sea. "We have 16 sites we've been working in the last six or seven years," Mr. Greco said. Three sites have been highly productive, he added, including one his divers are still swimming down to and recovering artifacts from.

The shipwrecks lie at depths as great as 280 feet, Mr. Greco said, which is beyond the range of most sport divers. He said his team used no air tanks but rather weights and lines and hoses that bring air down to men working in the bottom gloom. Some of the divers swam with wooden paddles strapped to their feet, rather than fins. "Tanks are for tourists," Mr. Greco said.

Mr. Greco, whose company, Stallion Recoveries, is based in Hong Kong, said the lost ships were either going to Chinese trading posts in the Philippines or were on their way to Indonesia, to the south. Experts say the South China Sea abounds in wrecks lost to storms, piracy and ineptitude.

Mr. Greco said he always had his operation keep a low profile, even while getting the proper permits from the National Museum of the Philippines and other authorities. "We never told anybody what we were doing," he said.

He was apprehensive, he said, about making his finds public. "In the Philippines and Asia, depending on where you are, they think of them as pots and pans," he said of the treasures. "Once they see it has value, and somebody's interested, it's going to be a lot different working over there."

Mr. Kristof, a staff photographer for National Geographic magazine for more than three decades, said publications like his were reluctant to feature projects like Mr. Greco's lest they appear to be endorsing treasure hunting over archaeology.

David G. Concannon, a board member of the Explorer's Club of New York City and a lawyer, said Mr. Greco had recently retained him to help protect his interests. "When you get a collection this significant, somebody usually pops up and wants part of it," he said.

Mr. Greco said he planned to plow some of his expected profits back to his crew chiefs in the Philippines.

"I told them I would make each of them a millionaire in their own currency," Mr. Greco said. "And I will honor that."

Bali Aftermath

Bomb That Killed 202 Goes On Destroying Lives
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/international/asia/06BALI.html

UBUD, Indonesia, June 2 — I Made Degun, a woodcarver who creates cats, koala bears and kangaroos for the trinket trade, sat at the lowest rung of what seemed to be the infinite tourism boom in Bali. His inexpensive souvenirs, snatched up by visitors who ventured to this artistic town by the vanful, gave him a new way of life: a house with a second story, a motorcycle to ferry the goods to market, even a modest shop in his front yard.

But eight months after Islamic militants blew up a Bali nightclub with a car bomb, killing 202 people, most of them Australian revelers, Mr. Degun's income has vanished.

He is months behind on payments for loans on his house and precious motorbike. His 6-week-old baby, born with Down syndrome, was delivered free of charge by a sympathetic midwife. A garden of scrawny leaf vegetables and donations of rice from relatives help Mr. Degun, and his wife, Ni Ketut Masni, feed their four children.

Soon after the terror attack, there were predictions that Bali's tourism business would bounce back: the dominant Hindu culture, distinctive from the rest of Muslim Indonesia, would beckon travelers.

But the Iraq war, and then the spread of SARS, particularly in Singapore and Hong Kong, major transit points for Bali, set back the hopes for the island.

From the luxurious hotels where the cheapest room sells at $700 a night to the cheap joints near the ill-fated Sari nightclub, customers are scarce.

Here in Ubud, the sleek 30-room Amandari Hotel, once the boîte of choice for rock stars and fashion designers, is now an echo chamber. For three consecutive recent nights, it was empty, said the area manager for Aman Resorts, Guy Haywood.

Other nights, only one or two rooms were occupied under a no-bargaining policy on the $700 and up rates, he said. The company, which runs three hotels in Bali and two others elsewhere in Indonesia, has considered closing one of their properties. But closure turned out to be more expensive than eking out an existence with 6 to 8 percent occupancy, he said.

At the less luxurious Raja's cafe in Kuta, where the regulars tend to be Australian tourists in shorts and thongs, demand has fallen for the supercharged drinks for two: the $5 pink Raja cocktail and the $7 brown concoction called Brain Damage.

They come in tub-sized glasses with two straws and a lit sparkler emitting crackle and dazzle as it is delivered to the table.

Now the cafe sells only half a dozen or so of the Raja (gin, rice wine, grenadine and a medley of juices) and rarely any of the Brain Damage (brandy, rum and Coca-Cola), the waiters said.

In a report on Bali this week, the World Bank confirmed, in its understated way, what is obvious on the streets and in the villages.

"A survey among market traders, beach vendors and taxis reveals sharp drop in sales revenues and profits, up to 70 percent in some cases," the report said.

Even with the smart marketing that they plan, hotel managers say they face obstacles from the United States and Indonesian governments.

Last month the State Department issued a travel warning that makes fairly grim reading for even the gamest of travelers. It makes no distinction between Indonesia as a whole (where there is civil conflict in the northern province of Aceh), and the island of Bali, which remains a favorite weekend retreat for American diplomats and business people living in Indonesia.

"The terrorist attack in Bali, which took place in an area with a large number of foreign tourists, clearly indicates that a security threat extends to private American citizens," the warning says.

Another obstacle, say the hoteliers, is the Indonesian government's plan to introduce a $45 visa fee for Americans, Australians and many Europeans wanting to come here as tourists.

For Balinese like Mr. Degun, the tourism crash has hit particularly hard. In the 1990's, when the Balinese, who used to toil in rice paddies, suddenly made money as waiters, artists and drivers, financial institutions introduced the idea of consumer credit.

The Balinese began borrowing for everything: from television sets to the mandatory contributions to cremations for the dead.

In the Hindu culture here, cremations are an important and expensive village event that involves the building of an ornate float for the ceremony and provision for a feast.

The village rumor mills are now thick with stories of people being unable to repay their loans for cremations, and of some village banks reclaiming motorcycles because of the owners' failure to pay monthly installments.

Mr. Degun said he is three months behind on his loans for his house and motorcyle. "After five months they will start to come after me," he said of the village bank.