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Home » THE ACT OF KILLING: Indonesia’s Dark Past & Present

2014 Oscar Nominated and BAFTA Best Documentary Winner

“If we are to transform Indonesia into the democracy it claims to be, citizens must recognize the terror and repression on which our contemporary history has been built. No film, or any other work of art for that matter, has done this more effectively than The Act of Killing.” — National Human Rights Commission of Indonesia
The Act of Killing’s Website

In 1976 I traveled throughout Indonesia and today still love its Sundanese music – the closest thing to “music from paradise.” I also got to appreciate the slowness and peacefulness of Jogja’s dance and music. I was even somewhat ecstatic playing in UCLA’s gamelan… BUT
I was also always aware of its 1965-1966 large scale “patriotic massacre” of alleged Communists and ethnic Chinese  – completely ignored in present textbooks &  supported by the U.S.

Just a few words here...
I just finished viewing the Director's Cut: this is a MUST SEE FILM, a public service announcement about "DEVOURING IMAGES."

This film may sear straight into your memory because it clearly implicates, as all film viewing should, the complicity of the viewer.
Yes, it is about killing, but not just by thugs or politicians, but the killing (and ecocide) behind our omnipresent spectacle, and the merchandise that surrounds it.
It is also very much about the ego's delusions, and who does not have one?
Buñuel's grandchild is alive and kicking, making (brilliantly disturbing) documentaries!

HERE IS MY REVIEW!


First two outstanding British Film Institute articles:


T o u r i n g    t h e   U S
&
the UK
– some venues with director –

Latest U.S. Reviews:
The New Yorker
The Village Voice
The Tablet
3 NPR Stories: 1, 2, 3 .
and
A.V. Club Interview with J. O. and Werner Herzog
Esquire Interview with J. O. and Werner Herzog
Errol Morris on that history and its connection to Vietnam (in Salon)
——–
“To dub Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary a masterpiece is at once warranted and yet somehow limiting, the term too narrow for what the first-time filmmaker achieves with his debut” – Village Voice.
“The most compelling thing you’ll ever see… Almost every frame is astonishing.” –  The Guardian
” Could well change how you view the documentary form.” – Los Angeles Times
“The Act of Killing is one of the few films now in theaters that demands to be seen”–The Nation
“A radical development in the documentary form and as an explosive journalistic expose” – CNN
“ A towering achievement in filmmaking, documentary or otherwise.” –The Playlist
“Remarkable…An Astounding Masterpiece.” –Democracy Now!

LINKS (to be tweaked for better access)
Best Reviewed Film for 2013 on Rotten Tomatoes: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/?year=2013
New York Times (Critic’s Pick):
Mass Murder? Gee, That Was Fun
Video Reviews of ‘The Conjuring,’ ‘The Act of Killing’ and ‘Computer Chess’
Village Voice
Huffington Post  & HuffPost Live
Time Magazine: http://world.time.com/2013/07/17/acts-of-killing-how-asia-still-struggles-with-histories-of-genocide/
NPR/Leonard Lopate Show: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2013/jul/19/act-killing/
NPR/Fresh Air: http://www.npr.org/2013/07/19/202702269/two-documentaries-examine-violence-human-and-animal
NPR/Studio 360: http://www.studio360.org/2013/jul/19/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=%24%7Bfeed%7D&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+%24%7Bstudio360%7D+(%24%7BStudio+360%7D)
NPR/The Take Away: http://www.thetakeaway.org/
RogerEbert.com 4 of 4 Stars http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-act-of-killing-2013
AM New York 4 of 4 Stars: http://www.amny.com/urbanite-1.812039/movie-review-the-act-of-killing-4-stars-1.5718302
New York Post 4 of 4 Stars: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/movies/telling_the_true_horror_of_killing_EDV5xldjqqn2UWXjJ2a0XI?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=Movies
The Onion: http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-act-of-killing,100235/
Flixist: http://www.flixist.com/review-the-act-of-killing-216066.phtml & http://www.flixist.com/interview-joshua-oppenheimer-the-act-of-killing–215124.phtml
NowThisNews/BuzzFeed: http://www.buzzfeed.com/nowthisnews/the-act-of-killing-making-a-movie-with-indonesia-749g
Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2013/07/the_act_of_killing_documentary_reviewed.html
Indiewire – The Playlist (A+)



You won’t find better people to endorse your film:

“An absolute and unique masterpiece.”
– Dusan Makavejev

“I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade… unprecedented in the history of cinema…”
THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism.”
– Werner Herzog

“Like all great documentaries, The Act of Killing demands another way of looking at reality. It starts as a dreamscape, an attempt to allow the perpetrators to reenact what they did, and then something truly amazing happens. The dream dissolves into nightmare and then into bitter reality. An amazing and impressive film.”
– Errol Morris

“If we are to transform Indonesia into the democracy it claims to be, citizens must recognize the terror and repression on which our contemporary history has been built. No film, or any other work of art for that matter, has done this more effectively than The Act of Killing. [It] is essential viewing for us all.”
– National Human Rights Commission of Indonesia

“The Act of Killing is the most powerful, politically important film about Indonesia that I have ever seen. The arrival of this film is itself a historical event almost without parallel. [It] witnesses the bloody destruction of a foundation of this nation at the hands of Indonesians themselves. On top of a mountain of corpses, our fellow countrymen rolled out a red carpet for the growth of gangster capitalism and political Islam. In documenting this, The Act of Killing exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of this country’s notions of ‘patriotism’ and ‘justice.’ The film achieves all this thanks to the director’s genius and audacious choice of filmmaking method.”
– Ariel Heryanto, Historian and Cultural Critic, Tempo Magazine (Indonesia’s premier newsmagazine)

“Every now and then a non-­fiction film comes along that is unlike anything else I have seen: Buñuel’s LAND WITHOUT BREAD, Werner Herzog’s FATA MORGANA, Hara’s THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON. Well, it’s happened again. Here, Joshua Oppenheimer invites unrepentant Indonesian death-­squad leaders to make fiction films reenacting their violent histories. Their cinematic dreams dissolve into nightmares and then into bitter reality. Like all great documentary, THE ACT OF KILLING demands another way of looking at reality. It is like a hall of mirrors––the so-­called mise-­en-­scène––where real people become characters in a movie and then jump back into reality again. And it asks the central question: what is real Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in a Paris Review interview, wrote about reading Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” for he first time, “I didn’t know you were allowed to do that.” I have the same feeling with this extraordinary film.”
– Errol Morris


An important interview with Joshua Oppenheimer.
The best “NOTES” on the film – to be seen AFTER viewing the film to see the impact of this monument of a film.|


From the film’s website:
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
by Joshua Oppenheimer

Beginnings

In February 2004, I filmed a former death squad leader demonstrate how, in less than three months, he and his fellow killers slaughtered 10,500 alleged ‘communists’ in a single clearing by a river in North Sumatra. When he was finished with his explanation, he asked my sound recordist to take some snapshots of us together by the riverbank. He smiled broadly, gave a thumbs up in one photo, a victory sign in the next.

Two months later, other photos, this time of American soldiers smiling and giving the thumbs up while torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners, appeared in the news (Errol Morris later revealed these photographs to be more complex than they at first appear). The most unsettling thing about these images is not the violence they document, but rather what they suggest to us about how their participants wanted, in that moment, to be seen. And how they thought, in that moment, they would want to remember themselves. Moreover, performing, acting, posing appear to be part of the procedures of humiliation.

These photographs betray not so much the physical situation of abuse, but rather forensic evidence of the imagination involved in persecution. And they were very much in my mind when, one year later, I met Anwar Congo and the other leaders of Indonesia’s Pancasila Youth paramilitary movement.

Far away or close to home?

The differences between the situations I was filming in Indonesia and other situations of mass persecution may at first seem obvious. Unlike in Rwanda, South Africa or Germany, in Indonesia there have been no truth and reconciliation commissions, no trials, no memorials for victims. Instead, ever since committing their atrocities, the perpetrators and their protégés have run the country, insisting they be honoured as national heroes by a docile (and often terrified) public. But is this situation really so exceptional? At home (in the USA), the champions of torture, disappearance, and indefinite detention were in the highest positions of political power and, at the same time, busily tending to their legacy as the heroic saviours of western civilisation. That such narratives would be believed (despite all evidence to the contrary) suggests a failure of our collective imagination, while simultaneously revealing the power of storytelling in shaping how we see.

And that Anwar and his friends so admired American movies, American music, American clothing – all of this made the echoes more difficult to ignore, transforming what I was filming into a nightmarish allegory.

Filming with survivors

When I began developing The Act of Killing in 2005, I had already been filming for three years with survivors of the 1965-66 massacres. I had lived for a year in a village of survivors in the plantation belt outside Medan. I had become very close to several of the families there. During that time, Christine Cynn and I collaborated with a fledgling plantation workers’ union to make The Globalization Tapes, and began production on a forthcoming film about a family of survivors that begins to confront (with tremendous dignity and patience) the killers who murdered their son. Our efforts to record the survivors’ experiences – never before expressed publicly – took place in the shadow of their torturers, as well as the executioners who murdered their relatives – men who, like Anwar Congo, would boast about what they did.

Ironically, we faced the greatest danger when filming survivors. We’d encounter obstacle after obstacle. For instance, when we tried to film a scene in which former political prisoners rehearsed a Javanese ballad about their time in the concentration camps (describing how they provided forced labour for a British-owned plantation, and how every night some of their friends would be handed over to the death squads to be killed), we were interrupted by police seeking to arrest us. At other times, the management of London-Sumatra plantations interrupted the film’s shooting, “honouring” us by “inviting” us to a meeting at plantation headquarters. Or the village mayor would arrive with a military escort to tell us we didn’t have permission to film. Or an “NGO” focused on “rehabilitation for the victims of the 1965-66 killings” would turn up and declare that “this is our turf – the villagers here have paid us to protect them.” (When we later visited the NGO’s office, we discovered that the head of the NGO was none other than the area’s leading killer – and a friend of Anwar Congo’s – and the NGO’s staff seemed to be military intelligence officers.)

Not only did we feel unsafe filming the survivors, we worried for their safety. And the survivors couldn’t answer the question of how the killings were perpetrated.

Boastful killers

But the killers were more than willing to help and, when we filmed them boastfully describing their crimes against humanity, we met no resistance whatsoever. All doors were open. Local police would offer to escort us to sites of mass killing, saluting or engaging the killers in jocular banter, depending on their relationship and the killer’s rank. Military officers would even task soldiers with keeping curious onlookers at a distance, so that our sound recording wouldn’t be disturbed.

This bizarre situation was my second starting point for making The Act of Killing. And the question in mind was this: what does it mean to live in, and be governed by, a regime whose power rests on the performance of mass murder and its boastful public recounting, even as it intimidates survivors into silence. Again, there seemed to be a profound failure of the imagination.

Within Indonesia more generally, such openness about the killings might be exceptional. But in North Sumatra, it is standard operating procedure. For there, the army recruited its death squads from the ranks of gangsters. Gangsters’ power derives from being feared, and so the thugs ruling North Sumatra have trumpeted their role in the genocide ever since, framing it as heroic struggle, while all the time taking care to include grisly details that inspire a constant and undiminished disquiet, unease, even terror of possible recurrence. (In East Java and in Bali, the death squads were recruited from religious groups, while in Central Java and elsewhere they were members of the Indonesian special forces. Unlike gangsters, those groups’ power is not necessarily based on their being feared.)

In the gangsters’ role as the political bosses of North Sumatra (a province of 14 million people) they have continued to celebrate themselves as heroes, reminding the public of their role in the massacres, while continuing to threaten the survivors – and they have done so even as governors, senators, members of parliament, and, in the case of one prominent veteran of the 1965-66 genocide, as the perversely named, “Deputy Minister of Law and Human Rights”.

Seizing the moment

I understood that gangsters don’t hold quite the same monopoly on power in many other regions of Indonesia – including Jakarta. So in one sense the circumstances in North Sumatra differ from elsewhere. Perpetrators in other regions haven’t been so open, not because they fear prosecution (they don’t), but because they don’t need to use stories about the genocide as a tool of criminal and political intimidation. And yet, just as the situations I encountered in Sumatra had parallels in the United States, so too did they embody a logic of total impunity that defines Indonesia as a whole, and probably any other regime built on terror and its threatening recount.

In this, I saw an opportunity: if the perpetrators in North Sumatra were given the means to dramatize their memories of genocide in whatever ways they wished, they would probably seek to glorify it further, to transform it into a “beautiful family movie” (as Anwar puts it) whose kaleidoscopic use of genres would reflect their multiple, conflicting emotions about their “glorious past”. I anticipated that the outcomes from this process would serve as an exposé, even to Indonesians themselves, of just how deep the impunity and lack of resolution in their country remains.

Moreover, Anwar and his friends had helped to build a regime that terrorised their victims into treating them as heroes, and I realized that the filmmaking process would answer many questions about the nature of such a regime – questions that may seem secondary to what they did, but in fact are inseparable from it. For instance, how do Anwar and his friends really think people see them? How do they want to be seen? How do they see themselves? How do they see their victims? How does the way they think they will be seen by others reveal what they imagine about the world they live in, the culture they have built? The filmmaking method we used in The Act of Killing was developed to answer these questions. It is best seen as an investigative technique, refined to help us understand not only what we see, but also how we see, and how we imagine. These are questions of critical importance to understanding the imaginative procedures by which human beings persecute each other, and how we then go on to build (and live in) societies founded on systemic and enduring violence.

Anwar’s reactions

If my goal in initiating the project was to find answers to these questions, and if Anwar’s declared intent was to glorify his past actions, there is no way that he could not, in part, be disappointed by the final film. And yet, a crucial component of the filmmaking process involved screening the footage back to Anwar and his friends along the way. Inevitably, we screened the most painful scenes. They know what is in the film; indeed, they openly debate the consequences of the film, inside the film. And seeing these scenes only made Anwar more interested in the work, which is how I gradually realised that he was on a parallel, more personal journey through the filmmaking process, one in which he sought to come to terms with the meaning of what he had done. In that sense, too, Anwar is the bravest and most honest character in The Act of Killing. He may or may not ‘like’ the result, but I have tried to honour his courage and his openness by presenting him as honestly, and with as much compassion, as I could, while still deferring to the unspeakable acts that he committed.

There is no easy resolution to The Act of Killing. The murder of one million people is inevitably fraught with complexity and contradiction. In short, it leaves behind a terrible mess. All the more so when the killers have remained in power, when there has been no attempt at justice, and when the story has hitherto only been used to intimidate the survivors. Seeking to understand such a situation, intervening in it, documenting it – this, too, can only be equally tangled, unkempt.

The struggle continues

I have developed a filmmaking method with which I have tried to understand why extreme violence, that we hope would be unimaginable, is not only the exact opposite, but also routinely performed. I have tried to understand the moral vacuum that makes it possible for perpetrators of genocide to be celebrated on public television with cheers and smiles. Some viewers may desire a formal closure by the end of the film, a successful struggle for justice that results in changes in the balance of power, human rights tribunals, reparations and official apologies. One film alone cannot create these changes, but this desire has of course been our inspiration as well, as we attempt to shed light on one of the darkest chapters in both the local and global human story, and to express the real costs of blindness, expedience and an inability to control greed and the hunger for power in an increasingly unifiedworld society. This is not, finally, a story onlyabout Indonesia. It is a story about us all.

PRODUCER’S STATEMENT
by Signe Byrge Sørensen

Ever since I was young I have wondered about the Nazi extermination of the Jews, as well as other genocides. Why do they happen? What makes some people turn on other people in such a terrible way? Why do neighbours start killing neighbours? And why do others let this happen? When studying these issues more closely, I discovered that the stories people tell about each other play an enormous role in the process of genocide. If we identify a group of people, define them as terrible, evil, and very strong, somehow it becomes easier to kill them. After all, the killers can claim it was all in self-defence, and that the victims were the ‘bad guys’.And if, at the same time, the people in charge have hierarchies, resources, and henchmen in place, then the process becomes terribly easy, and sometimes extremely fast. If, on the other hand, we have critical voices who ask difficult questions about the legitimacy of what is happening, then the killing process may be interrupted, and the outcome less inevitable – and this interruption may at least give everyone some time to think. In the best case, it may even stop the process, before it is too late.Joshua Oppenheimer is someone who asks difficult questions. And in this film he questions the people we fear the most: the killers. However, he does not only focus on the lower level perpetrators, and he is not satisfied by easy psychological explanations. He persists until he can show the whole hierarchy involved, and he reveals layer by layer how storytelling, killing, politics and economics are closely related.

When I met Joshua and heard about his project, I met a director who was not out simply to make a film (as hard as that is), but also to make a fundamental investigation into the human, social, and political conditions that make genocides possible. I am proud to be on this journey with him.

CO-DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
b
y Christine Cynn

Many of us also find ourselves acting in ways dissociated from what (we believe) we believe. In other words, we are rarely whom we imagine ourselves to be. This is as true of bankers and film directors as it is true of death squad leaders. THE ACT OF KILLING hopefully reveals more than another terrifying example of human brutality and injustice. My hope was that the film might lead us to question the role of our imaginations in perpetuating a delusional social cycle, driven by struggles for power, and spiked with performances of terror and mass murder that are invariably followed by false historical narratives.I do not consider myself an optimist, but I am convinced that not all ‘make believe’ need be delusional. Human imagination is the key to empathy, which leads us to acts of compassion. Imagination is also the foundation of curiosity, which leads us to acts of discovery. This, in turn, changes what is possible. Human imagination might also lead us to break the cycles of self- deception and their devastating consequences if, and only if, we find the humility to admit responsibility for them.

By Anonymous

I was one of thousands of students who stood face to face with riot police in 1998, urging the New Order military dictatorship to go. I was not one of the student leaders who delivered heated speeches to the crowd; I was only a supporter, who felt that this moment might be historically important.After more than three decades in power, General Suharto had finally stepped down. Since then, there have been some changes. The constitution has been amended four times. The press has become relatively freer. The President and Governors are elected by the people. There are no limitations on the numbers of political parties, although it remains illegal for any of them to declare a Marxist affiliation.However, working with grassroots communities, trying to create a fairer distribution of natural resources, for example, I repeatedly hit a dead end. Everywhere, corruption is still rampant. Munir, a human rights activist, was murdered by leading officials in the Indonesian intelligence services while on a flight to Holland, where he was to pursue a graduate degree – and there has been no effort to prosecute those responsible. Violence is still often used as the primary language of politics. The buying of votes has transformed ‘democracy’ into, at best, a formal, almost stage-set procedure… In other words, nothing has really changed since the day General Suharto seized power — even now, 14 years after he gave it up. The façade of Indonesian politics might have altered since the 1998 political reforms but, behind it, the old machinery still works in exactly the same way.In 2004, I met Joshua and helped him begin his filmic exploration of the 1965-66 genocide in North Sumatra. Initially, I came to help for a month, not realizing that it would mark the beginning of an eight year collaboration. Making this film has become a personal journey for me, in seeking to discover why this social and political stasis remains.Through the imaginations and recollections of the mass murderers featured – men who supported, even created this corrupt structure – I understand, with particular clarity, how one of the devices of the old regime is still working so efficiently. It is the ‘projector’ that keeps playing, on an endless loop, a fiction film inside every Indonesian’s head. People like Anwar and his friends are the projectionists, showing a subtle but unavoidable form of propaganda, which creates the kind of fantasy through which Indonesians may live their lives and make sense of the world around them; a fantasy that makes them desensitized to the violence and impunity that define our society.This is the true legacy of the dictatorship: the erasure of our ability to imagine anything other.I worked with Joshua to make The Act of Killing in order to help myself, other Indonesians, and human beings living in similar societies around the world, to understand the importance of questioning what we see, and how we imagine. How else are we to envision our world in a different way?

I must remain anonymous, for now, because the political conditions in Indonesia make it too dangerous for me to do otherwise.


Edited from observations on the massacres, their aftermath and implications, by Historian John Roosa. Many thanks to him for providing this summary. Additional opening and closing notes by Joshua Oppenheimer.

In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, founder of the non-aligned movement, and leader of the national revolution against Dutch colonialism, was deposed and replaced by right-wing General Suharto. The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which had been a core constituency in the struggle against Dutch colonialism, and which had firmly supported President Sukarno (who was not a communist), was immediately banned.

On the eve of the coup, the PKI was the largest communist party in the world, outside of a communist country. It was officially committed to winning power through elections, and its affiliates included all of Indonesia’s trade unions and cooperatives for landless farmers. Its major campaign issues included land reform, as well as nationalizing foreign-owned mining, oil, and plantation companies. In this, they sought to mobilize Indonesia’s vast natural resources for the benefit of the Indonesian people, who, in the aftermath of three hundred years of colonial exploitation, were, on the whole, extremely poor.

After the 1965 military coup, anybody opposed to the new military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist. This included union members, landless farmers, intellectuals, and the ethnic Chinese, as well as anybody who struggled for a redistribution of wealth in the aftermath of colonialism.

In less than a year, and with the direct aid of western governments, over one million of these “communists” were murdered. In America, the massacre was regarded as a major “victory over communism”, and generally celebrated as good news. Time magazine reported “the West’s best news for years in Asia”, while The New York Times ran the headline, “A Gleam of Light in Asia”, and praised Washington for keeping its hand in the killings well hidden.

(The scapegoating of the ethnic Chinese, who had come to Indonesia in the 18th and 19th centuries, was done at the incitement of the US intelligence services, which sought to drive a wedge between the new Indonesian regime and the People’s Republic of China. The slaughter of village-level members of the PKI and its affiliate unions and cooperatives was also encouraged by the US, who was worried that without a “scorched earth” approach, the new Indonesian regime might eventually accommodate the PKI base.)

In many regions of Indonesia, the army recruited civilians to carry out the killings. They were organized into paramilitary groups, given basic training (and significant military back up). In the province of North Sumatra and elsewhere, the paramilitaries were recruited largely from the ranks of gangsters, or preman. Ever since the massacres, the Indonesian government has celebrated the “extermination of the communists” as a patriotic struggle, and celebrated the paramilitaries and gangsters as its heroes, rewarding them with power and privilege. These men and their protégés have occupied key positions of power – and persecuted their opponents – ever since.

The pretext for the 1965-66 genocide was the assassination of six army generals on the night of 1 October 1965. (above written by Joshua Oppenheimer).

1.10.1965: The Thirtieth of September Movement (Gerakan 30 September, or G30S), made up of disaffected junior Indonesian Armed Forces Officers, assassinated six Indonesian Army Generals in an abortive coup and dumped their bodies down a well south of the city. At the same time, the Movement’s troops took over the national radio station and announced that they intended to protect President Sukarno from a cabal of right-wing army generals plotting a seizure of power. The Movement was defeated before most Indonesians knew it existed. The senior surviving army commander, Major General Suharto, launched a quick counter-attack and drove the Movement’s troops from Jakarta within one day.

Suharto accused the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) of masterminding the Movement and then orchestrated an extermination of persons affiliated with the party. Suharto’s military rounded up over a million and a half people, accusing all of them of being involved in the Movement. In one of the worst bloodbaths of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of individuals were massacred by the army and its affiliated militias, largely in Central Java, East Java, Bali, and North Sumatra from late 1965 to mid-1966. In a climate of national emergency, Suharto gradually usurped President Sukarno’s authority and established himself as the de facto president (with the power to dismiss and appoint ministers) by March 1966.

The massacres were out of all proportion to their ostensible cause. The Movement was a small-scale conspiratorial action organized by a handful of people. In total, it killed twelve people. Suharto exaggerated its magnitude until it assumed the shape of an ongoing, nation-wide conspiracy to commit mass murder. All the millions of people associated with the PKI, even illiterate peasants in remote villages, were presented as murderers collectively responsible for the Movement.

Indonesian government and military officials, to the very end of the Suharto regime in 1998, invoked the specter of the PKI in response to any disturbance or sign of dissent. The key phrase in the regime’s argument was “the latent danger of communism.” The unfinished eradication of the PKI was, in a very real sense, the raison d’être of the Suharto regime. The original legal act under which the regime ruled Indonesia for over thirty years was Sukarno’s presidential order of 3rd October 1965, authorizing Suharto to “restore order.” That was an emergency order. But for Suharto, the emergency never ended.

In constructing a legitimating ideology for his dictatorship, Suharto presented himself as the saviour of the nation for having defeated the Movement. His regime incessantly drilled the event into the minds of the populace by every method of state propaganda: textbooks, monuments, street names, films, museums, commemorative rituals and national holidays. The Suharto regime justified its existence by placing the Movement at the centre of its historical narrative and depicting the PKI as ineffably evil. Under Suharto, anti-communism became the state religion, complete with sacred sites, rituals, and dates.

It is remarkable that the anti-PKI violence, as such a large-scale event, has been so badly misunderstood. No doubt, the fact that both military personnel and civilians committed the killings has blurred the issue of responsibility. Nonetheless, from what little is already known, it is clear that the military bears the largest share of responsibility and that the killings represented bureaucratic, planned violence more than popular, spontaneous violence. The Suharto clique of officers, by inventing false stories about the Movement and strictly controlling the media, created a sense among civilians that the PKI was on the warpath. If there had not been this deliberate provocation from the military, the populace would not have believed the PKI was a mortal threat since the party was passive in the aftermath of the Movement. (The military worked hard to whip up popular anger against the PKI from early October 1965 onwards; and the US Government actively encouraged the Indonesian military to pursue rank and file communists). It prodded civilian militias into acting, gave them assurances of impunity, and arranged logistical support.

Contrary to common belief, frenzied violence by villagers was virtually unheard of. Suharto’s army usually opted for mysterious disappearances rather than exemplary public executions. The army and its militias tended to commit its large-scale massacres in secret: they took captives out of prison at night, trucked them to remote locations, executed them, and then buried the corpses in unmarked mass graves or threw them into rivers.

The tragedy of modern Indonesian history lies not just in the army-organized mass killings of 1965-66 but also in the rise to power of the killers, of persons who viewed massacres and psychological warfare operations as legitimate and normal modes of governance. A regime that legitimated itself by pointing to a mass grave at the site of the well, vowing “never again,” left countless mass graves from one end of the country to the other, from Aceh on the western edge to Papua on the eastern edge. The occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999 similarly left tens, if not hundreds, of thousands dead, many anonymously buried. Each mass grave in the archipelago marks an arbitrary, unavowed, secretive exercise of state power.

The obsession with a relatively minor event (the Movement) and the erasure of a world-historical event (the mass killings of 1965-66) has blocked empathy for the victims, such as the relatives of those men and women who disappeared. While a monument stands next to the well in which the Movement’s troops dumped the bodies of the six army generals on October 1, 1965, there is no monument to be found at the mass graves that hold the hundreds of thousands of persons killed in the name of suppressing the Movement. (above written by John Roosa).

Focus on who killed the army generals on 30th September 1965 has functioned as a fetish, displacing all attention from the murder of over one million alleged communists in the months that followed. Suharto’s regime produced endless propaganda about the “brutal communists” behind the killing of the generals, and still today most discussion of the genocide has been displaced by this focus. And this is true even in most English-language sources. To me, participating in the debate around “who killed the generals” feels grotesque, which is why it does not feature in The Act of Killing.

The Rwandan genocide was triggered when Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana (a Hutu) died after his aeroplane was shot down on its approach to Kigali. To focus on who shot down the plane (was it Tutsi extremists? was it Hutu extremists acting as provocateurs?) rather than the murder of 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates over the next 100 days would be unconscionable. Similarly, who started the Reichstag fire is irrelevant to an understanding of the Holocaust. Whether or not the disgruntled army officers behind the killing of the six generals had the support of the head of the PKI is much more than beside the point: it plays, as John Roosa points out above, the pernicious role of deflecting attention from a mass murder of world-historical importance. Imagine if, in Rwanda, the fundamental question about what happened in 1994 was “who shot down the president’s plane?” This would only be thinkable if the killers remained in power… (above written by Joshua Oppenheimer).

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