GENOCIDE CENTOURY

The 20th century has been rightly called “genocide century,” although the deliberate destruction of groups is far from a phenomenon known only in the 20th century. There are several examples of genocide throughout history, but never have so many people lost their lives as a result of genocide as in the 20th century. It’s hard to say why exactly the 20th was the “genocide century, “ but possible explanations could be technological advances, flourishing nationalism, and the emergence of mass media.

Although the deliberate destruction of groups is an old familiar phenomenon, it was only with the Nazi crimes against the Jews during World War II that the outrageous practice was named. The originator of the concept of genocide was the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who fled Poland in 1938 to avoid becoming a victim of Nazi atrocities against Jews. Lemkin combined in his 1944 book the Greek word for tribe or race “genos” with the Latin word for killing or kill “cide”, and thus arose the concept of “genocide”, which the Danish translated into genocide.

GENOCIDE CONVENTION DEFINING THE GENOCIDE

In the aftermath of the Nazi crimes, the UN adopted in 1948 the Genocide Convention, which legally defined the concept of genocide. The convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intention of totally or partially destroying a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The purpose of the convention was to prevent future genocide, but history has unfortunately since shown that the Holocaust would not be the last genocide of the 20th century.

According to the UN Convention, Article II defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with the intention of totally or partially destroying a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; doing members of the group serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s total or partial physical destruction, to implement measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Although the concept of genocide is defined in the UN Genocide Convention, it is not always easy to determine when the case is genocide. It will indeed always be a matter of how the Convention definition is interpreted. The number of genocides is very controversial, and there are many examples of controversial disputes and crimes that not all scientists are willing to describe as genocide.

In the example of the events of 1965-66 in Indonesia occurs the same problem of definition, and there are differing opinions about whether the killings can be defined as genocide or mass murder. The problem is that the groups – “communists” or simply “opponents” – that were the primary goal of the destruction do not fall under the UN Convention categories of “national,” “ethnic,” “racial” or “religious” group. However, looking at the thousands of victims who were ethnic Chinese, it is the definition of genocide under the UN Convention – even though there were many more victims who were not ethnic Chinese.

Source: Danish Institute for International Studies – Holocaust and Genocide: What is genocide?

People are genetically encoded for both altruism (kindness to others) and aggression. It is both our socialization and personal experiences which determine which of these tendencies are most expressed. Most people feel an instinctive revulsion for hurting other people, and it is a basic condition for normal human behavior. On the other hand, it seems psychopaths lack this “moral” brake. For most it is taboo to kill others. To kill another human is to exceed a psychological limit, and there is no turning back.

Social psychology speaks of “deed men” (those who carry out evil deeds), “crowd” (those who are witnessing the attacks but not interfere), “victims” (the target of the evil acts) and finally “heroic helpers” who try to help victims – often putting their own lives at risk, as we saw during the genocide of Jews during World War II. Social psychologists are also interested in the social and psychological processes that lead up to genocide.

SOCIAL FACTORS IN THE PEOPLE’S MURDER

People do not exist in a social vacuum. They are affected by the economic and social conditions in the community. Cultural values ​​and religious norms affect the individual and society. What is right and wrong is taught in principle through socialization – as, for example, by seeing which actions are rewarded and which are punished. People usually act within the framework of their social and cultural context.

In the period around 1965-66, there was a military dictatorship in Indonesia. The army claimed that the communists were a threat to national security and independence. The party’s struggle for land reforms and better working conditions for the working class was seen as a threat to the stability and order, as the army and the ruling class saw it. Therefore, the communists eradicated. It was possible to carry out in a systematic way since the army was apparently behind the organization of the killings, although they left part of the dirty work for paramilitaries and gangsters like Anwar and his group.

In individual villages, people could feel pressured to kill neighbors or family, because they were afraid of even being seen as communists. In this chaos of terror and fear family and friends were taken, and the fear of being called a communist still exists in Indonesia. The killing of municipality Ministers, and all those who were killed along with them, is apparently still perceived by many as a heroic act and necessary struggle against evil and the nation. On an official level there is silence about the murders and the victims, although there are small indicators that the silence is no longer total. While the fight against communists and “enemies of the state” and the murderers are still celebrated – both on TV and in large meetings of organizations such as Pancasila Youth.

MINISTRY MEN

An offender is defined as a person who performs a vicious, criminal or illegal act. In certain contexts, these deed men are called “executioners” in connection with the genocide. Who are these deed men? Are they ordinary people – or evil people? Are they forced by circumstances – or chance?

In social psychology, since World War II there has been a debate about whether the deed men are bad people or if the situation caused their evil actions. The philosopher Hannah Arendt attended the 1960 trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. He had overall responsibility for the practical aspects of the transportation of Jews to extermination camps. Arendt concluded that Eichmann was an ordinary man. He was not evil – just a bureaucrat who tried to do his job as well as possible. Her thesis “banality of evil” envisages that anybody can perform evil acts. This is very controversial and the debate rages on between historians, psychologists and philosophers.

When the deed men attack and kill members of marginalized groups, the victims have usually already been marginalized and “devalued” by hateful propaganda whipping up a mood against the victims. It was seen for example in Nazi Germany, as well Bosnia and Rwanda, where about a million people were brutally murdered in the space of 100 days.

The repetition of atrocities and killings changes deed men – both individually and as a group, says Erwin Staub., Perpetrators gradually become better at doing the dirty work, and they will typically justify their actions partly by saying that it is necessary to do so, and partly through disparaging the victims. This psychological rationalization gets the perpetrators to believe that it is in order to eradicate the victims. It happens too often the victims are dehumanized, i.e. referred to as “vermin” and therefore the general moral rules do not apply. On the contrary, morality is turned on its head, so that the killing of the victims is morally correct.

Psychology speaks of two kinds of aggression. The first is instrumental aggression, defined as aggression which has a purpose, for example in the form of social reward or access to resources. Second, is reactive aggression, i.e. an aggression which is to defend one’s self. In the case of instrumental aggression with a clear purpose, one can imagine, according to psychologists, that some deed men may focus on the goal and the reward of their evil actions and therefore are better able to disarm the emotional responses, so they avoid the psychological after-effects such as PTSD. The psychologist Weierstall, together with colleagues, formed a theory based on surveys of 269 deed men in Rwanda. Almost half of them said that they felt that they were carried away by the violence, and that they experienced a certain satisfaction in seeing the victim bleed. The researchers suggest that, for some, participation in the murders apparently caused a kind of exhilaration, and that victims’ struggle may intensify aggression. According to this explanation, it is possible for some individuals to enjoy cruelty when moral restrictions do not prevent it or if the situation even provides the opportunity for organized violence.

Perpetrators believe that their role is to kill – and preferably as many as possible. In an atmosphere of lawlessness it does not so much matter whether the victims actually are what you accuse them of being. It is enough that the perpetrators believe that they are guilty. If at the same time organizations are created that promote violence and discrimination, such as Pancasila Youth or other paramilitary groups, the perpetrators eventually consider that their “work” serves a just cause, and that it is the victims’ own fault that they are being persecuted and eradicated. Through a mix of self-delusion, vanity and falsehood, the murderers are able to construct a story about the situation and themselves – assisted by the official position – that causes them to perceive their role in the genocide as an act of heroism, which exempts most of them from remorse.

PANCASILA PRINCIPLES

In 1945, Sukarno led a revolution to form a new independent nation. The five moral principles, Pancasila (Panca = five, Sila = principles) would form the basis for this nation. The five principles were: the belief in one god, consensus democracy, humanity, social justice and national unity. The paramilitary organization Pancasila Youth, which is part of the act of killing, is named after these principles.

The new republic’s first year was marked by the desire – and the struggle – for unification. Not all provinces were subject to the nationalist regime and there were still smaller states with Dutch support and efforts to create Islamic states.

1. Belief in one god: This principle was formulated as an alternative to creating a state with the majority religion, Islam, as the foundation. Here they wanted to avoid exclusion of members of other religions from getting citizenship. However, nature religions still struggled to win acceptance, and especially Buddhists and Hindus had to fight for it.

2. Consensus Democracy: During the revolution the nationalists agreed that they were fighting for freedom, and some also felt that it meant democracy. Sukarno first’s act, however, was to establish a one-party system or a “democracy with leadership,” as he called it. He wanted to create an alternative to Western democracy. But during the 1950s there was popular movement for democracy following a Western model with a multi-party system. However, this was not implemented in Indonesia before 1955. Here were now the main parties: the Nationalist Party, PNI; the two Muslim parties, Masyumi and NOW; as well as the Communist Party, PKI; with respectively 22, 20, 18 and 16 percent of votes in that order. All parties incorporated socialism in one way or another, but disagreed on the design. In addition to the parties, there were many other political groupings that competed to get members. Often the motivation to choose one or the other grouping was not due to one’s political beliefs. Instead, people got jobs, rice, coffee, cigarettes or other “thank you” gifts, and thus aid in many cases was bought and paid for.

During this period, there was also massive employment in the bureaucracy. Various offices were often used as a thank you to participants in the revolution, which meant some rather disorganized authorities.

Sukarno was president from 1945-1967, but lost direct power in the period 1950-57 due to democratic initiatives. However, he remains crucial as an inspiration and as the charismatic symbol of the revolution.

3. Humanity: It was also called internationalism or humanitarianism. The international aspect was closely connected with the Cold War, when much of the world was divided into American or Soviet sphere of interest. Sukarno was active over what came to be called the Third World, which in this period meant the non-aligned states, that supported neither the United States nor the Soviet Union. In 1950, Sukarno spoke, among other things, about the fear of ideologies with thinly veiled allusions to liberal democracy with market economy and communism, respectively. Apparently, both stood to oppose to independence.

International relations brought everything from new clothes and different furniture, to one of today’s most important symbols of the modern: radio. At the same time, the contact with Western culture was also challenging traditional ways of life, and it was a recurring theme to find an alternative to what was seen as decadent “Western life” which could, for example, lead to having children outside of marriage. At the same time, some were skeptical about the Hollywood films that showed the West’s moral decay.

4. Social Justice: Under this item, the aim was to increase the prosperity of the people. With Sukarno’s slogans Indonesia should no longer be a nation of “coolies” and no “coolie” among nations. Indonesians should therefore be richer, while enjoying greater respect from other countries. However, there were major problems with corruption and violence – especially in connection with the previously mentioned clashes between the various factions in the country. Several political groups were also criminal gangs. The widespread unrest and random violence created a special bond between the people and the army, which thus gained the crucial role as protector and won the people’s trust.

5. National unity: For any group it often applies that if the group can agree on who the enemy is, you have a good chance to stand together. The same applies to an entire nation, and this was the situation with Sukarno’s Indonesia in the 1950s and New Guinea (now Papua), which the Dutch had retained. Here you could use the battle to gain control of the area as a testament to the continued battle against Dutch imperialism as a unifying factor. National unity was still a great challenge, as with the Christian and pro-Dutch Ambon Island. Here there was resistance that did not want to become part of the new Indonesian republic. But that resistance was quickly quelled.

The purpose of the principles was to legitimize the new government and give it a foundation. At the same time these ideas were used to rally support for a regime that became more and more oppressive.

GUIDED DEMOCRACY

In 1957, there was an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Sukarno. His survival was taken as a sign of the magical protection that many thought he possessed. After the attack came a large scattered rebellion from Sumatra, and it was later confirmed that it was supported by the US intelligence agency CIA. The Americans were concerned about Indonesia as a non-aligned state, and so prefered a US-backed military dictatorship, which was the model for other countries in the Third World. The Cabinet in Jakarta was under threat, and the response from Sukarno was a close alliance with sections of the army. He did away with democracy of the Western model, and introduced now the concept of guided democracy. Two years after he had effectively usurped all power. The guided democracy was certainly less democratic! The army was now the main institution for national unity, and this position has continued today.

It must have been hard to predict, but when Sukarno announced guided democracy as the new form of government it was an avalanche that triggered the largest disaster in Indonesian history. It ended not only with the fall of the government and up to one million dead, but also a centralized military dictatorship that lasted until the late 1990s.

ETHNIC CHINESE INDONESIAN

Many ethnic Chinese had come to the current Indonesia during colonial times as unskilled laborers in coffee and sugar production, but also as merchants and tax collectors for the Dutch. Other immigrants later came to dominate the money lending. They profited from heavily from Dutch taxation, as they’d created an acute need for cash due to poor earnings in agriculture. This kind of business was unpopular, which is clearly reflected in the fact that lenders were called earth leeches! In addition – and perhaps why – this caused troubles in the early 1900s and anti-Chinese riots in Java, which is seen again later on other occasions in Indonesia.

MILITARY COUP IN 1965
BY JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER

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

Immediately before the coup, the PKI was the largest communist party in the world in a non-communist country. The party was officially required to win power through elections, and their subsidiaries included all Indonesian trade unions and cooperative movements of peasants without land. Their primary campaign included land reform and nationalization of foreign-owned mining use, oil and plantation industry. In this way, they tried to mobilize Indonesia’s vast natural resources. It should be for the benefit of the Indonesian people, in their view, who were poor in all ways after three hundred years of colonial exploitation.

After the military coup in 1965, all could be accused of being communists and opponents of the new military dictatorship. This applied to union members, landless peasants, intellectuals, ethnic Chinese and all others who fought for a redistribution of wealth in the aftermath of colonization.

In less than a year, and directly aided by Western governments, over a million of these so-called “communists” were murdered. In America, the genocide was known as a great “victory over communism” and was largely celebrated as good news. TIME Magazine reported “The best news for the West in Asia for many years,” while The New York Times gave the headline “A glimmer of light in Asia” and praised Washington to hide its involvement in the killings.

The ethnic Chinese who had come to Indonesia in the 18th and 19th centuries were made scapegoats, spurred by US intelligence that attempted to create a rift between the new Indonesian regime and the People’s Republic of China. The slaughter of PKIs members at village level and people affiliated with unions and cooperatives was also encouraged by the United States.

In many of Indonesia’s regions, the military recruited civilians to carry out the killings. The civilians were organized in paramilitary groups, were given basic training and considerable military support. In North Sumatra and elsewhere, recruits came mostly from groups of gangsters. Ever since the genocide, the Indonesian government celebrated “the extermination of the communists” as a patriotic struggle. They hailed the gangsters and the paramilitaries as heroes and rewarded them with power and privilege. These men and their protégées have gained powerful positions – and persecuted their opponents ever since.

The Genocide of 1965-66 began with the killing of six generals at night on the first of October 1965.

30TH SEPTEMBER MOVEMENT

BY JOHN ROOSA

October 1, 1965: The Thirtieth September Movement (Gerakan 30 September, or G30S), an association of young, rebellious Indonesian officers from the armed forces, slaughtered six generals from the Indonesian army in a misguided coup and dumped their bodies in a well south of Jakarta. At the same time, they took over the movement’s troops on national radio and declared their protection by President Sukarno to the cabal of right-wing generals who were in the process of planning a takeover. The movement was overpowered before the Indonesians knew that it existed. The highest-ranking military commander, Major-General Suharto, launched a quick counterattack, driving the movement’s troops from Jakarta in a single day.

Suharto accused the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) of being behind the movement, and he took the initiative to eradicate people linked to the party. Suharto’s army captured more than half a million people and accused them of having been involved in the movement. In one of the worst bloodbaths of the twentieth century, the military and local militias slaughtered several hundred thousand people in central and eastern Java, Bali and North Sumatra from late 1965 to mid 1966. In a state of national crisis Suharto gradually usurped Sukarno’s authority and established himself as the de facto president in March 1966 – now with the power to dismiss and appoint ministers.

The genocide was disproportionate in relation to its alleged purpose. The movement was a small, conspiratorial action organized by a handful of people. Overall it struck and killed twelve people. Suharto exaggerated its scale, so it looked more like a nationwide conspiracy. All the millions of people who were associated with PKI – even the illiterate peasants in remote villages – were exhibited as murderers with a single charge of the movement’s actions.

Until the end of the Suharto regime in 1998, the Indonesian government and the official military personnel responded at any sign of disagreement or violence by pointing to the PKI ghost. The central reference in the regime’s argument was “the latent threat of communism.” The unfinished eradication of PKI amounted to, in a very real way, the Suharto regime’s existence. The original statute, with which the regime led Indonesia for over 30 years, was Sukarno’s “presidential order of 3rd October 1965″ that gave Suharto the authority to “restore order.”

After defeating the motion, Suharto appointed himself as the nation’s savior in an attempt to construct a legitimating ideology for his dictatorship. His regime used all the propaganda methods to maintain the event in the public consciousness: books, monuments, street names, movies, museums, memorial statues and national holidays. The Suharto regime justified its existence by placing the movement in the middle of its historical narrative and by depicting PKI as unspeakably evil. Under Suharto, anti-communism became the state religion – complete with holy places, rituals and dates.

It is noteworthy that the comprehensive anti-PKI violence has become so badly misunderstood. The fact that both the military and civilians carried out the killings have undoubtedly helped to blur the issue of liability. The limited information available clearly demonstrates that the military bears the greatest share of responsibility. The killings were the result of organized, planned brutality more than spontaneous violence. Suharto’s clique of officers concocted false stories and controlled press in great enough degree to delude civilians into believing PKI was on the rampage. Had the military not deliberately provoked this way, people would never have seen PKI as a threat, since the party had been passive in the aftermath of the movement. From October 1965 onwards the military worked hard to whip up a hostile atmosphere around PKI. The US government incited the Indonesian military to pursue rank and file Communists. The military encouraged the militias to take action, guaranteed them impunity, and arranged logistical assistance.

In contrast to the story that has most often been told in Indonesia, there was virtually no spontaneous acts of violence carried out by villagers. Suharto’s army arranged rather mysterious disappearances rather than public executions. The army and its militias carried out any of their comprehensive genocide in secret. They rounded up prisoners at night, transported them to remote areas, executed them and buried the bodies in unmarked mass graves or tossed them into rivers.

The tragedy of the modern Indonesian history lies not only in the military-organized mass executions in 1965-66, but also the power that the killers were given – people who considered murder and psychological warfare as legitimate and normal ways to govern. A regime that legitimized itself by pointing to the mass grave at the well where the six generals were killed and swearing “never again,” while it left countless other mass graves from one end of the country to another, from Aceh on the west coast to Papua on the east coast. The occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999 was similarly guilt for tens – if not hundreds – of thousands killed. Many of them were anonymously buried. Every mass grave in the archipelago marks an arbitrarily ongoing and secretive abuse of state power.

The occupation of a relatively small event (movement) and the blurring of a piece of world history (mass executions in 1965-1966) have removed any empathy for the victims and the bereaved. There was erected a monument beside the well where the movement’s forces dumped the bodies of the six generals of October 1, 1965. However, there is no monument at the mass grave that marks the bodies of hundreds of thousands of people who lost their lives by genocide.

HISTORY. STORYTELLING. POWER.
BY JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER

It has focused on who killed the generals September 30, 1965 without worrying about the killing of over one million alleged communists in the months that followed. Suharto’s regime made endless amounts of propaganda, and even today much of the discussion about the genocide has been displaced. And this applies even in English-language sources. For me it is grotesque to participate in the debate on “who killed the generals” – and therefore the debate is not in THE ACT OF KILLING.

The genocide in Rwanda was triggered when Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana died when his plane was shot down on approach to Kigali. To discuss who shot down the plane is unreasonable in light of the killing of more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Similarly, it is irrelevant to know who started the Reichstag Fire in order to understand the Holocaust. As John Roosa described in the above, it diverts attention from the genocide of world historical importance. Imagine if one in Rwanda only focused on the question of “who shot the presidential plane down” when you talk about what happened in 1994. It would only be possible if the killers were still in power.

President-elect Joko Widodo, commonly referred to as “Jokowi,” has shown a real concern for the plight of ordinary Indonesians and has been outspoken on the need to acknowledge the human rights violations committed by the military. Nevertheless, his supporters include army generals  surrounded by killers and their cronies, including retired army generals Hendropriyono and Wiranto, both of whom are responsible for some of the worst massacres in the history of the New Order military dictatorship. Moreover, Jokowi selected for his running mate Jusuf Kalla, the vice president who, in The Act of Killing, gives a speech at a paramilitary rally in which he says, essentially, we need our gangsters to beat people up and get things done.

We can say, however, that Jokowi’s opponent, oligarch and former commander of Indonesia’s notorious special forces, Prabowo Subianto, embodied the darkest side of Indonesian politics. Prabowo is infamous for masterminding the disappearance, torture and execution of student activists in 1998, pogroms against the ethnic Chinese in 1998, and massacres in East Timor. During the election campaign, his campaign team threatened critical journalists with arrest, he fanned the flames of religious extremism, and he said Indonesia is not ready for electoral democracy. His defeat, however narrow, is an enormous relief for survivors of human rights abuse, religious and ethnic minorities, and everybody struggling for genuine democracy in Indonesia.

Joko Widodo’s strong track record as Governor of Jakarta, as well as the electorate’s rejection of the old regime, is, finally, cause for hope.

The conditions I encountered were deplorable. Women working on the plantation were forced to spray herbicide without protective clothing. The mist would enter their lungs and then their bloodstreams, destroying their liver tissue. The women would fall ill, and many would die in their forties. When they protested their conditions, the Belgian-owned company would hire paramilitary thugs to threaten them, and sometimes physically attack them.

Fear was their biggest obstacle they faced in organizing a union. The Belgian company could get away with poisoning its employees because the workers were afraid. I quickly learned the source of this fear: the plantation workers had a large and active union until 1965, when their parents and grandparents were accused of being “communist sympathizers” (simply for being in the union), and put into concentration camps, exploited as slave labor, and ultimately murdered by the army and civilian death squads.

In 2001, the killers not only enjoyed complete impunity; they and their protégés still dominated all levels of government, from the plantation village to the parliament. Survivors lived in fear that the massacres could happen again at any time.

After we completed the film (The Globalisation Tapes, 2002), the survivors asked us to return as quickly as possible to make another film about the source of their fear –  that is, a film about what it's like for survivors to live surrounded by the men who murdered their loved ones, men still in positions of power.

We returned almost immediately, in early 2003, and began investigating one 1965 murder that the plantation workers spoke of frequently. The victim’s name was Ramli, and his name was used almost as a synonym for the killings in general.

I came to understand the reason this particular murder was so often discussed: there were witnesses. It was undeniable. Unlike the hundreds of thousands of victims who disappeared at night from concentration camps, Ramli’s death was public. There were witnesses to his final moments, and the killers left his body in the oil palm plantation, less than two miles from his parents’ home. Years later, the family was able to surreptitiously erect a gravestone, though they could only visit the grave in secret.

Survivors and ordinary Indonesians alike would talk about “Ramli,” I think, because his fate was grim evidence of what had happened to all the others, and to the nation as a whole. Ramli was proof that the killings, no matter how taboo, had, in fact, occurred. His death verified for the villagers the horrors that the military regime threatened them into pretending had never occurred, yet threatened to unleash again. To speak of “Ramli” and his murder was to pinch oneself to make sure one is awake, a reminder of the truth, a commemoration of the past, a warning for the future. For survivors and the public on the plantation, remembering “Ramli” was to acknowledge the source of their fear – and thus a necessary first step to overcoming it.

And so, when I returned in early 2003, it was inevitable that Ramli’s case would come up often. The plantation workers quickly sought out his family, introducing me to Ramli’s dignified mother, Rohani, his ancient but playful father, Rukun, and his siblings – including the youngest, Adi, an optician, born after the killings.

Rohani thought of Adi as a replacement for Ramli. She had Adi so she could continue to live, and Adi has lived with that burden his whole life. Like children of survivors all across Indonesia, Adi grew up in a family officially designated “politically unclean,” impoverished by decades of extortion by local military officials, and traumatized by the genocide.

Because Adi was born after the killings, he was not afraid to speak out, to demand answers. I believe he gravitated to my filmmaking as a way of understanding what his family had been through, a way of expressing and overcoming a terror everybody around him had been too afraid to acknowledge.

I befriended Adi at once and together we began gathering other survivors’ families in the region. They would come together and tell stories, and we would film. For many, it was the first time they had publicly spoken about what happened. On one occasion, a survivor arrived at Ramli’s parents’ home, trembling with fear, terrified that if the police discovered what we were doing, she would be arrested and forced into slave labor, as she had throughout the years of dictatorship. Yet she came because she was determined to testify. Each time a motorcycle or car would pass, we would stop filming, hiding what equipment we could. Subject to decades of economic apartheid, survivors rarely could afford more than a bicycle so the sound of a motor meant an outsider was passing.

The Army, which is stationed in every village in Indonesia, quickly found out what we were doing and threatened the survivors, including Adi’s siblings, not to participate in the film. The survivors urged me, “Before you give up and go home, try to film the perpetrators. They may tell you how they killed our relatives.” I did not know if it was safe to approach the killers, but when I did I found all of them to be boastful, immediately recounting the grisly details of the killings, often with smiles on their faces, in front of their families, even their small grandchildren. In this contrast between survivors forced into silence, and perpetrators boastfully recounting stories far more incriminating than anything the survivors could have told, I felt I'd wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power.

When I showed these testimonials to those survivors who wanted to see it, including to Adi and Ramli’s other siblings, everybody said, more or less: “You are on to something terribly important. Keep filming the perpetrators, because anybody who sees this will be forced to acknowledge the rotten heart of the regime the killers have built.” From that point on, I felt entrusted by the survivors and human rights community to do a work that they could not safely do themselves: filming the perpetrators. All of them would enthusiatically invite me to the places they killed, and launch into spontaneous demonstrations of how they killed. They would complain afterwards that they had not thought to bring along a machete to use as a prop, or a friend to play a victim. One day, early in this process, I met the leader of the death squad on the plantation where we had made The Globalisation Tapes. He and a fellow executioner invited me to a clearing on the banks of Snake River, a spot where he had helped murder 10,500 people. Suddenly, I realized he was telling me how he had killed Ramli. I had stumbled across one of Ramli’s killers.

I told Adi about this encounter, and he and other family members asked to see the footage. That was how they learned the details of Ramli’s death.

For the next two years, from 2003-2005, I filmed every perpetrator I could find across North Sumatra, working from death squad to death squad up the chain of command, from the countryside to the city. Anwar Congo, the man who would become the main character in The Act of Killing, was the 41st perpetrator I filmed.

I spent the next five years shooting The Act of Killing, and throughout the process Adi would ask to see material we were filming. He would watch as much as I could find time to show him. He was transfixed.

Perpetrators on film normally deny their atrocities (or apologize for them), because by the time filmmakers reach them they have been removed from power, and their actions condemned and expiated. Here I was filming perpetrators of genocide who won, who built a regime of terror founded on the celebration of genocide, and who remain in power. They have not been forced to admit what they did was wrong. It is in this sense that The Act of Killing is not a documentary about a genocide 50 years ago. It is an exposé of a present-day regime of fear. The film is not a historical narrative. It is a film about history itself, about the lies victors tell to justify their actions, and the effects of those lies; about an unresolved traumatic past that continues to haunt the present.

I knew from the start of my journey that there was another, equally urgent film to make, also about the present. The Act of Killing is haunted by the absent victims – the dead. Almost every painful passage culminates abruptly in a haunted and silent tableau, an empty, often ruined landscape, inhabited by a single lost, lonely figure. Time stops. There is a rupture in the film’s point of view, an abrupt shift to silence, a commemoration of the dead, and the lives pointlessly destroyed. I knew that I would make another film, one where we step into those haunted spaces and feel viscerally what it is like for the survivors forced to live there, forced to build lives under the watchful eyes of the men who murdered their loved ones, and remain powerful. That film is The Look of Silence.

Apart from the older footage from 2003-2005 that Adi watches, we shot The Look of Silence in 2012, after editing The Act of Killing but before releasing it – after which I knew I could no longer safely return to Indonesia. We worked closely with Adi and his parents, who had become, along with my anonymous Indonesian crew, like an extended family to me.

Adi spent years studying footage of perpetrators. He would react with shock, sadness and outrage. He wanted to make sense of that experience. Meanwhile, his children were in school, being taught that what had happened to them – enslavement, torture, murder, decades of political apartheid – all of this was their fault, instilling them and other survivors’ children with shame. Adi was deeply affected – and angered – by the boasting of the perpetrators, his parents’ trauma and fear and the brainwashing of his children. Rather than pick up where we left off in 2003, gathering survivors together to recount their experiences, Adi wanted to meet the men involved with his brother’s murder. By introducing himself to them as the brother of their victim, he hoped they would be forced to acknowledge that they killed human beings.

For a victim to confront a perpetrator in Indonesia is all but unimaginable – as one can see from The Act of Killing. I set out to do something unprecedented: make a film where victims confront perpetrators while the perpetrators still hold power. The confrontations were dangerous. When we’d meet more powerful perpetrators, we would bring only Adi and my Danish crew, cinematographer Lars Skree and producer Signe Byrge Sørensen. Adi would come with no ID card. We would empty all numbers from our telephones and bring a second car we could switch to minutes after leaving, making it harder for the perpetrators to send police or thugs to follow us. But none of the confrontations ended violently, largely due to Adi’s patience and empathy, and the fact that the perpetrators were not quite sure how to react to us because they’d known me from years before.

Still, the confrontations were tense. Again and again, Adi says the unsayable, leaving the audience to feel what it is like to live as a survivor, and to perceive the contours of an oppressive silence borne of fear.

In October 2012, Indonesia's most important news publication, Tempo Magazine, published a special double edition dedicated to The Act of Killing, including 75 pages of boastful perpetrators' testimony from across Indonesia. The magazine's editors gathered this testimony to show that the film could have been made anywhere in Indonesia, that there are thousands of feared perpetrators enjoying impunity around the country, and that the problems of corruption and gangsterism are systemic. This special edition broke a 47-year silence about the genocide in the mainstream media.

Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights issued its statement about the film: “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.”

For a long time, the Indonesian government ignored The Act of Killing, hoping it would go away. When the film was nominated for an Academy award, the Indonesian president's spokesman acknowledged that the 1965 genocide was a crime against humanity, and that Indonesia needs reconciliation – but in its own time. While this was not an embrace of the film, it was incredible, because it represents an about-face for the government: until then, it had maintained that the killings were heroic and glorious.

There is a scene in The Act of Killing in which I accuse one of the perpetrators of committing war crimes, and he responds by accusing the West of hypocrisy, noting that the US slaughtered the native Americans. More to the point, the US and the UK helped engineer the Indonesian genocide and for decades enthusiastically supported the military dictatorship that came to power through the slaughter.

When The Act of Killing was awarded a BAFTA, I used my acceptance speech to note that neither the UK nor the US can have an ethical relationship with Indonesia (or so many other countries across the global south) until we acknowledge the crimes of the past, and our collective role in supporting, participating in, and – ultimately – ignoring those crimes.

A film cannot change a country’s political landscape. Like the child in the Emperor’s New Clothes, it can only create a space for the people who see it to discuss the nation’s most painful and important problems without fear, and for the first time. 

Into this space comes The Look of Silence.