Unlike the Nazis or the Hutu, This Country's Leaders Got Away With Genocide

Editor's note: Readers, don't forget about "Elder Cleansing" by the Probate Court of Cook County. They also get away with genocide.  Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

 

Unlike the Nazis or the Hutu, This Country's Leaders Got Away With Genocide

By Scott Johnson | Takepart.com17 hours agoTakepart.com

Imagine for a moment that the Nazis had somehow triumphed in 1945, and the regime that systematically killed millions of innocent people was still in place.

Or, to use another example, consider what Rwanda might look and feel like today if the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that committed the majority of the killings during the 1994 genocide, had taken power—if, in other words, it got away with it.  

It is a painful, deeply troubling outcome to contemplate, and yet it’s essentially what began in Indonesia in the last months of 1965 and continued for the next 30 years. It’s also the subject of one of the most powerful films to emerge this year,The Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and a strong contender in the best documentary category at the Academy Awards on March 3.  

The genocide in Indonesia, often referred to as the Indonesian killings, began in October 1965 when members of the Communist 30 September Movement staged a failed coup. The Indonesian Army responded immediately and began an anti-Communist purge that swept across the island archipelago. At least 500,000 people are estimated to have been killed (some estimates put the figure closer to a million), and upwards of a million were imprisoned. Some of the most brutal purges took place in Java, Bali, and North Sumatra, where Oppenheimer’s film is centered.

To help carry out the purge, the man who would become president, Haji Muhammed Suharto, encouraged the proliferation of right-wing militias that ruthlessly massacred hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes in clusters of thousands or tens of thousands at a time. As Suharto solidified his power, these right-wing “gangsters,” as they were known, became powerful celebrities, feted, promoted, and lauded both in and out of the halls of power. Unlike the Rwandan genocidaires or the Nazi death camp leaders in Germany, many of whom were held to account after their regimes were toppled, the Indonesian killers took control and have stayed in it ever since. The result, says Oppenheimer, is an Indonesia “where black is white and white is black.” 

Oppenheimer trains his lens on these killers as a way to show what he calls “the moral vacuum” of Indonesia today. By allowing the killers to reenact, on camera, some of their most heinous and vicious methods of killing, Oppenheimer is showing us what happens to a society—to the killers as much as the killed—when it leaves the confines of the moral universe. The central character, a mass murderer named Anwar Congo who decapitated more than 1,000 of his victims with a garroting wire, takes us into the mind of not only a killer but also a society sick with a self-imposed psychological terror.  

“The reenactments are not intended to re-create what it was like then,” Oppenheimer told me recently during an interview in Los Angeles. “I see them as telling us something about Indonesia today, about the stories these men are telling themselves today in order to live with themselves and maintain an economy of fear in this society.”  

Indeed, the film is full of scenes showing how the culture that allowed the killings to happen in the first place has morphed into a nationwide endorsement of the crudest, most insidious form of denial and self-justification. At one point we see the Indonesian vice president endorsing the paramilitary group called the Pemuda Pancasila, which reveres Congo as a kind of founding father, by telling a crowd of supporters that sometimes it’s simply necessary “to beat people up.” The film is filled with these chilling, sinister moments, when the full scope of what Indonesians are only now beginning to come to terms with is on full display.  

Oppenheimer told me that the survivors of the genocide and the Indonesian human rights community, on whose behalf he says he has been working for the last seven years, have only recently started to feel comfortable talking about the trauma that Suharto’s brutal legacy has imposed on them.  

“The film is a document of the very recent past,” he said. “But Indonesia is at a crossroads now. There is a younger generation of Indonesians who are coming into their professions and lives, and they want to raise their children in the democracy that the country claims to be but is not yet. They don't want their children to be lied to in school the way they were lied to.”  

It is a measure of Oppenheimer’s skill as a filmmaker and a journalist, and as a human being, that he manages to remain close to his subjects as they reenact their crimes and, in the case of Congo, come to terms with the scope of their crimes.  

At one point we see Congo look straight at the camera and begin to sob. “Have I sinned, Joshua?” he asks, and from behind the camera we hear only silence, as if in the void the dead themselves are finally able to have a presence in a discussion that has never taken place. 

“Now for the first time the media is talking about the genocide as a genocide,” Oppenheimer told me. “The survivors are able to talk with much less fear than they ever had. Ordinary people are talking about genocide as genocide. And the government is acknowledging that what happened was wrong. So a process of transformation is occurring, and it has grown over the last 18 months since the film has appeared.”