UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

JduAhALi + 111 '3 I T

.' L P U B L I S H I H Q

The Act of Killing and the Dilemmas of History Author(s): Brad Simpson

Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Winter 2013), pp. 10-13

Published by: University of California Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.Org/stable/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.10

Accessed: 25/03/2014 13:25

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

This content downloaded from 137.99.71.186 on Tue, 25 Mar 2014 13:25:23

PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film

http://www.
STOR
jstor.org

THE ACT OF KILLING AND THE DILEMMAS OF

HISTORY
Quarterly.

Brad Simpson
''No one cared, as long as they were Communists,
that they were being butchered.''

Th is was the judgment of Howard Federspiel, a State

Department intelligence officer, recalling the views of
the US government officials regarding the mass killing of an estimated
500,000 alleged Communists in Indonesia in 19651966. 1 The killings
were directed by the Indonesian Army and carried out by a wide range
of civilian and paramilitary allies following an alleged coup attempt by
the PKI on September 30, 1965, events which led to the overthrow of
Indonesias President Sukarno and the ascension of General Suharto to
power in 1966, where he remained for thirty-two years. 2
The September 30th Movement and the massacres that followed
were the culmination of years of mounting conflict among the
Indonesian armed forces, Islamic parties and organizations, and the
Indonesian Communist Party (the PKI, which was the largest in the
world outside of the socialist bloc), over the direction of Indonesian
politics and foreign policy. In the aftermath of a disastrous regional and
civil war in the late 1950s, sponsored in part by the United States,
President Sukarno abandoned parliamentary democracy, and the Army
and PKI emerged as the two dominant political forces in a highly
polarized Indonesia.
Over the next six years, President Sukarno committed himself to an
increasingly radical, anticolonial domestic and foreign policy,
challenging Western investors, withdrawing from the United Nations,
waging a low-level war with the British over the formation of
Malaysia, and forging closer ties to the Peoples Republic of China. In
response, the United States and other Western governments began
conducting covert operations aimed at provoking a clash between the
Army and the PKI, the only
Film Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2, pps 10-13, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630.

2014 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all

y
10 W INTER 2013

requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of
California
Press's
Rights
and
Permissions
website,
http://
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/FQ.2014.67.2.10

mass-based alternative to Army rule. In early 1965, several months

after the intensification of these operations, the US Ambassador to
Indonesia, Howard Jones, told a gathering of regional ambassadors
that, from our viewpoint, of course, an unsuccessful coup attempt by
the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of
political trends in Indonesia.3 By the time of the September 30th
Movement, the United States and many of its allies viewed the
wholesale annihilation of the PKI and its mass base as an indispensable
prerequisite to Indonesias reintegration into the international political
system on Western terms.
The September 30th Movement itself, a badly bungled affair
resulting in the deaths of six generals, was quickly crushed by the
Indonesian Army. More important than the movement itself, as John
Roosa has argued, was the way that Suharto, the Indonesian Army, and
their supporters in the international community used the movement to
justify the annihilation of the PKI as an existential threat to the nation. 4
Over the next three months the Army, working with and directing a
range of local militias, anticommunist student groups, Pemuda
Pancasila chapters, and Islamic organizations, banned the PKI,
slaughtered upwards of a half-million of its members and alleged
supporters, and imprisoned hundreds of thousands more. The US and
UK governments, supported by other nations in the region, conducted
wide-ranging secret operations aimed at supporting and encouraging
the Army-led slaughter, providing economic and military assistance to
this end.5 They also supported Sukarnos ouster in March of 1966 and
helped to nurture the emergence of an Army-led authoritarian regime.
One of the many achievements of Joshua Oppenhei- mers landmark
The Act of Killing is to show how little Indonesians today seem to care
about the killings, arguably the central event of modern Indonesian
history, and how those who participated in them have shaped a sort of
victors verdict without parallel, and seemingly without an

Anwar Congo poses at a Pemuda Pancasila rally in The Act of Killing.

social sanction. Oppenheimer has rightfully garnered praise for his

innovative approach to a subject whose drama and scale are so vast that
they seem to defy efforts to render them intelligible on an individual
level. How can a filmmaker convincingly convey the individuality and
humanity of people who willingly take part in atrocious acts and seem
unrepentant, if not untroubled, by what they have done, without
collapsing the moral distance between viewer and perpetrator? Other
essays in this special edition explore these questions. I, instead, would
like to offer a brief overview of the events Oppenheimer describes and
some sense of the scholarly and political landscape into which his work
has landed.
The site of Oppenheimers film, the North Sumatran city of Medan
and its surroundings, a rubber and tin producing area where the PKI and
affiliated trade unions were politically well entrenched, witnessed some
of the worst killings. Even discounting for exaggerations, the US
Consulate in Medan reported in November 1965 that a widespread
slaughter was taking place.6 Police Information Chief Colonel Budi
Juwono reported that from 50100 PKI members are being killed
every night in east and central Java by civilian anti-Communist groups
with blessing of Army. Bloodthirsty members of Pemuda Pancasila
informed the consulate in Medan that the organization

intends to kill every PKI member they can get their hands
7

Scholars continue to debate the precise death toll from the 1965
1966 killings, but estimates of up to 80,000 killed in North Sumatra
seem plausible, out of a nationwide total of perhaps 500,000 dead. The
combination of the mass murder and imprisonment of alleged PKI
members and supporters, the banning of its affiliate organizations, and
the adoption of anticommunism as a virtual state religion for more than
three decades, moreover, shattered the countrys civil society. Victims
and survivors of the events of 19651966, unsurprisingly, faced
extraordinary difficulties in attempting to force a national reckoning
with, much less an accountability for, the killings. Suhartos ouster in
1998 created the first fissures, and in subsequent years a wider national
conversation about the killings has begun.8 As Oppenheimer
graphically shows, however, many of the perpetrators and their
accomplices continue to hold positions of power and respectability in
Indonesia, and have a deep stake in preserving a national narrative that
posits them as saviors from a possible communist takeover decades
earlier.
The Act of Killing has helped to invigorate popular discussion in
Indonesia about the profound and troubling legacy of the 1965 killings,
the need for accountability, an

FILM QUARTERLY 11

This content downloaded from 137.99.71.186 on Tue, 25 Mar 2014 13:25:23

PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Indonesian youth participate in a party rally under the banner of Pemuda Pancasila in The Act of Killing.

the consequences of impunity. Human rights activists, networks of

former political prisoners, and others have organized scores of
screenings across Indonesia, though the film is effectively banned
from public viewing.
The film, however, is not the only voice speaking to these
events. After a lull of nearly two decades, scholarly interest in the
events of September 30, 1965, and their bloody aftermath has
surged. John Roosas Pretext for Mass Murder provides the clearest
and most persuasive account yet of the September 30th Movement,
while my own work delves deeply into the role of the United States
in seeking to provoke an armed clash between the Indonesian Army
and the Communist Party (PKI) and in supporting the latters
extermination.9 Anthropologist Robert Lemelsons documentary, 40
Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy (2009), explores some of
the same themes as The Act of Killing, but from the perspective of
victims of the anti-PKI slaughter.10
A range of others, many of them Indonesian, have begun to
painstakingly reconstruct the local dynamics of the mass killings in
various parts of the Indonesian archipelago, including in North
Sumatra, as well as the response of Western powers. 11 Roosa has
collaborated with a number of Indonesian researchers to found the
Indonesian Institute for Social History, which has conducted
hundreds of oral histories of victims and survivors of the 1965
1966 killings

and the waves of political imprisonment that accompanied them. 1

Victims groups in Indonesia continue to press both for
acknowledgment of the 19651966 killings and for redress.
Perhaps most important, Indonesias National Human Rights
Commission (KOMNAS HAM) in 2012 issued a lengthy official
report labeling the 19651966 killings as state-sponsored crimes,
though the report was rejected by the Indonesian Attorney Generals
office.13 The Attorney Generals office has hinted that it might
conduct a similar inquiry, and Indonesias House of Representatives
is currently considering long-stalled legislation establishing a
national truth commission to investigate the killings.
Joshua Oppenheimers documentary is both a window into a
horrific period of Indonesian history and a mirror reflecting the
difficulties of a now formally democratic state and society in
confronting the past. The films artistry and power insure that it will
garner wide attention from film watchers and scholars alike. But it
is in Indonesia itself that The Act of Killing may have its most
significant impact.

Notes
1.

CIA Memo, 9 November 1965, FRUS, 19641968, pp.

36163; Federspiel quoted in Kathy Kadane, Ex-Agent

1 W INTER 2013

sSay CIA Compiled Death Lists for Indonesians, States News Service, 19
May 1990; Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William
BundyBrothers in Arms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 353.
2. Ibid.
3. Presentation by Howard Jones at the 1965 Chief of Mission Conference, ND,
Howard Jones papers, Box 22, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA.
4. John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement &
Suharto's Coup dEtat in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2006).
5. Telegram 1304, US Embassy Jakarta to State Department, 2 November
1965, NSF CO Files Indonesia, Vol. V, LBJ Library, Austin, TX; Telegram
1712, US Embassy Jakarta to State Department, 10 December 1965, RG 59
19641966, POL 23-9 INDON, National Archives, College Park, MD; Top
Secret Telegram 9645, Foreign Office to Washington, 3 December 1965,
PREM 13, 2718, The National Archives, Richmond, Surrey, UK.
6. Telegram 32, US Consulate Surabaya to State Department, 14 November
1965, NSF CO File, Indonesia, Vol. V, LBJ Library, Austin, TX.
7. Telegram 1438, US Embassy Jakarta to State Department, 13 November
1965, RG 59 Central Files 19641966, POL 23-9 INDON, National
Archives, College Park, MD; Telegram 65, US Consulate Medan to State
.

Department, 16 November 1965, RG 59 Central Files 19641966, POL 239

INDON, National Archives, College Park, MD.
8. Mary S. Zarbuchen, Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian
Present (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).
9. Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder; Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns:
Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 19601968
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Also useful, in a more
comparative context, is Christopher Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies:
Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 1792.
10. 40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy, directed by Robert Lemelson
(Elemental Productions, 2009). DVD.
11. Doug Kammen and Katherine MacGregor, eds., The Contours of Mass
Violence in Indonesia: 19651968 (Singapore: National University of
Singapore Press, 2012); Bernd Schaefer and Baskara Wardaya, eds.,
Indonesia and the World, 196566 (Jakarta: Kompas Gramedia, 2013).
12. See http://www.sejarahsosial.org/ (accessed October 2013).
Komnas HAM Declares 1965 Purge a Gross Human Rights Violation, Jakarta
Post, July 23, 2012, Ai

FILM QUARTERLY 13