New Film Shows U.S.-Backed Indonesian Death Squad Leaders Re-enacting Massacres

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Adi in The Act of Killing.

 

ADI ZULKADRY: [translated] Listen, if we succeed in making this film, it will disprove all the propaganda about the communists being cruel and show that we were cruel.

ANWAR CONGO: [translated] We’re the cruel ones.

ADI ZULKADRY: [translated] If this film is a success. We must understand every step we take here. It’s not about fear. It’s 40 years ago, so any criminal case has expired. It’s not about fear. It’s about image. The whole society will say, "We always suspected it. They lied about the communists being cruel." It’s not a problem for us; it’s a problem for history. The whole story will be reversed—not 180 degrees, 360 degrees—if we succeed with this scene.

HERMAN KOTO: [translated] But why should we always hide our history, if it’s the truth?

ADI ZULKADRY: [translated] No, the consequence is that everything Anwar and I have always said is false. It’s not the communists who were cruel.

HERMAN KOTO: [translated] But that’s true.

ADI ZULKADRY: [translated] I completely agree, but not everything true should be made public. I believe even God has secrets. I’m absolutely aware that we were cruel. That’s all I have to say. It’s up to you what to do about it.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Adi, a killer in Indonesia—after Suharto came to power, who knows how many people he killed?—in this film, The Act of Killing. Joshua Oppenheimer is the director. So, he’s coming to realize—I mean, this is a smart guy—that this does not look very good for them.

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah, this is a really—I think there’s a number of really interesting things about this. One of them is that Adi here says—warns everybody, "This is going to make us look bad." And, in fact, he only warns everybody this strongly once in the film, but in the process he did so many times. But everybody continued. Nobody heeds his warning.

And I think there’s a couple really important reasons for that. For the younger thugs, in the younger generation of paramilitary gangster leadership, as gangsters, fear is their capital. So they’re not participating in this film to look good; they’re participating in this film to look fearsome. And they’re only able, as we see them doing in the film, to go into a market and shake down the Chinese market stall owners—Chinese were, with a broad brush, attacked in 1965, labelled communist just by virtue of having been ethnically Chinese—they, these men, are not trying to look good, the other members of—the younger members, the Pancasila Youth. So they want to continue. Adi’s warning falls on deaf ears.

And I think, for Anwar, it’s particularly interesting why he doesn’t listen to his old best friend’s advice. I think it has to do with what Anwar is trying to do with this film. He is trying, actually, somehow, to deal with his own pain. He’s trying to deal with his nightmares. He finds a forum in the film to express a pain that the regime has no time for. The regime wants him to say it was heroic, it was great, so that, one, he can live with himself, all the other killers can live with themselves, and the survivors are kept suppressed and silenced. And suddenly, in the making of the film, he has a chance to deal with the ghosts that haunt him.

Earlier, in the first clip we saw, he dances on the roof. We see him—we cut right where he starts dancing the cha cha cha on the roof. But if you extend that and watch him dance the cha cha cha, most viewers will feel appalled. How can a man dance where he’s killed a thousand people? But just before he dances, as we will have noticed, he says he’s drinking, taking drugs, going out dancing, to forget what he’s done. So, somehow his pain, his conscience was there from the beginning. And then I think it is his effort to run away from the meaning of what he’s done that leads him to propose ever more complicated dramatizations. So, Anwar doesn’t listen to Adi’s warning here because Anwar actually is somehow trying to deal with his pain. He’s not trying to look like a hero. He’s not trying to simply revisit or restate the official history. He’s trying to actually run away from and experience—and these are two paradoxical human needs, I think—run away from and experience his pain.