A potbellied, ponytailed man in grey suit and tie plops a floppy pink cowboy hat on the head of a much leaner accomplice. “This one’s for the Big Boss.” The slender figure clad in cream suit and brown shirt nods. “Yep, it’s perfect for me.” Gesturing to a wooden picnic table, he describes in detail – a point here, a hand motion there – how he positioned one leg of the table on a man’s throat, bouncing up and down on the table top and singing until the victim’s skull collapsed. As he demonstrates for the camera how he committed first degree murder, pink Stetson perched absurdly on head, this man – who beat to death, strangled or decapitated more than 1,000 Indonesians with his bare hands – claps his hands and laughs.
When veteran director Werner Herzog describes a film as the most “powerful, surreal and frightening in at least a decade”, you know you’d better steel your nerves before the opening credits start to roll. The Act Of Killing, for which Herzog later signed on as executive producer, isn’t the imagined stuff of nightmare peddlers Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino; it’s actual documented history, which is what makes its horrors that much harder to bear.
First-time director Joshua Oppenheimer, who will be staging a live Q&A session via Skype after his film screens at Bophana Centre this week, deals not in fiction but in fact. Eight years, 25 awards and one very surreal journey ago, he set out to make a documentary about ‘the second greatest crime of the 20th century’: the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, in which gangsters hired by General Suharto’s military dictatorship systematically tortured and murdered more than half a million people.
As with atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge here in Cambodia a decade later, the word ‘genocide’ doesn’t quite cover it. These were human beings bound, gagged and beaten to death – or worse – not on the basis of their race, creed or caste, but for the simple act of failing to support a political institution built on fear. Genocide in the strictest sense it may not have been; mass murder it most certainly was.
And it was to those responsible for these mass murders in northern Sumatra that Oppenheimer went with what some might consider an indecent proposal: re-enact the killings you committed, on camera, in the style of your favourite movie genre. Absurd it may sound, but the resulting 157 minutes of footage – edited down from thousands of hours gathered by Oppenheimer and his crew in situ between 2005 and 2011 – are among the most disturbing you will ever see. They document not only the process of producing said dramatisations, but also the inevitable consequences.
Anwar Congo, he of the pink Stetson, peers intently over the gold rims of his glasses. Now dressed in green Hawaiian shirt, with trousers that match his white hair, he raises one arm in slow motion. He’s standing on a white-walled roof terrace, the kind ubiquitous in Asia, with square mesh windows and barred metal doors. “At first we beat them to death, but there was too much blood. There was so much blood here so when we cleaned up it smelled awful. To avoid the blood I used this system. Can I show you?”
This small-time crook who went on to lead North Sumatra’s most lethal death squad holds aloft for the camera a piece of wood about 50 centimetres long and a few centimetres wide. A long piece of wire trails from its centre, one end of which Anwar ties to a pole. He then orders another man to sit, wrapping the remaining wire around his throat and slowly pulling it taut. The man makes an exaggerated choking sound, grinning. Anwar, wire still in hand, turns to face the camera. “This is how to do it without too much blood… I’ve tried to forget all this with good music, dancing, feeling happy, a little alcohol, a little marijuana, a little… what do you call it? Ecstasy. Once I’d get drunk I’d ‘fly’ and feel happy.” Anwar dances an enthusiastic cha cha on the spot where hundreds died at his hands. His ‘victim’ laughs: “He’s a happy man.”
From hawking dodgy cinema tickets to movie-goers hungry for the latest Hollywood hit in the early ’60s, Anwar rose – via extortion, torture and murder – through the ranks of Indonesia’s gangster elite to occupy what is today a privileged place in the political hierarchy. Despite committing what the Geneva Conventions would define as crimes against humanity (or rather because of that), he’s revered as the founding father of Pemuda Pancasila, the right-wing paramilitary mob spawned by the original death squads.
And what a mob it is, counting among its three million members everyone from henchmen to government ministers. Their bravado knows no bounds: in frame after frame, they boast about their parts in the ‘extermination of communists’; a politically motivated massacre, in short. They laugh and cajole, even as they extort money from Chinese market-stall owners right in front of Oppenheimer’s lens (the director hung back after several such incidents to apologise and assure people he wasn’t filming on the thugs’ behalf). In several particularly excruciating scenes, these bold-as-brass killers bully the families of their victims to take part in their dramatic re-enactments.
‘Why?’ one might very well ask, not least at the sight of bewildered children being bullied to tears by obese serial killers. What could possibly be the point of such a traumatic cinematic exercise? Because, answers Oppenheimer, the regime still ruling Indonesia to this day was founded on crimes against humanity, yet has never been held accountable. “The film is essentially not about what happened in 1965, but rather about a regime in which genocide has, paradoxically, been effaced yet celebrated in order to keep the survivors terrified, the public brainwashed and the perpetrators able to live with themselves… It never pretends to be an exhaustive account of the events of 1965. It seeks to understand the impact of the killing and terror today, on individuals and institutions… When I was entrusted by this community of survivors to film these justifications, to film these boastings, I was trying to expose and interrogate the nature of impunity. Boasting about killing was the right material to do that with because it is a symptom of impunity.”
There is no shortage of such material. In one scene, an Indonesian governor proudly declares: “Communism will never be accepted here because we have so many gangsters, and that’s a good thing. The word gangster comes from English: ‘free men’. Thugs want freedom to do things, even if they are wrong. But if we know how to work with them, all we have to do is direct them.” In another, this time shot on the golf course, more thugs ruminate on the appeal of their unusual career choice: “Gangsters are free men. They want to enjoy life in their style. Relax and Rolex…” One then turns to his pretty, smartly attired female caddy and makes a lewd comment about her genitalia.
And therein lies the rub: these notorious mass murderers, infamous exterminators of their fellow men, appear throughout as alarmingly normal – a phenomenon Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt described in her 1963 book Eichmann In Jerusalem as “the banality of evil”. Oppenheimer’s monsters pester one another for shoulder massages at the bowling alley; can’t remember their lines at political rallies; smoke weed and drink beer to silence their demons. At one point, a frail-looking Anwar chastises a young boy – a nephew, perhaps? Grandson? – for breaking the leg of a duckling. “Say ‘Sorry, duck. It was an accident. I was scared and I hit you.’”
In Eichmann In Jerusalem, Arendt reports on the trial in Israel in 1962 of Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (‘lieutenant colonel’) Adolf Eichmann, one of the main orchestrators of the Holocaust. During the proceedings, after which he was hanged for crimes against humanity, he showed neither guilt nor hatred. In words eerily reminiscent of those of Kaing Guek Eav or Comrade Duch, the man who oversaw the notorious Khmer Rouge interrogation centre S21, Eichmann stated he was simply ‘doing his job’.
The link between the protagonists in Oppenheimer’s film and Arendt’s theory has been explored by at least one Indonesian academic. Soe Tjen Marching, writing in the Jakarta Globe, questions whether the perpetrators are banal, noting that “These people may merely have been at ease performing their unawareness (or denial) of their crimes in front of a perceived ally. Later, Anwar shows remorse as he becomes aware of Oppenheimer’s true intentions. Was Anwar previously really unaware? Or has Anwar’s awareness of Oppenheimer’s political stance somehow led him to demonstrate his awareness and his remorse concerning the crimes that he has committed? After all, we represent ourselves differently vis-a-vis different people.”
As the film progresses and the re-enactments become increasingly elaborate (think potbellied murderers dressed in full drag), so Oppenheimer’s nightmarish vision intensifies. Indonesia’s banal culture of impunity – the kind of culture to which Cambodia is no stranger – is a haven of horrors in which killers joke about war crimes on TV chat shows and celebrate moral disaster with the ease and grace of a soft-shoe shuffle. In front of thousands, a paramilitary leader announces: “This country needs free men. If we all worked for the government, we’d be a nation of bureaucrats. We’d get nothing done. We need gangsters to get things done. Muscles aren’t for beating people up… although beating people up is sometimes needed.” His visibly enthused audience laughs and cheers.
In a recent interview with Amnesty International, Oppenheimer says: “The justification and even celebration of mass killings seems in the film like a sign that they feel no guilt. I think it’s the opposite: it seems that they’re inhuman; on the contrary, killing is a human act, only human beings do it, we’re the only species that does this and to justify it and celebrate it is also human. Normally when we hear about perpetrators in film, they’ve already been removed from power, so they can’t justify it anymore. These are people who can justify it and so they do justify it, and the justification is actually a symptom of their own conscience and their own humanity. That’s the paradox in the film; it’s what allows the film to develop into what it develops to and leads to that climax. But it’s also the tragedy, because once you’ve corrupted yourself by killing somebody or killing many people and then justify it, the justification allows you to commit further evil, it allows you to kill again, it allows you to extort your victims, to blame them for what happened, intimidate them so that they don’t accuse you and make you feel guilty, and so that they stay silent, and it allows you to extort money from them, to kick them off the land, and it almost demands that you kill again.”
Anwar, of course, is by no means a lone operator. Also prominent in The Act Of Killing is Herman Koto, the aforementioned potbellied/ponytailed henchman, and Adi Zulkadry, the main driving force behind Pancasila Youth. Filmed fishing together, Adi dismisses Anwar’s lingering nightmares as “just a nerve disturbance”.
At one point Adi, ever remorseless, says on record: “Killing is the worst crime you can do. The secret is to find a way to not feel guilty. It’s all about finding the right excuse… All morality is relative.” Later, pressed by an unseen interviewer to explain his war crimes, he replies: “I don’t necessarily agree with those international laws. When Bush was in power, Guantanamo was right… The Geneva Conventions may be today’s morality, but tomorrow we’ll have the Jakarta Conventions and dump the Geneva Conventions. ‘War crimes’ are defined by the winners. I’m a winner, so I can make my own definition.”
The same could surely be said of Evil.
