Take
Action on U.S. Support for Mass Violence
and Genocide
in Indonesia
The massacre of
up to 1,000,000 communists, leftists,
ethnic Chinese, and others in Indonesia
in 1965-1967 is a foundational event in
modern Indonesian political history, but it
remains mostly a footnote for most in
the United States and elsewhere.
The documentary
The Act of Killing
shocked
audiences as
perpetrators of the mass murder
reenacted their violence. The film has fueled a debate
within Indonesia and drawn attention
internationally to events unknown to
many. Events that the U.S. facilitated
and cheered at the time.
The Look of Silence,
a companion
film to THE ACT OF KILLING will soon be
showing in U.S. theaters It
follows the investigation by Adi Rukun
into the murder of his older brother who
was killed during the violence.
These powerful films tell us much about
Indonesia today as they do about the
past. However, any evaluation of the
events of 1965-1967 must include a
discussion of the role of Western powers
in the violence, especially the
United States. The
East Timor
and Indonesia Action Network
(ETAN) continues to call for
accountability for those in the West who
encouraged and assisted in the mass
violence in Indonesia. The full truth
must come out and the U.S. should
declassify all files related to
Suharto's U.S.-backed seizure of power
and the murderous events which followed.
1)
Sign the petition urging the
U.S. government to take two immediate
steps:
a) declassify
and release all documents related to
the U.S. role in the 1965/66 mass
violence, and
b) formally
acknowledge the U.S. role in
facilitating the 1965-66 violence
and its subsequent support for the
brutalities of the Suharto regime.
3)
Spread the word about the petition and
the film. Write a letter to the editor
and post to facebook or other social
media calling for the U.S. to take
responsibility for its role in the
mass killings in Indonesia.
Go here
for sample letters, tweets and
facebook posts. It is best to
use your own words. Also use
ETAN's Backgrounder:
Breaking the Silence: The U.S. and
Indonesia's Mass Violence.
for additional information.
4) Organize a
discussion of the films. (See our
brief discussion guide, write
etan@etan.org if you plan to use it
or with any suggestions or comments.) If you are high school teacher or
college professor teaching an
appropriate subject, consider assigning
The Act of Killing
or
The Look of
Silence to your
students. Use it as a springboard for
discussions on the impact of U.S.
foreign policy, the need to address
human rights violations, and how the
past affects the present. (Contact:
Chris Lundry for further info or
assistance.)
5)Support ETAN. We need your
support to continue our work for justice
and accountability.
Please
donate today.
THE LOOK OF SILENCE is Joshua
Oppenheimer’s powerful companion piece
to the Oscar-nominated The Act of
Killing. Through a family that lost
their eldest son, the film explores one
of the 20th century’s deadliest
atrocities, still largely hidden after
50 years—Indonesia’s 1965 army-led purge
and killing of as many as one million
people. The family discovers years later
(from Oppenheimer’s footage) who killed
their son and how, and they must
confront how privileged, dangerous, and
close at hand the killers remain. The
younger son, an optometrist named Adi,
breaks the half-century of fearful
silence with an act the film calls
“unimaginable in a society where the
murderers remain in power.” While
testing the eyesight of the men who
killed his brother, Adi confronts them.
He challenges them to accept
responsibility for their violence.
Oppenheimer writes that the film depicts
“a silence born of terror,” and “the
necessity of breaking that silence, but
also … the trauma that comes when that
silence is broken." More
information about the film can be found
here:
http://thelookofsilence.com/
About THE ACT OF KILLING
In
The
Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer
and executive produced by Errol Morris
and Werner Herzog, the filmmakers expose
a corrupt regime that celebrates death
squad leaders as heroes.
When the Indonesian
government was overthrown in 1965,
small-time gangster Anwar Congo and his
friends went from selling movie tickets
on the black market to leading death
squads in the mass murder of over a
million opponents of the new military
dictatorship. Anwar boasts of killing
hundreds with his own hands, but he's
enjoyed impunity ever since, and has
been celebrated by the Indonesian
government as a national hero. When
approached to make a film about their
role in the genocide, Anwar and his
friends eagerly comply—but their idea of
being in a movie is not to provide
reflective testimony. Instead, they
re-create their real-life killings as
they dance their way through musical
sequences, twist arms in film noir
gangster scenes, and gallop across
prairies as Western cowboys. Through
this filmmaking process, the moral
reality of the act of killing begins to
haunt Anwar and his friends with varying
degrees of acknowledgment, justification
and denial. More information about the
film can be found here:
http://actofkilling.com/.
Order the Oscar nominated
documentary THE ACT OF KILLING
here and support ETAN
