Impact case study database

The 1965 genocide began as an anti-Communist purge but expanded to encompass many other opposition parties and sympathisers, resulting in an estimated 500,000+ deaths. The period of mass killings ended with the instigation of military leader Suharto's three-decade authoritarian presidency – the “New Order”. During these thirty years, the perpetrators of the killings – members of the Indonesian military and various death squads facilitated by the U.S. and other states – came to be celebrated in all Indonesian schools and media for their “heroic extermination of the communists”. It is this suppressed trauma of the past, and subsequent generations’ culturally embedded attitude towards it, that the Genocide and Genre project aimed to redress.

Informing Domestic Activism

An important outcome of Oppenheimer’s research-based creative practice is the establishment and undertaking of a formal truth commission for the 1965 mass killings. The International People's Tribunal (IPT) 1965 was undertaken at the Hague from 10-13 November 2015 and examined evidence in order to develop an accurate historical and scientific record of, and apply principles of International law to, the facts as found.

The IPT’s general coordinator, lawyer Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, has testified that he was inspired to act following a screening of The Act of Killing at the Movies that Matter Festival in The Hague in 2013: “Oppenheimer said: ‘I have done my job as filmmaker. How will you fight for the dignity of your nation?’ We were shocked at what he said, I thought it was such a provocative question […] On that day, March 23, 2013, we really felt it was time to fight for justice. In the end we decided to bring the 1965 case to the International Tribunal in The Hague” [a].

The IPT aimed to create a climate in which the international community would recognise the killings as crimes against humanity and thus pressure the Indonesian government to take action. Such international pressure is especially important given that, as noted in the Asia Literary Review, “[i]n 2012, the National Human Rights Commission (Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia, known as Komnas HAM) released the results of a four-year investigation into the atrocities of 1965 and declared that the army had carried out gross crimes against humanity. But since 2012, the attorney general has continued to reject Komnas HAM’s recommendation for a criminal inquiry” [b]. Leading authority figures within Indonesia were angered by this Tribunal taking place abroad, with the Attorney General stating: “We solve our own issues. There is no need for other parties to be involved in this” [c]. International outlets, including Al Jazeera and Time magazine, reported on the IPT’s final report, with CNN’s article headlined: “Tribunal finds Indonesia guilty of 1965 genocide; US, UK complicit”, and the academic blog Indonesia at Melbourne stating “the IPT 1965 report serves as the single most significant moral statement representing the crimes inflicted against so many” [d]. Oppenheimer would further increase international pressure on this issue through his own activities, as described in the section on “Achieving Accountability” below.

Oppenheimer’s work has also led to a partial achievement of the Tribunal members’ “hope [that] the verdict will be used as a basis for changing school history textbooks and ‘countering the hate propaganda’ produced by the Suharto regime” [e]. As part of the “Look of Silence Outreach” programme – which involved working with and organising networks of Indonesian civil society organisations, human rights groups, universities, and cinemas to address and challenge fear and silence around the 1965 genocide – the Indonesian History Teachers Association created just such an alternative history curriculum [f]. Unlike the decades-old state education curriculum, which fails to address the genocide of ’65, this curriculum directly addresses the killings. The curriculum is built around the two films and has been delivered in high schools throughout the country.

Achieving Accountability from the U.S.

Oppenheimer has worked with various NGOs in order to achieve accountability from the U.S. in regard to their role in the Indonesian genocide. This work gained momentum in early 2014 when U.S. Senator Tom Udall, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, encountered The Act of Killing following its Oscar nomination and discussed the film with Oppenheimer [g-i]. Of his plans to introduce a Senate Resolution on the matter, Udall stated: “I think what this documentary does is it makes us ask some very tough questions. […] The United States government should be totally transparent on what it did and what it knew at the time, and they should be disclosing what happened here” [g-i]. Of Indonesia, Udall stated: “The survivors still live in fear, and they’re living in this country with the same government […] There’s a whole human rights issue” [g-i]. On 10 December 2014, U.N. Human Rights Day, Senator Udall introduced the Sense of the Senate Resolution “regarding the need for reconciliation in Indonesia and disclosure by the United States Government of events surrounding the mass killings during 1965–66” [h-i].

Subsequently, when The Look of Silence was nominated at the 2016 Academy Awards, Oppenheimer used “his awards-season megaphone” and traveled to Washington, D.C. with two members of Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM), along with members of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, to request that the U.S. declassify all government documents pertaining to the killings [g-ii]. The party met with officials at the U.S. State Department, Congress, and The White House (National Security Council), where the Indonesian National Human Rights Commissioners delivered a letter to President Obama formally requesting the declassification.

Having “visit[ed] the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to ask them to support Sen. Tom Udall's resolution for the United States to recognize its role, release the classified documents, and help Indonesia set up a truth commission to bring closure to the events”, the first two of these requests were met in 17 October 2017 [h-ii, h-iii]. “[N]early 30,000 pages of declassified records from the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta between 1964 and 1968 were published” [h-ii], and, as The New York Times put it, the documents reveal the killings were “an anti-Communist blood bath of at least half a million Indonesians. And American officials watched it happen without raising any public objections, at times even applauding the forces behind the killing” [h-ii]. In a public statement on the release of these documents, Senator Udall wrote: “I am especially grateful to Joshua Oppenheimer for his work to bring this moral outrage into the public view” [h-iv].

In regard to the significance of these documents, The New York Times article quotes an academic who states “it’s great to have this information in black and white so it’s not just based on oral interviews with victims” [h-ii]. The publication of the documents has thus strengthened the nature of the evidence that can be put to the Indonesian government and strengthens the case of those lobbying for domestic accountability. As Brad Simpson, founder and director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project, states: “Indonesians can now read for themselves and learn about these important events in Indonesian history as part of a larger struggle for justice and accountability” [h-ii].

Changing Domestic Public and Political Discourse

The Indonesian government continues to be reluctant to redress their historical stance on the events of 1965. However, public and political discourse within Indonesia has demonstrably changed as a result of responses to Oppenheimer’s films.

In response to the public reaction to The Act of Killing, on 24 January 2014 the Indonesian government released the first official statement to recognise the killings. In the statement the presidential spokesman for foreign affairs, Teuku Faizasyah, criticised The Act of Killing for portraying Indonesia as “a cruel and lawless nation” [i]. However, he also compared the killings to that of other countries: “We remember the history of slavery in the United States, Aboriginal discrimination in Australia, the bombing of Vietnam by the US. All of these events are crimes against humanity” [i]. In seeking to highlight hypocrisy elsewhere, Faizasyah affirmed in his reaction to Oppenheimer’s film that the mass killings in Indonesia are on par with such historical violence.

The late-2014 release in Indonesia of The Look of Silence gained national news coverage due to attempts at suppression by organised groups of thugs and paramilitaries who threatened to attack screenings of the film, aided by the passivity of the police and, in some instances, their collusion [j]. Also reported was the resistance to such intimidation from activists who went on to screen the film across 2015 [j]. In order to further counter these attempts at censorship, “[o]n December 10 [2015], International Human Rights Day, the filmmakers made The Look of Silence available on YouTube and as a free download for all Indonesians. Both of the documentaries have been viewed thousands of times in Indonesia, sparking a national conversation as Jakarta struggles with grafting old-school repression onto the digital age” [j]. (As of 14/05/20, The Act of Killing: Director’s Cut has been streamed 2,082,138 times; The Look of Silence has been streamed 764,599 times [k].)

These responses, in combination with the aforementioned International People's Tribunal 1965, led the Indonesian government to finally react to calls for redress in a positive manner.

In 2016, Indonesia’s Presidential Advisory Council organised the first government-sponsored forum for addressing the massacres: “National Symposium on the 1965 Tragedy”, Jakarta, 18-19 April [l]. As historian Jess Melvin put it, this two-day symposium “test[ed] the ground for a national process of reconciliation. This unprecedented gathering, which included government officials, survivors and perpetrators of the genocide, and which was broadcast live around the world, should be understood as a hard-won victory for all those engaged in advocating for truth and justice for 1965” [l]. The Look of Silence was specifically discussed at the forum as providing a warning of the dangers of propaganda that incites or legitimates mass violence, and Melvin argues that the forum happened due to attention “generated in large part by the international success of Joshua Oppenheimer’s two Academy Award nominated documentary films”, as well as the pressure brought to bear through their associated activities [l]. Following the forum, on 25 April 2016 the president instructed his security minister to begin a formal investigation into the killings, though domestic political pressure from factions associated with the perpetrators has so far hindered momentum on this.

Despite government resistance, Oppenheimer’s research-based creative practice has demonstrably helped to create the social and cultural conditions for future political impacts in this area. The UK Ambassador to Indonesia states: “ The Act of Killing and Look of Silence have had a major impact on raising much-needed debate in Indonesia on the political events and violence that took place in 1965. […] Joshua Oppenheimer and his brave Indonesian collaborators can take great credit for stimulating this debate with this excellent pair of documentaries” [m]. In this connection, Jakarta-based journalist Prodita Sabarini explains how: “Those born after 1965 are now discovering that modern Indonesia is built on horrendous violence. We are asking questions of our elders, and the answers reveal not only that we were lied to by the state, but that we have also been deprived of our families’ histories” [b]. The domestic popularity of Oppenheimer’s films has also played a significant role in normalising the use of the term “genocide” to describe the mass killings within Indonesian discourse [n, p.34]. As Melvin writes: “Since 2013, the use of the term genocide to describe the killings has become increasingly popular in Indonesia. The adoption of the term has coincided with the ballooning success of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary film The Act of Killing” and “the media-hype surrounding the film and its partner, The Look of Silence”, with “Oppenheimer […] openly describ[ing] the killings as a genocide in his public statements” [n, p.34]. According to the Deputy Director of the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch, Phelim Kine, the films have thus “substantially aided” attempts to end the “decades-long official taboo on public discussions of the massacre”, imposed “by successive governments to absolve those responsible” [o]. As such, Oppenheimer’s impact on public discourse within Indonesia has created the ground for further political change and for accountability and redress.