ETAN
ALERT
Take
Action on U.S. Support for Mass Violence
in Indonesia
The Oscar-nominated documentary, The Act
of Killing will be broadcast on PBS,
Monday October 6, 2014, on POV. We hope
you will watch this important and
disturbing film, where
Although the massacre of between 500,000
and 1,000,000 communists, leftists,
ethnic Chinese, and others in Indonesia
in 1965-1967 is a foundational event in
modern Indonesian political history, it
remains mostly a footnote for most in
the United States and elsewhere. In
2012, the documentary
The Act of Killing shocked
audiences throughout the world as
perpetrators of the mass murder
reenacted their violence. The film shows
sociopathic gangsters from Medan,
Sumatra, who committed these acts as
they are celebrated by many in modern
Indonesia. 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 public television program
POV will be airing the
Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing
on October 6 (and you can watch it on
POV's website from October 7-21) and the
film is available for
online streaming and purchase elsewhere.
The Look of Silence, a companion
film currently showing at film
festivals, focuses on the victims. 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, including that of 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.
ETAN has prepared a backgrounder on the
events and aftermath of Suharto's brutal
seizure of power, where we focus on the
U.S. role and responsibility. Read
Breaking the Silence: The U.S. and
Indonesia's Mass Violence.
What You Can
Do
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The
World Bank gave $30 billion to a
dictator who killed 1 million.
ETAN projected the film on
World Bank headquarters in Washington to highlight international
complicity in Indonesia's mass violence.
Photo by Dakota Bell. |
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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, including the CIA's
so-called "job files." These detail
its covert operations,
b) and formally
acknowledge the U.S. role in
facilitating the 1965-66 violence
and its subsequent support for the
brutalities of the Suharto regime.
2) Watch The Act of Killing
and write a letter to the editor
about the need for the U.S. take
responsibility for its role in the
mass violence in Indonesia. We will
have some sample letters available
by the weekend, but it is better to
write your own. Feel free to use
ETAN's Backgrounder:
Breaking the Silence: The U.S. and
Indonesia's Mass Violence, if
you do so.
3) If you are high school teacher or
college professor teaching an
appropriate subject, consider assigning
The Act of Killing 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.)
4) Support ETAN. We need your
support to continue our work for justice
and accountability.
Please
donate today.
For more information see
http://www.etan.org
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 at
http://actofkilling.com/.
