Shedding Light on A Dark Past by Andreas D. Arditya and Prodita Sabarini/The Jakarta Post A surge of fictional and non-fictional works has added more fuel to the curiosity machine regarding Indonesia’s buried, decades-old history of bloody communist purges between 1965 and 1968. In 2012, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer invited members of the Tempo magazine editorial team to an early viewing of his documentary The Act of Killing, which follows Anwar Congo and his colleagues, who claim in the film to have killed an untold number of alleged communists in North Sumatra. Tempo chief editor Arif Zulkifli said the movie triggered a decision to get firsthand accounts from people across the archipelago about their involvement in the killings. More than 60 journalists were involved in the three-month investigation, which resulted in a report of dozens of interviews in the magazine in October that year. In July of the same year, the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) declared in its findings that the systematic prosecution of alleged members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) after the failed 1965 coup was a gross violation of human rights. After investigating the murky matter for four years, the commission also called for military officials who were involved in the purge to be brought to trial. The following year, cultural and literary researcher Wijaya Herlambang had his PhD dissertation published as a book entitled Kekerasan Budaya Pasca 1965: Bagaimana Orde Baru Melegitimasi Anti-Komunisme Melalui Sastra dan Film (Post-1965 Cultural Violence: How the New Order Legitimizes Anti-Communism Through Literature and Film). Oppenheimer said art is about showing people what they already know but are perhaps too afraid to acknowledge and remember. “In this sense, the role of art and the role of non-fiction art or cinema in so far as its political role is rather like a child and the emperor’s new clothes, pointing out a reality that everybody either knows or is too afraid to talk about or used to know and is too afraid to remember,” Oppenheimer recently told The Jakarta Post. “And I’m not the only child; The Act of Killing is not the only child. There are also so many activists and oral historians who have been trying to raise this issue. We’re trying to create a space where people can talk about and, therefore, address their biggest and most frightening problems because, if we don’t address them, we’re doomed to continue living in the nightmare,” he added. Read more: thejakartapost/news/2014/06/08/shedding-light-a-dark-past.html
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 04:09:55 +0000
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