Joshua Oppenheimer

 
It is estimated that over 500,000 people were slaughtered in Indonesia between October 1965 and the early months of 1966.

Paramilitary militias and vigilante groups, coordinated by the Indonesian army and aided by British and American intelligence agencies, were responsible for mass killings in the country’s anti-communist purge. Nearly 50 years later and the perpetrators still hold power and are heralded as national heroes.

In his groundbreaking 2012 film, The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer exposed the impunity with which the perpetrators live. On 18 September The Fontline Club screened Oppenheimer’s follow up piece, The Look of Silence.

After the screening Oppenheimer joined the Frontline Club over Skype.

The Look of Silence follows Adi, an optometrist whose brother was murdered during the anti-communist purges. Throughout the film Adi meets and directly confronts those responsible for his brother’s death.

Although he does not feature in The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer told the Frontline Club that Adi was an important collaborator in both films. “Over the years making The Act of Killing, Adi would watch everything we had time to show him,” said Oppenheimer.

It was this involvement that lead Adi to ask Oppenheimer to help him meet his brother’s killers. “I sat down with [Adi] and he said, ‘you know Josh, I’ve spent seven years watching your footage of the perpetrators, and it’s changed me and I need to meet the man who killed my brother… I need to confront them and see if they can take responsibility for what they’ve done.’”

Joshua Oppenheimer

Making the film with Adi could have been extremely dangerous. “There has never before been a film where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power,” said Oppenheimer who initially refused to make the film this way.

However after their experience working on The Act of Killing, Ali believed that confronting his brother’s killers would help reconciliation. “He though they would welcome this as this chance to sort of be forgiven by their victims families… and to stop this manic boasting which he always felt was defensive,” said Oppenheimer.

“I didn’t realise that he might be right until after I started to film Anwar Congo,” Oppenheimer said referring to the main protagonist in The Act of Killing. None the less he was still sceptical that Adi would receive the apology he was hoping for. In the five years that he filmed with him, Oppenheimer told the Frontline Club that never once did Anwar Congo consciously admit to himself that he was wrong to have killed.

Instead, with The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer hoped that the meetings between Ali and his brother’s killers would allow him to capture the unconscious guilt

“Maybe if I can film with precision and empathy and intimacy,” said Oppenheimer, “the complex human reactions that are inevitable when you go into someone’s home and say ‘look you’ve killed my brother, please can’t you take responsibility for this for the sake of our children’… then we can make visible the previously invisible abyss of fear and guilt that’s dividing everybody in this society.”

Oppenheimer told the Fontline Club that the primary audience was always intended to be Indonesians. There was an outpouring from human rights groups and survivors that Oppenheimer needed to keep filming with the killers in order to expose the lie that the 1965 killings were heroic.

“[I] felt as though I was entrusted by the survivors and the human rights community to do a work that clearly they could not safely do themselves… and I felt therefore much more like their agent than I ever felt like a foreign filmmaker,” said Oppenheimer.

The release of The Act of Killing has started a transformation around the way that Indonesia talks about its past. “Whereas the mainstream media was once, with very few exceptions, or before with very few exceptions silent about the genocide or celebrating the heroic extermination of the Indonesian left, now they talk about the genocide as a genocide,” said Oppenheimer.

Because of the changes that The Act of Killing have made to the national discourse, Oppenheimer told the Frontline Club that The Look of Silence released in a much bigger way than would have been possible if it was a standalone film. “Adi came to both [premier] screenings as a surprise guest and received a 15 minute standing ovation,” he said.

The two films have prompted the introduction of a truth and reconciliation bill into parliament. “It’s woefully inadequate,” said Oppenheimer, “… but it’s a great step because it sort of enshrines the acknowledgement that what happened was wrong.”

As well as catalysing change within Indonesia, Oppenheimer is also hoping to pressure both the UK and US governments to openly admit to their role in the killings.

“That’s, I think, terribly important if we’re going to actually stand up against impunity at home in the west, and if our talk about human rights, our rhetoric about human rights is not to be merely hypocritical.”

Joshua Oppenheimer

On 6 April 1994, a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down over Kigali airport. The events that followed saw bitter ethnic divisions engulf the country: neighbour turned on neighbour and in the space of 100 days an estimated 800,000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsis, were killed.

At the time the international community was heavily criticised for its slow response and now declassified diplomatic cables have revealed that the US, Britain and the United Nations were explicitly warned that a “new bloodbath” was imminent in Rwanda.

Twenty years on we will look at how communities in Rwanda have been reconciled, the political, social and economic strides the country has taken and what more still needs to be done. We will also ask if the international community has learnt its lessons and if it can ensure that such a failure to react will never occur again.

Chaired by foreign affairs editor of Sky News, Sam Kiley. Through the 90’s he served as Africa bureau chief for The Times, covering the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire).

The panel:

David Belton worked as a producer at BBC Newsnight in the 1990s where, amongst many foreign assignments, he covered the civil war in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda. In 2002, he co-wrote the story and produced the award-winning feature film Shooting Dogs based on real events that had taken place during the Rwandan genocide. He has since produced and directed many critically acclaimed and award-winning documentaries for British and American television. When The Hills Ask For Your Blood: A Personal Story of Genocide and Rwanda is his first book.

Eric Murangwa Eugene is a Rwandan survivor of the 1994 genocide and former Rwandan international football player who founded Football for Hope, Peace and Unity (FHPU Enterprise) an initiative which uses sport and football in particular to assist the transformation of Rwandan community for social change and reconciliation here in the UK and in Rwanda itself.

Mukesh Kapila, CBE is professor of Global Health and Humanitarian Affairs at the University of Manchester. Previously he was Under Secretary General at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan. He was the first UK government official to enter Kigali in 1994 after the genocide. He is author of Against a Tide of Evil.

His Excellency Williams Nkurunziza is the high commissioner of the Republic of Rwanda to the United Kingdom and non-resident ambassador to Ireland. His previous posting was as high commissioner to India. Prior to his diplomatic career, he served as director general of the Rwanda Investment and Export Promotional Agency (RIEPA), during which time he worked to reposition post-genocide Rwanda in the international marketplace as an ideal investment destination and a reliable trading partner. During this time, he also served on President Paul Kagame’s Presidential Economic Advisory Council.

In May 1992, 6,000 local Bosnian Muslim men, women and children were detained, tortured and raped in the cluster of villages around Kevljani. Many of these Bosniak were killed, and currently 1,200 are still missing.

In 2000 the first Bosnian survivors returned to Kevljani, where  they started to rebuilt their homes and lives. Most Serb neighbours remain silent about the past and continue to fight against an initiative to erect a memorial even after the discovery of mass graves in the village.

The message the Egyptian people were sending was that they were no longer prepared to live under a regime that used torture as a weapon against dissent.

Nine months after the toppling of Mubarak we will be looking at the extent to which the military regime has continued to use torture against the Egyptian people and their continuing struggle against it.

In the light of recent revelations about Britain’s collusion with Libya over the torture of Colonel Gaddafi’s opponents,  a panel of experts will be discussing the role of the West in not only upholding but making use of torturous regimes and to what extent opposition to torture was part of the Arab Spring movement.

We will also be looking ahead to discuss issues or reconciliation and the need to hold perpetrators to account. Can lessons be learned from those Latin American countries that have had to deal with the aftermath of regimes that have employed the use of torture against their people?

With:

Zahraa Kassem, sister of Khaled Said will be joining us via skype;

Brita Sydhoff, IRCT (International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims) Secretary-General;

Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor for Human Rights Watch working across the Middle East and North Africa region;

Carla Ferstman, director of REDRESS, an organisation which helps torture survivors seek justice. She is also a member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Sub Group on Torture Prevention. She has worked with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on legal reform and capacity building in post-genocide Rwanda, with Amnesty International’s International Secretariat as a legal researcher on trials in Central Africa and as Executive Legal Advisor to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Commission for Real Property Claims of Displaced Persons and Refugees (CRPC). 

Additional panelists to be confirmed.