The Act of Killing - A Discussion between Paul Barber and Professor John T. Side

The Conflict, Security & Development Research Group at War Studies hosted a screening of the film The Act of Killing. Following the screening, Professor John Sidel (LSE) and Mr Paul Barber (TAPOL) discussed the film, chaired by Dr Jana Krause.
One of the most powerful and provocative films of this year, this documentary drama shows local gangsters in Medan, Sumatra re-enacting in vivid and sometimes sickening detail the killing of alleged communists during the events that followed former President Suharto's rise to power in Indonesia in 1965. At least 500,000 people were murdered and up to one million were held without charge or trial, many of them tortured. Since the end of the Suharto regime in 1998, former political prisoners, researchers and human rights activists have started documenting the widespread human rights violations, including crimes against humanity. The movie invites reflection on the organisation and the perpetrators of mass violence, and on dealing with a violent past in Indonesia and elsewhere.
Professor John T. Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at LSE. He specializes in the study of Southeast Asia and is the author of Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (Cornell 2006); and more recently Dangers and demon(izer)s of democratization in Egypt: through an Indonesian glass, darkly (In: Gerges, ed. The new Middle East: protest and revolution in the Arab world (Cambridge 2013). Mr Paul Barber has been Coordinator of TAPOL, a London-based NGO that campaigns for human rights, peace and democracy in Indonesia, since 2009. TAPOL was established in 1973 by Carmel Budiardjo, a political prisoner in Indonesia following former President Suharto's rise to power in 1965.

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