82 The EconomistNovember 16th 2019
T
he firsttime he tried to kill a man, he used a stinky durian
fruit. It didn’t work. Eventually, he came to the view that the
most efficient method was garrotting, and he was proud of how
adept he became with the wire. It hadn’t always been so.
He was born in Medan, a grimy industrial town in northern Su-
matra that was home to Pancasila Youth, the main semi-official
political gangster group that flourished as Indonesia’s military
dictatorship grew ever more powerful in the mid-1960s. An at-
tempted coup by leftists in 1965 had given the army the excuse it
needed to unleash an orgy of killing across the country. Anybody
opposed to the army could be accused of being a communist. As
America became enmeshed in the Vietnam war, and the fear of
communism’s possible domino effect across Asia took hold in the
West, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his allies were happy to
look away as more than a million alleged communists were tor-
tured and killed, many of them Chinese Indonesians.
Known as preman, from the English words “free men”, Panca-
sila’s death squads, with their political connections and their can-
do/will-do swagger, proved the ideal recruiting ground for a boy
like Anwar Congo. He had dropped out of school at the age of 12 and
spent much of his time selling bootleg cinema tickets with his
friends outside Medan’s main picture house. Dressed in a cowboy
hat and a braided leather necktie complete with Texas star, he
imagined himself as a skinny John Wayne, or, in a dark Panama
and shades, as one of the mobster types in “Murder, Inc”. It was all a
bit of a lark, until someone tried to ban American films, and the
gangsters’ business slumped.
As he grew older, he moved from cinema tickets into petty
smuggling and illegal gambling, and soon he came to the attention
of men like Ibrahim Sinik, a newspaper publisher and paramilitary
gang boss. Mr Sinik decided who got killed in Medan and who
should merely be shaken down for money. He needed protection,and the young film buff was just the guy to provide it. He’d go to a
musical film in the afternoon, then sidle across the street—high on
show tunes—and hop up the stairs to the roof of Sinik’s newspaper
office where he changed into jeans or thick trousers and set to
work. In the early days, he beat his victims to death. But there was
so much blood. Even after it was cleaned up, it still stank. To avoid
the mess, he switched to wire. With a wooden slat at either end, it
was quick and clean. So many people were killed on that roof ter-
race, it was known as “the office of blood”. He is reckoned to have
murdered at least 1,000 people with his own hands, and soon had
his own gang known as the Frog Squad.
When, at last, the killing came to an end in 1968, he moved into
organising political muscle, clearing land for illegal logging. And
there, in humanity’s dark shadows, he might have remained, were
it not for the fact that in 2005, exactly 40 years after the genocide
began, he met an idealistic young American-born documentary-
maker named Joshua Oppenheimer. Thus began the second life of
Anwar Congo.
He was the 41st killer to be interviewed by Mr Oppenheimer. He
gloated over how they used to crush their victims’ necks with
wooden staves, how they hanged them, strangled them, cut off
their heads, ran them over with cars—all because they were al-
lowed to. And he insisted that they never felt guilty, never got de-
pressed, never had nightmares. Dressed in white slacks and a lime
Hawaiian shirt the first day he met the film-makers, he led them up
to Mr Sinik’s roof and showed them in person, demonstrating on a
friend, how he had garrotted his victims. And how afterwards, he
would put on some good music, drink a little booze, smoke a little
marijuana. Stepping lightly across the roof, he crooned: “Cha, cha,
cha.” By now in his 60s and missing several teeth, he clacked his
dentures when the camera began rolling.
At home, he served the film-maker sweet tea. While the two
men discussed what film they might make, he taught a young boy
how to care for his pet duckling. He roped in his Pancasila friends
to re-enact what they had done. The directors gave them carte
blanche. The gangsters sketched out interrogations and how they
beat women and burned down villages. Aided by a fat sidekick in
drag, with bright lipstick and lime eyeshadow, they even re-en-
acted a beheading, and how afterwards they ate the victim’s liver.
In the evening they watched the day’s rushes. Sometimes, wear-
ing a burgundy Panama hat, he played one of the interrogators: “It
must be fun being a communist. You fuck other people’s wives.” Or
he’d play the film-maker, sitting high up in the cameraman’s chair,
wholly consumed with panning across a scene of make-believe.
And then, one day, he cast himself as a victim. He sat in the
chair on the far side of the interrogator’s wooden desk. His shiny
charcoal suit turned dark as he sweated at being questioned. After
the wire was slipped around his neck, his right hand began to
shake. “Did the people I tortured feel the way I do here?” he asked. “I
felt all the terror possess my body.”
“No,” Mr Oppenheimer quietly replied. “You’re making a film.
They knew they were going to be murdered.”Punishment, not justice
“The Act of Killing”, or Jagalas it was called in Indonesian, mean-
ing “Butcher”, was tipped to win an Oscar when it was released in- It became the country’s most viewed film after the producers
made it available free online, and Indonesians began talking about
the years of living dangerously in a way they never had before.
As for Mr Congo, he evaded justice, but not punishment. The
garrotting stayed with him. It was, he said, one of the easiest ways
of taking a human life. When, on the final day of the shoot that had
lasted five years, he was filmed returning, in a mustard double-
breasted suit and lemony shirt, to the roof of Mr Sinik’s office,
where so many men had died by his hand, he sniffed the night air
and then he gulped. Turning away, he retched and retched—until
he could retch no longer. 7
Anwar Congo, a perpetrator of the mass killings in
Indonesia in 1965-68, died on October 25th, aged 78The executioner’s song
Obituary Anwar Congo