Anwar Congo (1937–2019) is one of the most chillingly complex figures in modern documentary history. A former Indonesian preman (gangster/thug), he became globally notorious as the central subject of Joshua Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking, Oscar-nominated 2012 documentary The Act of Killing.
During the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, Congo evolved from a street-level criminal into a prominent death squad leader. He personally executed an estimated 1,000 alleged communists, leftists, and ethnic Chinese individuals in Medan, North Sumatra.
What makes Congo’s legacy unique—and deeply unsettling—is the intersection of historical impunity, pop culture, and psychological decay.
The Cinema Connection
Before the 1965 purges, Congo made his living as a black-market ticket scalper outside a movie theater in Medan. He was deeply infatuated with mid-century Hollywood cinema—specifically film noir, American gangster flicks, and John Wayne westerns.
When the military-backed genocide began, Congo and his fellow "cinema thugs" directly transposed Hollywood tropes onto real-world mass murder. Congo famously recounted how he hated stabbing or beating victims because it left too much blood to clean up. Inspired by the gangster movies he loved, he devised a systematic technique to strangle prisoners with wire attached to wooden handles, minimizing the mess while keeping execution rates remarkably efficient.
The Surrealism of Impunity
Unlike perpetrators of the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, the killers in Indonesia won the political conflict and remained in power, integrated into dominant right-wing paramilitary groups like the Pancasila Youth. Because they were officially celebrated as national heroes who saved the country from communism, they felt no need to hide their past. They openly boasted about their crimes.
Oppenheimer leveraged this absolute lack of shame into a brilliant, surreal cinematic framework: he invited Congo and his associates to write, direct, and star in dramatized reenactments of their real-life atrocities, using whatever movie genres they preferred. Congo eagerly agreed, staging lavish musical numbers, campy western standoffs, and moody film noir interrogation scenes to depict his past.
The Psychological Rupture
While his accomplices viewed the filmmaking process as a grand ego trip, the camera inadvertently acted as a psychological trap for Congo. Throughout The Act of Killing, his boastfulness begins to clash violently with a deeply buried, long-repressed trauma. He mentions being perpetually haunted by nightmares of his victims staring back at him with open eyes.
The climax of the film tracks a profound psychological rupture. While filming a scene where he portrays a generic interrogation victim being choked and terrorized, the wall of cinematic fiction collapses. Congo is suddenly forced to internalize the terror he inflicted upon hundreds of people.
In the final, haunting sequence of the documentary, Congo returns to the rooftop where he performed his mass executions. Standing on the concrete where he once danced the cha-cha-cha, he is suddenly gripped by severe, uncontrollable dry-heaving. His body physically rejects the heroic, patriotic narrative he spent fifty years telling himself, leaving him broken in front of the lens.
The 1965–66 Indonesian mass killings represent one of the most devastating, yet historically obscured, mass atrocities of the 20th century. Over a span of just a few months, an estimated 500,000 to over 1 million people were systematically murdered.
The primary targets were members, sympathizers, or alleged affiliates of the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia)—the Indonesian Communist Party—which at the time was the largest non-governing communist party in the world. However, the violence quickly expanded to sweep up labor unionists, leftists, ethnic Chinese Indonesians, and traditionalists.
Historical photographs from the period document the scale of the operations, showing thousands of civilians rounded up by military personnel. Beyond those who were killed, hundreds of thousands of others were sent to political prison camps without trial, where they faced years of torture, starvation, and forced labor.
The Trigger: The September 30 Movement (G30S)
To understand how the country fractured so quickly, you have to look at the tense political climate of 1965. Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, maintained power by balancing three powerful, opposing forces: the nationalist military, conservative Islamic organizations, and the massive PKI.
Everything shattered on the night of September 30, 1965. A group of mid-level military officers calling themselves the September 30 Movement (G30S) kidnapped and executed six top anti-communist army generals in a botched coup attempt.
While the exact internal mechanics and mastermind of G30S remain heavily debated by historians, a rising, little-known general named Suharto quickly stepped into the power vacuum. He seized control of the military, banned independent media outlets, and pinned the entire coup plot squarely on the PKI.
How the Violence Spread
The military launched an aggressive propaganda campaign, painting communists as godless, barbaric traitors who were actively preparing lists of citizens to slaughter. This manufactured panic unleashed an immediate wave of violence.
The killings were unique because they were not just standard military operations; they relied heavily on civilian death squads and local militias. The army provided logistics, weapons, and hit lists, while local youth groups, criminal gangs, and religious organizations carried out much of the physical violence up close.
As modern demographic and spatial data maps illustrate, the intensity of the massacres closely correlated with existing political and social friction points. In regions like Central and East Java, where rivalry ran hot between the PKI and conservative or religious parties (like Nahdlatul Ulama), the population drop was severe. The violence also tore violently through Bali and Northern Sumatra, completely wiping out entire villages.
The Cold War Backdrop
This wasn't happening in isolation. At the height of the Cold War, Western powers like the United States, Great Britain, and Australia viewed Indonesia’s massive communist presence with deep anxiety.
Declassified Western diplomatic files have since confirmed that Western governments were highly aware of the slaughter as it happened. Instead of intervening, the U.S. covertly supported the Indonesian military by providing communications equipment, monetary aid, and even tracking lists of high-level PKI operatives to help the army systematically dismantle the party infrastructure.
The Legacy of the "New Order"
By mid-1966, the PKI was completely eradicated, and President Sukarno was stripped of his power. Suharto formally established his "New Order" regime, an authoritarian, staunchly anti-communist dictatorship that ruled Indonesia for the next 32 years.
Under Suharto, a strict wall of silence was built around the genocide:
The massacres were completely omitted or rewritten in school textbooks, framing the military and death squads as heroic saviors of the nation.
Survivors and families of victims were heavily stigmatized, branded with "communist" markers on their identity cards, and legally barred from government jobs.
It wasn't until Suharto’s fall in 1998 that Indonesians could finally begin exploring this history openly. Documentaries like Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) brought international awareness to the tragedy, showcasing how many of the perpetrators still live openly today as powerful, unpunished figures.
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