As I was finishing this book, a scene from Joshua Oppenheimer's film was haunting me: an elderly man of over a century, whose skin was sticking to his bones, creeping over a cracked floor. Towards the end of The Look of Silence, Adi's father, Rukun, is lost in his own home and thinks that someone is about to beat him up. However, no one was about to beat him up. He was in a room with his own son, Adi, who was filming him.

Rukun has forgotten about the gruesome events of half a century ago. He cannot even remember the name of his son, who was brutally murdered in 1965. Yet the memory of the murder has not been deleted. Rukun has buried his memories so deeply that he no longer remembers what he has buried. Still, his unconscious remembers. And his sense of powerlessness has not simply vanished, especially because his son's murder remains unresolved and involves severe injustice. These submerged memories seem to return in a transformed state: the pain and terror do not disappear.

Rukun is certainly not the only one. The survivors and families of the 1965 victims are not allowed to express what gruesome incidents they had witnessed and have been forced to accept the manipulated version of the atrocities. This has caused many of them to repress their memories and also their identities, in the same way that Rukun has done. I have seen many victims enter into old age while being haunted by their pasts. They tend to forget more recent events, but those that are in the more distant past can suddenly resurface. Memory might have dispersed the details of the incidents, but the sediments of painful episodes can become even more powerful and harrowing with time.

The inability to express ‘real’ anguish has trapped many victims in a kind of hallucinatory fear. But doesn't fear have to be hallucinatory for it to work efficiently, so that the victims remain subdued, regardless of whether any danger is nearby? The fear implanted by Soeharto's government has been potent in maintaining the hatred directed against the communists, as well as sustaining the sense of powerlessness experienced by the victims and their families.