Summer Collection 2024 – Perceptions of Evil

In this episode that was first released during Covid, Janet sat down with Kjell Anderson, with Stephanie calling in remotely, to talk about perpetrators and genocide and the myths that surround them both.

Kjell was in The Hague to follow the closing arguments in the trial of former Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) commander Dominic Ongwen at the International Criminal Court. Ongwen is an interesting case because he is a former child soldier who made it to the top of the militia that took him as a child and in turn, became a perpetrator. He was later sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment. Kjell subsequently wrote a book called “The Dilemma of Dominic Ongwen.”

Of course they also spoke about Kjell’s other fascinating book, Perpetrating Genocide, which also makes an appearance in other episodes selected for our 2024 Summer Collection, which will feature dictator-hunter Reed Brody and Beth van Schaak.

As someone who has interviewed many perpetrators Steph and Janet also asked Kjell about his experiences and what commonalities he saw. Stephanie of course had to bring up that Jessica Stern‘s controversial New York Times article about her book of interviews with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic which set Balkan twitter alight.

His recommendations included the New York Times podcast Califate by Rukimini Callimachi who reports on Islamic State (since found to be stretching the truth) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s stunning films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence which both take an unusual look at Indonesia’s brutal anti-communist purge in the 1960s.

For books he praised the work of two researchers on Rwanda who really deepened the research into the 1994 genocide: the late Lee Anne Fujii and Omar McDoom.