Wednesday, March 2, 2022
ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Where to even start with this.....
I found these photographs at a second hand market here in Bandung a few weeks ago. Being a bit of a history buff I knew these were somehow special. Truly terrible, but special. I've been thinking about posting these on my blog here or not. The last thing I want to do is maybe making some visitors relive old trauma, open up old wounds or making people angry, I apologize if that would happen....
I send them to somebody in Holland who runs a website about colonial Indonesia in Holland. He posted them there and a heated discussion ensued there (in Dutch) in the comment section. I was hoping to get some answers about what actually happened in these horrible pictures. You can read all that here, but again, it's all in Dutch:
https://javapost.nl/2022/02/21/tempo-doeloe-voorbij/#more-17804
Many possibilities were discussed there but I did not get a clear answer, so I decided to post them here, on my blog, who knows, maybe this way I will get some answers....
Right now there is a big exposition in the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam called Revolusi and it's all about the time when Indonesia was fighting for it's freedom, to free itself from Dutch colonialism and it kicked up quite some dust, one of the conservators, an Indonesian person, refused to use the word "Bersiap" saying it was a rascist term which provoked a lot of old soldiers in Holland who were fighting in Indonesia in those years, a lot of anger from those that survived the Bersiap period and/or lost family members and friends during that time.... The Bersiap period was a truly horrible period, roughly from 1945 till 1946.... You can read all about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bersiap
Then there was also the Dutch movie De Oost (The East) about Raymond Westerling that kicked up quite some dust too in 2020 and still does....
So, right now all of this is a very hot topic in Holland. The Minister-president of Holland, Rutten, actually apologized a few weeks ago for the first time, saying that the Dutch side was all wrong and the Indonesian side all in the right during those crazy years of the fight against Dutch colonialism.
Anyway, back to these (original) photographs.... It's unclear by who they were taken. Unclear where they were taken and also when they were taken....
You can see Dutch military personal and in the first photograph we see a (probably) white (probably) civilian holding what seems to be some sort of weapon and holding up the head of a murdered Indonesian person.... Were these people murdered by Dutch soldiers? Were they murdered by the Pemuda's (Indonesian revolutionairy fighters)? That would very often happen, they, the Pemuda's, would murder Indonesian civilians suspected of collaborating with the Dutch and they would then often lay out the bodies on the road as a warning to others.... The Dutch side also committed many, many atrocities, many of which are only coming to light in the last few years and there was a lot of in-fighting between different Indonesian groups.....
They were very confusing times where lots of terrible things happened....
It seems there's just no way to make sense of these photographs.....
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This is incredible. Thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome Ross, and yes, these photographs really are incredible.... There are many other photographs from the bersiap period (if these really were taken during the bersiap period which was roughly '45 till around the end of '46, they could also be from the say 5 or six years after that), terrible photographs too but way different than these, really, quite a find....
ReplyDeleteMerci Henk for your comments and explanations, even you don't know so much. It's important to not forget and know what really happened in the past in every place in the world.
ReplyDeleteI hope you will have some informations from the other site.
It's a great work to restore culture, thoughts, history.
I wish you will have some great encounters with these photography.
Welcome and thanks :) It really has been a super hot topic in Holland the last few years, lots of emotions, anger and in some cases relief, as a Dutchman living in Indonesia, quite interesting :)
ReplyDeleteThe thing that makes it really sinister is that young soldier, who looks like a college kid, enjoying some sort of recreational activity, and making it so I can imagine a bunch of pretty, laughing girls drinking wine just outside the shot.
ReplyDeleteOr the guy casually standing around, hands in pocket.... The guy in the first picture... if you can do that, smilingly holding up a corpses head by the head like that, well... I wouldn't wanna tangle with a type like that....
ReplyDeleteThat's the guy I was referring to. I wouldn't want to be in the same room with him.
DeleteOne scary individual.... The more I read about it all the I'm amazed by the absolute cruelty.... on both sides really, reading about what some of the things that happened in Surabaya during the bersiap, it just defies imagination, I won't even go into some of that stuff here....
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ReplyDeleteThanks for your thought-provoking, though surely disturbing post Henk. It's a reminder - and eye-opening for the non-Dutch like me - of the long and entangled history of the struggle for self-determination for both the people of the Netherlands and what is Indonesia today.
ReplyDeleteIs it sheer coincidence I found your post digging around the current Dutch perceptions around the VOC-DEI's legacy, as in this 2020 report, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/10/dutch-colonial-history-indonesia-villains-victims , and looking closer at the "Bersiap" era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bersiap, of which I was only vaguely aware? I feel the weight of all this history especially keenly during the disturbing invasion of Ukraine occurring right now.
Welcome Andrew.... Not sure if they are translated into English but the books from Dutch writer/researcher Ewald Vanvugt are very good when it comes to this subject, especially about the VOC, the Dutch Royals and the opium trade.... Also Pramoedya Anantoa Toer's Buru Quartet, amazing books about the beginnings of some of the groups that started around the beginning of the last century Like Sarekat Islam and other groups.... About that weight.... I've been feeling that weight since the CIA trained death squads in Latin America all the way back in the 80's, the former country of Yugoslavia and all that happened there, the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia.... Darfur... And so much more.... As a small kid I saw the Vietnam war, back then you got it all on tv, not these imbedded so-called "journalists" and it made a huge impact.... I wish Robert Fisk was still around, I would be curious what he would have to say about what is going on right now, not to mention Robert Anton Wilson and Hunter S. Thompson....
ReplyDeleteshocking but great pictures overall,thanks for sharing again
ReplyDeletewelcome :)
ReplyDeleteI was totally ignorant of this historical Dutch colonial period. Always the same unbearable effects...
ReplyDeletePretty heavy period but yeah... Algiers.... And so many other places...
ReplyDeletePhotographs like that have been taken in almost every place in the world, for as long as photography has existed. As terrible as they are, we need to keep taking those photographs. And showing them.
ReplyDeleteSome of the sellers thought I was now looking for photographs of dead people, ehrrr, no, no, no, just if they have a historical context :)
ReplyDeleteGreat pictures! would like to know the historical context
ReplyDeletewell, what i've been able to find out is in the text and the comments, nothing 100% sure though, those were really insane times where insanity often reigned
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