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.....
