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Linawati Sidarto (The Jakarta Post)
Amsterdam ● Midweek, March 23, 2016
Banjo daughter: Surakarta residents greet incoming Dutch soldiers on Dec. 21, 1948, while a keroncong band (men with lighter-colored hats) plays music. The military photographer deliberately zooms in on the people to leave out the deserted streets from the picture show.(Courtesy of T. Schilling, DLC, National Archives, The Hague )
A unique photo exhibition in Amsterdam shows what the Dutch state tried to hide from its people near the grueling state of war it fought against Indonesia, its former colony.
An Indonesian girl playing a tiny banjo sits among grin Dutch soldiers on a military machine vehicle, surrounded by locals. This jovial image belies the fact that the streets of Surakarta, Central Java on December. 21, 1948 '€" the day the photo was shot '€" were deserted as the Dutch had just renewed its war machine offensive on Java.
'€œThe official image of the war on Coffee and Sumatra aimed at manipulating public opinion,'€ said the opening text of the exhibition '€œColonial War 1945 '€" 1949: Desired and Undesired Images'€ at Amsterdam'€™south Dutch Resistance Museum.
'€œWithout images of violence in that location seemed to be no war.'€
During World War II, kingdom of the netherlands was occupied by Deutschland on their home soil and by Japan in their colony of the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch barely had time to bask their freedom after Germany'€™s surrender in May 1945 when information technology was jolted by its colony'€™s independence proclamation on Aug. 17, 1945.
In the side by side four years, close to 100,000 Dutch soldiers '€" out of a population of merely under 10 million '€" were sent off to Republic of indonesia in what the exhibition calls '€œthe biggest state of war the Dutch had ever fought'€. Well-nigh of the soldiers were drafted. Virtually 6,000 Dutch soldiers lost their lives, while 150,000 Indonesians '€" military and noncombatant '€" died during the clashes.
The Dutch authorities, however, did its best to hide the intensity of that war, calling information technology a politionele actie, police action.
In pictures: Images published in De Spiegel magazine, with the title '€œWhen freedom arrives'€, June fifteen, 1946.(Courtesy of the Dutch Resistance Museum)
'€œThe government wanted to present the image that their soldiers were serving the people in the colony,'€ said historian Erik Somers of the Plant for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies NIOD '€" one of the exhibition'€™s initiators.
During that war the Dutch armed services information service DLC, the exhibition explains, '€œbasically decided what could be reported'€.
'€œThere were barely any Dutch journalists and photographers in the land [Republic of indonesia] at the fourth dimension and many areas were extremely unsafe ['€¦] people in the Netherlands saw very footling pictorial evidence of the violence.'€
The exhibition lets the images tell the story: it chronologically goes through the four years of war, with '€œdesired'€ and '€œundesired'€ images put adjacent.
One corner, for example, shows photos of Dutch soldiers distributing food to villagers, while the next console shows unpublished photos of terrified Indonesian prisoners. Or corpses in a ditch.
The censorship went every bit far as staging pictures, said exhibition co-initiator Louis Zweers.
'€œThere is one photo of a supposedly jubilant local crowd welcoming Dutch soldiers in Malang [Eastward Java]. If y'all look closely, however, you can see a soldier on the sidelines directing the crowd,'€ historian Zweers said during a seminar in January at Amsterdam'€™s Purple Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences KNAW.
Photos that did non laissez passer the censor include one from Baronial 1946, which nonetheless had the original caption written by photographer H. Wilmar: '€œAn extremist who fired on our marines from a ditch tried to escape, merely was captured by a marine. The marines would possibly take the man as a prisoner to extract information near the enemy'€.
'€œI'€™d be surprised if this man fabricated it out alive,'€ commented a visitor at the exhibition, Klaas Westrene, every bit he scrutinized the photograph. '€œInformation technology'€™s adept that this exhibition sheds some light on this episode.'€
Likewise on display are illustrated magazines, such as Panorama and De Spiegel, which '€œshowed little of the military operations'€, and instead presented '€œsoldiers on patrol, distributing dress and providing medical intendance to the native population'€.
Absence: An image not shown in kingdom of the netherlands: soldiers of the Royal Dutch East-Indies Regular army KNIL next to wounded and dead Indonesian soldiers captured in Malang, Due east Java, in belatedly July 1947.(Unidentified military photographer, DLC, National Archives, The Hague)
Indonesian soldiers, in contrast, were portrayed by the magazines every bit '€œroaming gangs'€.
Somers points out that '€œat that place was inappreciably whatever reporting in the Dutch printing on the euphoric mood amid Indonesians regarding their independence [in August 1945]'€.
The nearly stirring part comes at the terminate of the exposition, where aging photo albums belonging to soldiers are displayed. One yellowed page shows small black-and-white photos: outset of Indonesian prisoners marching, while the next are of their corpses. The corking paw-written captions read: '€œIn that location were prisoners being held, simply when we'€™re existence fired upon things get nasty, and so some people die'€.
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Source: https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/03/23/hollands-censored-war.html