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The growth of new technologies, particularly the internet, has allowed new communities of people to imagine themselves. These communities are linked by emotions, mutual interest and sometimes by a common curiosity to uncover hidden or silenced voices and stories. In this case, I am excited by the possibility of connection, dialogue and interchange offered by Facebook and my 'imagined community' of Dutch-Indonesians/Indos who are travelling a new road together to exchange knowledge about their hybrid family histories in what was once the Dutch East/Netherlands Indies and is now Indonesia.
Communities can be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined (Anderson 1991, 6).
On 17 August 1945, after approximately 350 years of Dutch colonial rule (and several years of the British interregnum 1811-1816), Indonesia was proclaimed merdeka (independent) by Sukarno and Matta, and Indonesia as a nation began its period of struggle and consolidation. During the period known as Bersiap (purge) after the end of World War Il and before the Dutch relinquished their claims to the archipelago, many Europeans, Indo-Europeans and Ambonese were slaughtered or terrorised by pemuda (young men) with the fire of revolution in their bellies. In the words of author Hans Meijer, translated from Dutch by Rob Kramer:
In Batavia (now Jakarta), posters called for the extermination of 'Indische parasites' and the slogan 'Death to the Ambonese and Indos' could be read on a building. The radical Indonesian populist leader Soetomo called for a vendetta against Indo-European bloodhounds ...
Torture them to death, root out those watchdogs of colonialism ... Brave warriors of Indonesia, countless generations of oppressed ancestors look down upon you. Their immortal spirits demand your revenge! Vendetta!' (Meijer 2004 [1945], n.p., quoted on Facebook, Dutch-Indonesian discussion group, June 2010)
Many survivors of Japanese internment camps were forced to go on the run or stay in the camps with their former camp guards acting as protectors, until Allied forces could rescue them.
In the twentieth century, Indonesians had suffered greatly through the economic depression of the 1930s and from the colonial repression of nationalist expression (McKay 1976, 136). Sukarno and Matta had been tried and imprisoned. For ordinary people, the hope that the Javanese prophecy of Jabayaya would come to pass must...