Kwaadwilligen — the “ill-disposed” — was the Dutch colonial designation, in the last years of the Atjeh-oorlog and the first years of the definitive peace, for die lieden, die het actief verzet tegen ons gouvernement nog niet hebben opgegeven — those persons who had not yet given up the active resistance against the Dutch government. The term belonged to the administrative language of the pacificatie: the kwaadwilligen were distinguished from the goedgezinden (the well-disposed) and from the common brigands, and their pursuit remained, after the submission of the great chiefs, the continuing task of the maréchaussée.
The remnant of 1913
In November 1913 Moens recorded that the remaining kwaadwilligen of the mountains — a following reckoned at about seventy men, according to the opinion of those best able to judge — were watched and pursued from a few posts such as the maréchaussée-bivak of Boeloh Blang Ara and from the bivouacs in the high mountains themselves at 1300–1400 metres. Gouverneur Swart explained to him why the pursuit was not relaxed: „Indien ik de kwaadwilligen met rust laat, vormen zij dadelijk weer een grootere bende en de desperado’s uit de laagvlakte zullen zich daarbij aansluiten” — If I leave the ill-disposed in peace, they at once form again a larger band, and the desperadoes of the lowland will join it; the seeking, the Governor added, had rightly to be compared with the seeking of a needle in a haystack — het toeval moet ons wel helpen, om deze laatste kerels nog te vangen — chance must help to catch these last fellows, and the fewer they were, the harder it became, in a terrain of thousands of square kilometres. It was in the same context that Moens’s journey recorded the administrative instrument by which the government held the fading resistance in sight: the general registratie der bevolking (registration of the population), introduced by General Van Heutsz precisely om overzicht van en toezicht op de kwaadwilligen te kunnen houden — to be able to keep oversight of, and watch upon, the ill-disposed.
The desperadoes
The other face of the term appeared at Sigli in the discussion of the murder of overste Scheepens in October 1913: the murderer was counted by the Europeans to the desperado’s, the men who felt that they had nothing more to expect of life, and who, while the war-bands had stood open, would have joined the kwaadwilligen of the mountains and so escaped the environment that offered them no future. With the bands extinguished and the mountain remnant reduced to a hunted handful, the desperadoes turned against the nearest representative of the hated or envied order — which was Moens’s explanation why the Sigli court-hall attack remained an incident, and not a political movement.
See Also
- Boeloh Blang Ara
- Korps Marechaussee van Atjeh en Onderhorigen
- Scheepens murder (1913)
- Pacificatie van Atjeh
- Moens’ journey through Atjeh (November 1913)
- 1913
Source
Reisindrukken van Atjeh, door W. Moens, oud-luitenant ter zee (Amsterdam: Jacob van Campen, 1914), pp. 16–17, 26, 29–30. OCR-filename: 20260716_140310_DLP-99-Reisindrukken_van_Atjeh_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.