Niet-inmengingspolitiek

Niet-inmengingspolitiek (non-intervention policy) — also called onthoudingspolitiek (policy of abstention) — was the policy followed by the Dutch government throughout the nineteenth century with respect to the native states of the Buitengewesten (the outer provinces of the Netherlands Indies outside Java), by which the government refrained from active intervention in the internal affairs of the native polities and confined itself to the maintenance of the existing state of affairs and the recognition of the “nominal” supreme authority of the Netherlands. The policy, identified by Ir. J. Frijling as the principal cause of the protracted failure to suppress slavery and piracy in the Buitengewesten, is the central subject of Frijling’s 1946 sketch Een stukje geschiedenis der Indische Buitengewesten and the principal political background to the Atjeh-oorlog.

The Origin and Rationale

The policy of niet-inmenging arose from the practical impossibility, in the impoverished Netherlands of the post-Napoleonic period, of administering the vast outer territories of the Netherlands Indies with the resources available. The Verdrag van Londen of 1814 had restored to the Netherlands sovereignty over a territory extending from the 95th to the 142nd degree of longitude east — more than an eighth of the Earth’s circumference measured along the equator. The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, whose rights the Dutch state had inherited, had been able to enforce its authority over no more than ten per cent of the total area of the archipelago; over the whole of Java, but in the Buitengewesten only at a few widely separated posts. The army of officials needed for an actual administration was simply not to be had.

The Consequences

In the absence of effective authority, the native princes and headmen fell into increasing mutual discord, “een strijd van allen tegen allen, leidende tot grenzenloze onderdrukking van bevolkingen.” Slavernij flourished, and both zeeroverij (piracy) and landroverij (land-piracy — rampok- and ketjoepartijen, plundering and extortion) assumed unheard-of proportions. Foreign merchant ships were among the victims; the American bombardment of 1831 and the British bombardment of 1844 were direct foreign reprisals against Atjehese piracy. Frijling records the irony that the policy, “voor de talloze vorsten en hoofden, kortom voor hen, die in die dagen tot de sterken behoorden,” produced the very “Merdeka” — the unbounded freedom — that the later Indonesian nationalist movement would claim.

The Intermezzo of the Niet-inmengingspolitiek in Atjeh

The niet-inmengingspolitiek was the explicit framing of the Dutch decision to recall the troops from Atjeh after the capture of the Kraton of 24 January 24 January 1874. Frijling records that “de Regering, menende, dat de militaire gebeurtenissen een diepe indruk op de Atjehers hadden gemaakt, wilde vasthouden aan haar onthoudingspolitiek en riep onze troepen naar Batavia terug.” The result was that a year later troops had to be sent again, and “slavenhandel en zeeroperij werden op de oude voet voortgezet.” The political failure of the niet-inmengingspolitiek in Atjeh inaugurated the protracted “schier eindeloos gesukkel” of the Atjeh-oorlog.

The Resolution

The pacification of Atjeh by Van Heutsz around the turn of the century, and the subsequent reforms by which Van Heutsz preserved native self-government under a thin layer of properly prepared Dutch administrators, marked the definitive abandonment of the niet-inmengingspolitiek and its replacement by an active, though economical, colonial administration. Frijling defends Van Heutsz against the charge of being a geweldenaar en onderdrukker — a violent man and oppressor — and praises his policy of preserving the native self-governments (inlandse zelfbesturen) under the supervision of a single, properly prepared Dutch official with multiple functions. This was the “ei van Columbus” — alternatively, the “ei van van Heutsz” — that resolved the problem that the niet-inmengingspolitiek had failed to solve.

The situation

Java had always been and remained the centre of the Indies; on Java were concentrated chiefly the administrative care of the government and the interest of minister and parliament. All those hundreds of islands outside and around Java, the buitenbezittingen as they were then described, “remained distant unknowns, where our authority reached no further than the shadow of a flagstaff — with, in that narrow shadow, an administrative official without means of power and therefore without authority.”

Article 43 of the Instructie voor den Gouverneur-Generaal of 1855 did indeed say: “the right of self-government left by agreement to native princes or peoples does not exclude the obligation to promote the welfare of the land, to govern with justice, to prevent piracy and the slave trade, and to protect agriculture, industry, trade and shipping. The Governor-General sees to it that this obligation is fulfilled and that the obstacles opposing it are cleared away.” But until the turn of the century these remained words and nothing more. They lay in Multatuli’s emerald girdle as sleeping beauties indeed, “but in those distant years before 1900 the Netherlands Government by no means felt itself the fairy-tale prince who was to wake her.”

Justification and cost

Du Croo warned that the history of the era of exploitatie-politiek — which was undeniably conducted — must be judged and not simply condemned in the light of its own time: “a time without modern means of transport and communication, without colonial awareness among other colonisers either, without a real sense of responsibility towards the native population, and without ethical understanding.”

The difficulty of the moment was that the means were scarce and that the politics of the batig slot (favourable balance) — itself also a product of its time — was mortally afraid of costly intervention in the affairs of the often powerful and insolent rulers of the islands outside Java and Madura. Minister Loudon wrote to the Governor-General in 1861: “I regard every extension of our authority in the Indies archipelago as a step nearer to our fall, and the more so because we have already grown far beyond our strength.”

The Raad van Nederlandsch-Indië did take a broader and stronger view in 1864, when that advisory body determined “that without incorporation of territory no lasting peace was possible in the outlying communities, that the so-called punitive expeditions could never lead permanently to the goal and were moreover harmful in every respect.” But when it was at last decided to assert Dutch authority against sea-roving Atjeh, because no other road remained open in view of Dutch international obligations, that decision brought in its financial burden — the long-drawn-out, costly war — together with the disappearance of the batig slot, also fear of and the apparent impossibility of any further extension of authority.

Atjeh as the standing warning

The bloody and costly setbacks in the Atjeh war, which was also waged, judged, condemned and directed in the Dutch parliament, formed in that disastrous, constantly shifting insight, in the continual changing of system and persons, “the grinding brakes upon every impulse to action in another direction.”

“Again and again it was heard: “remember Atjeh — let Atjeh be a warning!”… and consequently “No Entry” became the imperative sign that closed off the free road to the Outer Provinces. And the Outer Provinces remained closed — a virtually unknown, untrodden world of its own.”

Governor-General Van Rees declared: “If there were still officials in the Outer Provinces who, ambitious or bellicose, wished to follow the road of annexation, conquest or extension of direct authority, then that inclination in them ought to be vigorously suppressed; no extension of involvement — on the contrary, a system of contraction deserved recommendation.” — choosing in the theoretical “steady supervision by suitable officials” a footbridge that could not even serve as a plank.

The turn

Gradually more colonial figures of significance turned against this absolute non-intervention; more than one side pointed to the dangerous and continual chance that other powers, in the emerging drive for colonial expansion, would declare that non-intervention to be impotence and exploit it; Governor-General Van Lansberge at least dared to acknowledge that greater involvement did not exceed Dutch financial strength. But it lasted until 1894, and until the abuses in Lombok made intervention unavoidable, before the minister of Colonies acknowledged: “our sovereignty over a native state lays upon us, with regard to what happens there, a responsibility that we cannot shake off.”

The cost, in figures

Du Croo quoted from C. Lulofs’s pamphlet the figures which, read in the light of their own time, show clearly “what hesitation and ever-changing views have cost us in men and in means.”

In Atjeh the Dutch lost in 1875 957 dead, while 5,151 men were evacuated; in 1876 1,737 men died and 7,600 were evacuated. Up to the beginning of 1877 the Atjeh war had cost sixty million guilders. In 1877 there were 944 dead; in 1879 124 officers, 5,577 other ranks and 3,681 convicts were evacuated, and in the same year 277 officers, 6,394 other ranks and 6,982 convicts had to be sent out as replacements.

In 1880 the costs amounted to 115 million, risen by 1884 to 150 million, while the deficit in the Indies treasury had risen to eighty-six million. In the time of the notorious geconcentreerde linie five thousand soldiers were massed in the celebrated square geographical mile, an accumulation which caused evacuations of 3,408 in 1890, 2,796 in 1891, 3,171 in 1892 and 2,879 in 1893. In the last two years replacements of 4,893 and 4,470 men respectively had to be sent out; the total war costs then amounted to 210 million. Even 1895, the last year before Teukoe Oemar’s defection, required a replacement of 6,069.

Lulofs’s conclusion, quoted by du Croo as questionable when written but wholly confirmed by later results: “From the figures it appears that after 1845, leaving Atjeh out of consideration, only the period 1871–1890 is noteworthily distinguished from the twenty-five preceding and the sixteen following years; and if one includes Atjeh, then it appears that with no noteworthily greater force than was in the field in the Outer Possessions since the beginning of the Atjeh war, the whole remaining independent part of the archipelago was subjected, apart from Groot Atjeh and its Dependencies.” A calculation moreover showed that the notoriously expensive years of van Heutsz were 959,000 guilders a year cheaper than the three immediately preceding.

Significance

The non-intervention policy is, in du Croo’s account, the condition against which the whole achievement of van Heutsz and of the Korte Verklaring must be measured. It also produced the paradox at the heart of the book: it was Atjeh, the one place where the Netherlands did intervene, whose cost and duration became the standing argument against intervening anywhere else.

Sources

Nederlandsch Indië Platen Atlas met korte beschrijvingen, uitgegeven door Volkslectuur, Weltevreden, Java. Weltevreden: G. Kolff & Co., January 1926. Chapter IX (Verkeer), p. 160.

Source

J. Frijling, Een stukje geschiedenis der Indische Buitengewesten, voor wie dat niet overbodig mocht zijn (1946), pp. 1–2, 7–9. Koninklijke Bibliotheek shelfmark 0465 0898.

Generaal Swart, Pacificator van Atjeh (“General Swart, Pacifier of Atjeh”), by M. H. du Croo, Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with the collaboration of H. J. Schmidt, Titular Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with a foreword by His Excellency Lieutenant-General K.N.I.L. (retired) G. K. Dijkstra (Maastricht: N.V. Leiter-Nypels, 1943), Chapter V, pp. 30–33.

tags	concept, policy, colonial, dutch, slavery, piracy, aceh-war, buitengewesten, 19th-century, political-strategy
aliases	Non-intervention policy, Dutch non-intervention, Onthoudingspolitiek, Afwachtende politiek, Dutch policy of abstention, Non-interventiepolitiek, policy of non-intervention, non-interventie, policy of abstention, politiek van onthouding

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