The Sultan of Acheh — the sovereign of the Atjeh sultanate — is, in the Vermeulen retrospective, the political-moral object against which the 1873 declaration of war of the Netherlands was directed. The office of the Sultan is the type-specimen, in the Atjehnese-war parliamentary record, of the independent non-European sovereign whose overthrow the Dutch justified on the three grounds of piracy, internal warfare and fear of foreign interference.
The 1873 object
The declaration of war of 1873 was, in the official motivering, directed against the sultan of Atjeh as the sovereign responsible for the alleged piracy emanating from Atjehese waters, the alleged prevalence of internal warfare within the sultanate, and the alleged foreign contacts (with the Italian and American consuls in Singapore) that threatened the Dutch position in Straat Malakka.
The Van Kol question
The most penetrating parliamentary questioning of the 1873 declaration was that of Van Kol (s.d.) in the 1897 Tweede Kamer debate on credits for Nieuw Guinea: “Mogen wij dan voor datgene wat wij zelve niet kunnen tegengaan, een onafhankelijke vorst (de sultan van Atjeh) van de troon stoten en hem zijn land ontnemen?” — May we, for what we ourselves cannot suppress, depose an independent prince (the sultan of Atjeh) from his throne and take his land from him?
The Sumatra-tractaat connexion
The Sultan of Acheh’s sovereignty was, in international law, terminated by the Sumatra-tractaat ([[1871)|Sumatra-tractaat]] of 1871 — the Anglo-Dutch treaty by which England agreed that the whole of Sumatra (including the Atjeh sultanate) would fall within the Dutch sphere of influence. The 1873 declaration was, in this sense, the diplomatic ex post execution of the 1871 treaty.
Significance
The Sultan of Acheh is, in the Vermeulen retrospective, the type-specimen of the independent non-European sovereign whose overthrow the Dutch justified on the three grounds of piracy, internal warfare and fear of foreign interference. The office is the political-moral object against which the 1873 declaration of war was directed.
See Also
- Acheh
- Atjeh-oorlog (1873-1904)
- Declaration of war against the Sultan of Atjeh (1873)
- Sumatra-tractaat (1871)
- H. B. van Kol
- 1871
- 1873
- 1897
Source
Schets eener parlementaire geschiedenis van Nederland van 1849 tot 1901, by Mr W. J. van Welderen baron Rengers, 4th rev. ed., Vol. IV: Oost-Indië 1891-1918 by Dr W. H. Vermeulen (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955), pp. 267-269.