Een strijd in Atjeh (Een oogarts op het oorlogspad) — A struggle in Atjeh (An eye doctor on the warpath) — was a Dutch-language pamphlet published in 1934 by the Vereeniging „SIMAVI” (Steun In Medische Aangelegenheden Voor Inheemschen, Support in Medical Matters for Natives) at Rotterdam, printed by N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg at Weenaplein 16. It reprints three letters written by the young jurist and journalist C. Graadt van Roggen for the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, recording his shipboard conversations with the ophthalmologist Dr. J. Tijssen about Tijssen’s cataract and trachoma campaigns in the kampongs (villages) of Atjeh. A foreword by H. Wanting, editor of the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, dated September 1934, explains that the letters are published as an act of piëteit (pious remembrance) towards Graadt van Roggen, who had died shortly after writing them.
The pamphlet is, for the history of Atjeh, a rare non-military Dutch account of Acehnese village life in the early 1930s — of the North Coast, the West Coast between Meulaboh and Singkel, and the island of Simaloer — and of the state of medical provision in the pacified sultanate a generation after the Atjeh-oorlog.
Publication and physical description
The title-page reads: EEN STRIJD IN ATJEH (Een oogarts op het oorlogspad) DOOR Mr. C. GRAADT VAN ROGGEN met een voorrede van den heer H. WANTING, Redacteur „Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant”. Beneath the title is the caption of the cover photograph: “eenige van de behandelde cataractlijders in de kampong Long Poetoe op de Noordkust van Atjeh” (some of the treated cataract sufferers in the kampong of Long Poetoe on the North Coast of Atjeh). The imprint is Uitgave van de Vereeniging „SIMAVI” (Steun In Medische Aangelegenheden Voor Inheemschen).
The pamphlet comprises sixteen numbered pages of text within a twenty-page collation, illustrated with photographs of Acehnese patients — among them the group of seven juvenile cataract patients operated on the West Coast, an incurably blind child carried by its father, a Muslim priest reading the Koran aloud to his fellow patients, and a final plate captioned Kinderliefde in Atjeh (child-love in Atjeh).
The second page reproduces the constitution and governing board of SIMAVI, royally approved on 28 October 1926. The last page of text carries a quotation from Dr. J. Tijssen in Medische Nood, 1934, no. 1, and the statement that SIMAVI had in that year expended f 26,500 on medical assistance to the indigenous population of the Netherlands East and West Indies, of which f 4,400 was for medicines and dressings alone.
Origin of the text
Wanting’s foreword recounts that in February of the previous year — that is, February 1933 — the steamer Baloeran of the Rotterdamsche Lloyd brought together on her homeward voyage two passengers who had never met and would never meet again. One was Dr. J. Tijssen, an eye doctor in Atjeh who, after long years of practice as a plantersdokter (plantation doctor), had gone into the kampongs on his own initiative — “a pioneer.” The other was the twenty-eight-year-old Mr. C. Graadt van Roggen, returning to his editorship at the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant after a short spell of journalism in the Indies.
Wanting describes the encounter as either “a happy accident or a wise dispensation,” and notes that the reserved physician could not escape “het gretige journalistenoog” (the eager journalist’s eye) of the gifted young jurist. The result was the three letters here reprinted. Wanting records that half a year after the shipboard meeting the mourners stood at Westerveld around Graadt van Roggen’s bier, and that many expressions of sympathy had arrived from the Indies, where he had lived and worked so very briefly.
Contents
The letters are datelined a/b. „Baloeran”, Februari 1933 and proceed as a reported conversation. They cover: Tijssen’s sixteen years as a plantation doctor in the south of Atjeh and at Langsa; his assistantship under Prof. van der Hoeve at Leiden; his return to Atjeh in 1929; his decision to work outside the hospitals; the cataract campaign on the North Coast; the encounter with the chief Teukoe Oemar van Bernoen; the seven juvenile cataracts between Meulaboh and Singkel; the Idi operations of November 1931; the Bakongan journey of August 1933; the visit to Simaloer; and finally the trachoma campaign on Samosir in the Tobameer, appended as a comparative case.
Significance
The pamphlet’s importance for Acehnese history lies in three areas. First, it documents the medical condition of the Acehnese population — cataract, trachoma, avitaminosis and juvenile blindness — in a period for which few civil accounts survive. Second, it records, through the anecdote of Teukoe Oemar van Bernoen and the courteous question „Blanda betoel?” (“A real Dutchman?”), the persistence of Acehnese suspicion of Dutch motives sixty years after the outbreak of the war. Third, in describing the road along the West Coast flanked by mass graves recalling “de vele Atjehoorlogen en den opstand van ‘26,” — the many Atjeh wars and the rising of ‘26, and the monument marking the spot where Teukoe Oemar fell, it preserves the physical memory landscape of the war as it stood in the 1930s.
See Also
- C. Graadt van Roggen
- J. Tijssen
- H. Wanting
- Vereeniging SIMAVI
- Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant
- Cataract campaign on the North Coast of Atjeh (1932)
- Seven juvenile cataracts of Atjeh’s Westkust
- Teukoe Oemar van Bernoen
- Baloeran
- 1933
- 1934
Source
Een strijd in Atjeh (Een oogarts op het oorlogspad), door Mr. C. Graadt van Roggen, met een voorrede van den heer H. Wanting, redacteur Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg, uitgave van de Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934), title-page and pp. 1–16, with photographic plates.
Acknowledgement of sources. The material in this article derives from Een strijd in Atjeh (Een oogarts op het oorlogspad) by Mr. C. Graadt van Roggen (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg for the Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.