Het recht op den grond in Atjeh (De Boer)

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tagsdocument, adat, land-law, colonial, dutch, atjeh, 20th-century, legal, ethnography
aliasesHet recht op den grond in Atjeh, Het Recht op den Grond in Atjeh, De Boer on Atjehnese land law, The right to the soil in Atjeh, DLP-141, De Boer 1931 land law memorandum

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Het recht op den grond in Atjeh (“The right to the soil in Atjeh”) was a monographic study of Atjehnese customary land law written by D. W. N. de Boer, a former chairman (Voorzitter) of Atjehnese moesapat and landschapsgerechten (native and territorial courts), dated at Scheveningen in November 1931 and printed in pages 59–80 of a Netherlands-Indies colonial periodical, the offprint of which was catalogued at the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde at ‘s-Gravenhage under the shelf entry DLP-141. The study set out, in systematic order, the operation in Atjeh of the beschikkingsrecht (right of avail or disposal), the Inlandsch bezitsrecht (indigenous right of possession), the customary charges levied on land clearance and cultivation, the several forms of mawaih (share-cropping), the gala (pledge) and Atjehnese hypotheek (mortgage), the atra peunoelang marriage gift, and the colonial introduction of verjaring (prescription) in 1911.

De Boer presented the work not as a completed treatise but as a résumé of data gathered “te hooi en te gras” (haphazardly, as opportunity offered) over many years of judicial service, published in the hope that “ook deze bescheiden bijdrage voor de studie van het Adatrecht van nut zal kunnen zijn, al zou ze alleen maar aanleiding geven tot critiek, correctie, commentaar” — that even this modest contribution to the study of adatrecht might be of use, if only by prompting criticism, correction and commentary.

Origin, authorship and date

The study was written after De Boer’s return to the Netherlands, and is signed and dated “Scheveningen, November 1931.” The running head of the printed page 65 carries the notation “1932 Januari 5,” indicating that the instalment containing that page appeared in the issue of 5 January 1932. The offprint preserved at the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde bears the institute’s address stamp at Galewstraat 159, ‘s-Gravenhage, and the accession marks of the Bibliotheek KITLV.

De Boer’s authority for the material rested on his own judicial practice: he wrote explicitly as one who had sat as Voorzitter van Atjehsche Moesapats en Landschapsgerechten, and repeatedly introduced institutions as forms “which the chairman of a moesapat or landschapsgerecht not infrequently encounters.” The work is therefore a practitioner’s record of the land law as it was actually litigated in the Atjehnese courts of the early twentieth century, rather than a purely literary compilation.

Comparative frame: Atjeh against the Toba-Batak lands

De Boer opened the study with a sustained comparison between Atjeh and the Toba-Batak lands and the territories that had borrowed their institutions. In the Batak country, he argued, the beschikkingsrecht (right of avail over unappropriated land) took the form of an anxiously intensive control exercised in the first instance by the Radja (ni) Hoeta over the taking of land into use, and above all over the prevention of the alienation of land; and second, of the annexation by that same Radja Hoeta of lands left by the deceased or abandoned by emigrating dependants, where no entitled heirs presented themselves — annexation either for his own benefit or for issue and re-issue to new immigrants, whom he thereby bound to himself as parripe’s.

For the Batak radja, De Boer wrote, that right was “de basis van zijn macht, het fundament bij den opbouw van zijn harajaon” — the basis of his power, the foundation of the building-up of his chieftaincy. Without it the small Batak radja, especially since the fragmentation of the marga (clan), could not bind to himself the picked ripe’s, preferably of his own marga, needed to maintain or extend his harajaon; nor could he prevent representatives of other marga’s from nibbling away at his already insignificant little chieftaincy, until at last he found himself in so small a minority even in the village he had himself founded that he could be more or less eliminated under marga law.

In Atjeh the position was fundamentally different, and the comparison served to explain why: the Atjehnese keradjaäns were not fragmented in that degree, were far larger, and — decisively — had come into being territorially rather than genealogically.

The territorial origin of the Atjehnese states

De Boer emphasised that the Atjehnese keradjaäns had “zich willekeurig als meer of minder belangrijke, onderling in geen enkel opzicht gebonden, zelfstandige staatjes ontwikkeld” — developed arbitrarily as more or less important, mutually unbound, independent statelets. In support he quoted De Atjehers, Volume I, page 62: “Zoodra echter de groote stap op het gebied der politieke ontwikkeling gedaan was, die hoofden of vorsten (Oeléébalang) tot gezaghebbers over bewoners van een zeker gebied maakte zonder onderscheid van kawoms of soekëë…” — once the great step in political development had been taken which made chiefs or princes (oeléëbalang) into authorities over the inhabitants of a certain territory without distinction of kawom or soekëë.

From this followed his central thesis: in Atjeh there was no dependence on a sufficiently strong following of members of the same lineage, sub-stem or marga in order to maintain oneself; and therefore no necessity to handle the beschikkingsrecht with circumspection. The Atjehnese village chiefs — the Keutjih and the Peutoeha — enjoyed no outward independence, and the division of the land had not followed genealogical lines at all. A watchful, chiefly defensive beschikkingsrecht was accordingly not urgent.

Structure of the study

The study proceeded through the following subjects in order:

Sources used by De Boer

De Boer cited three works repeatedly and by page: De Atjehers by Professor Snouck Hurgronje (Volume I, pages 62, 91 ff., 106, 122, 312, 314, 315); the Adatrecht of Professor Van Vollenhoven (pages 164, 190, 196, 197 ff., 198, 200, 202); and Politiek Beleid en Bestuurszorg in de Buitenbezittingen (Second Part B, chapter IV, page 113 ff., and pages 111 ff. and 233 ff.). For the pepper contract he referred the reader to De Pepercultuur in de Buitenbezittingen, instalment V of the Mededeelingen van het Encyclopaedisch Bureau, and to De Buitenbezittingen: Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden, Part II, instalment 2, page 148 ff.

Disagreement with Van Vollenhoven

At two points De Boer set his own findings expressly against those of Van Vollenhoven. Where the Adatrecht (page 196) suggested that in Atjeh “een verbleekt of slapend beschikkingsrecht bestaat hier niet” — a faded or sleeping right of avail does not exist here — De Boer answered that this was “niet juist” for the Zelfbesturende Landschappen, as the remainder of his study would show. And where Van Vollenhoven recorded the customary grazing arrangement as “het eigenaardige recht” possibly surviving from a village beschikkingsrecht, and listed it among the restrictions on the Inlandsch bezitsrecht (indigenous right of possession), De Boer held that it was in reality no “right” at all but no more than a usage grounded in economic calculation — “‘n nuchtere uitwisseling van economische goederen,” a sober exchange of economic goods, which gave the cattle owner a free grazing place near his gampong and the owner of the grazing the benefit of costless manuring of his soil. The village, he insisted, played no part whatever in the field of rights in land in Atjeh.

Significance

Het recht op den grond in Atjeh is one of the few systematic descriptions of Atjehnese land law written from the bench rather than the study, and it preserves a body of technical Atjehnese legal vocabulary — haq radja taléë, thiplah tano, haq toeleuèng, haq thilangkob, padé kandoeri, aboen meu’oeë, atra peunoelang — much of which is not recorded in comparable detail elsewhere. Its comparative framing against the Toba-Batak beschikkingsrecht made it a contribution to the wider Netherlands-Indies debate on adatrecht opened by Van Vollenhoven, and its documentation of institutions already obsolete at the time of writing — notably the haq thilangkob, the right of the felling-length — was justified by De Boer himself on the ground that the recording of “adatrechterlijke antiquiteiten” could serve comparative or explanatory study of the adatrecht of other regions.

See Also

Source

Het recht op den grond in Atjeh, by D. W. N. de Boer, dated Scheveningen, November 1931, pp. 59–80 (the running head of p. 65 reading “1932 Januari 5”). Offprint DLP-141, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Galewstraat 159, ‘s-Gravenhage; Bibliotheek KITLV accession 0060 4460 60 081470 428.

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