Pel’s missive of 30 April 1875 was the lengthy official letter in which generaal J. L. I. H. Pel, the civil and military commander of Atjeh, addressed to the Governor-General of the Netherlands Indies a careful review of the Dutch position at Kota Radja, one year after he had inherited the command from generaal van Swieten. The letter — drafted at Kota Radja on 30 April 1875, seven weeks before Pel departed for a three months’ leave at Batavia on 13 June 1875 — was long invoked by the champions of the afwachtende houding (wait-and-see posture) as proof that Pel had declared in favour of their system, until its actual text was made public by Kielstra’s history of the Atjeh war and analysed by Overste Verstege at length in 1886. The missive is in fact the founding document of the programma-PEL, the offensive programme of action subsequently approved by the government.
What Pel actually wrote
After recording that in Atjeh itself, on the political terrain, only little progress had been made, Pel described the Dutch situation honestly: a completely safe position in Kota Radja and an equally safe communication with the sea, with a wider district around the chief fortification occupied than had originally been intended — a defensive expansion that the circumstances had forced upon him. He then judged the prophecy contained in van Swieten’s letter of 19 July 1874, that the Atjehsche resistance would die out of itself if the Dutch remained undislodgeable in the heart of the country, and advised, with all the authority his experience gave him, against waiting too long:
“De tijd zal moeten leeren, in hoever die voorspelling waarheid bevat, en onze militaire positie laat ons thans toe, eene afwachtende houding aan te nemen en ons voor te bereiden op eventueeliteiten, die ons wellicht zullen noodzaken tot hernieuwde krachtsinspanning. Ik erken, dat er voor het oogenblik geen periculum in mora is, maar ik meen ernstig te moeten waarschuwen tegen te lang wachten, eensdeels omdat onze verhouding tot de Onderhoorigheden er niet door wordt bevorderd, anderdeels omdat de krachtsinspanning, mocht die noodig blijken, grooter zal moeten zijn, naarmate den vijand langer gelegenheid wordt gegeven zich moreel en materieel te versterken.”
(“Time will have to teach how much truth that prophecy contains, and our military position now allows us to assume a wait-and-see posture and to prepare for eventualities which may oblige us to renewed exertion. I acknowledge that for the moment there is no periculum in mora [danger in delay], but I think I must seriously warn against waiting too long, first because our relation to the Dependencies is not furthered by it, and secondly because the exertion, should it prove necessary, will have to be greater the longer the enemy is given opportunity to strengthen himself morally and materially.”]
The heart of Atjeh is not the submission of the people
Pel frankly weighed the assets of the Dutch position — the heart of the country held, a one-headed government of any significance made impossible for the enemy, the Atjeh river and, with a blockading squadron, the supply by sea hampered — and asked: “Maar is dit afdoende om de zaak te beëindigen, en, zoo niet, is deze toestand dan op den duur houdbaar?” (“But is this sufficient to end the matter, and if not, is this situation tenable in the long run?”). He did not hide that he strongly doubted whether the position, however tenable, would suffice to bring the population of Groot-Atjeh, alienated “in the first place against us”, to submission, and warned that the blockade could not cut all supply along so extended a coast — a temporary measure which perhaps could be upheld no longer than the independence-minded Atjeher upheld his resistance. He recalled that the experience of April 1874 had taught the government that no promises from the Dutch side would induce the enemy to submit or to soften his resistance, and that he had accordingly refrained from issuing any proclamation; and he closed — in words entirely opposite to those attributed to him by the champions of the waiting system — with the programme he had drawn up for further offensive operations in Groot-Atjeh, to be approved by the government during his stay on Java:
“Mijne zienswijze komt, en résumé, hierop neer: consolidatie van onze actueele positie op Atjeh; voortzetting der vijandelijkheden zoo spoedig als onze strijdkrachten ons daartoe in staat stellen.”
(“My view comes, in résumé, down to this: consolidation of our actual position in Atjeh; resumption of hostilities as soon as our fighting forces put us in a position to do so.”)
The misuse of the letter
As Verstege demonstrated, the champions of the afwachtende houding — in the first place general van Swieten and since 26 September 1876 the former minister Fransen van de Putte — had declared, in the most peremptory terms, that Pel in this very letter had spoken out in favour of the waiting system, and van Swieten went furthest in 1880 when he wrote that even Pel had condemned active warfare “totdat hij tijdens een driemaandelijksch verlof te Batavia, in medio 1875, is omgepraat geworden” (“until during a three months’ leave at Batavia, in mid-1875, he was talked over”). The date error alone — the letter is of 30 April, the departure for Batavia of 13 June — betrayed the construction; the letter itself, as Pel had laid down his plans for further offensive operations in it, refuted it entirely (see Afwachtende houding).
See Also
- Jacobus Pel
- Jan van Swieten
- Afwachtende houding
- Bezettingskorps in Atjeh
- 1875
- Pel’s letter to Jan van Swieten
- Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk (Verstege, 1886)
Source
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 55-58, after the text of the missive first published in Kielstra, Beschrijving van den Atjeh-oorlog, Deel II. OCR-filename: 20260801_235605_DLP-158-Een_beroep_op_het_Nederlandsche_volk_in_zake_het_Atjeh_vraagstuk_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.