The years 1890 to 1898 were, in du Croo’s account, the period in which the Atjeh war passed through its most humiliating phase and then, at a stroke, into the new course of van Heutsz. It opened with the investigation of Dr. Snouck Hurgronje, continued through the conciliatory governorship of Deijckerhoff and the Legion of Teukoe Oemar, culminated in the catastrophe of 1896, and ended in March 1898 with van Heutsz’s appointment as Civil and Military Governor with Snouck Hurgronje as adviser.
The state of the question
In 1892 Atjeh was still, as a result of the constantly shifting insights of the Government, of hesitation and lack of self-confidence, “an expensive and troublesome problem child.” Yet many, including men on the Government side, had begun to doubt whether the costly Atjeh-vraagstuk, dragging on and pressing upon the whole of the Indies, could ever be brought to solution by such passive means.
That doubt led among other things to the despatch of the philologist Dr. Snouck Hurgronje, the great authority on Islam, with instructions to study the situation in Atjeh on the spot and report on it. To carry out that commission Snouck Hurgronje stayed in Atjeh from July 1891 to February 1892. His report, which the Government at first “deponeerde” (shelved), became the core of the standard work on Atjeh, De Atjehers, published on the Government’s orders in 1893. In it the real internal condition and the mutual relations were laid bare with the unambiguous conclusion: only general and vigorous action could put an end to the resistance.
Van der Heijden, the general with the strong hand and the tough perseverance, had pointed the way to a swift and complete subjection; the partnership of van Teijn and van Heutsz had, years later, demonstrated that the Acehnese adversary had respect only for purposeful force. Nevertheless, after the retirement of general van Teijn, the Government again chose the policy of waiting and negotiating. Thus, after a short and feeble administration by general Pompe van Meerdervoort, general Deijckerhoff took office.
The Deijckerhoff governorship
Deijckerhoff’s accession, du Croo wrote, “opened — and at the same time closed — the most disappointing and shameful period of Atjeh policy.” He was a convinced adherent of the policy of conciliation. That policy corresponded entirely with the requirements of the Indies moment in 1892, because the army was then preparing for a large-scale undertaking against Lombok which would probably demand all its strength, so that Atjeh could not count on reinforcement. Action on an extended scale therefore had to be avoided — which lay entirely in the line of Deijckerhoff’s own convictions. But the application of those convictions also meant that the courage and enterprise of the warlike Acehnese greatly increased: “als de Kompeni (“the Company (the Dutch power)“did not dare, he at once dared twice as much!”
Van Heutsz’s brochure
Almost simultaneously and in the same spirit, and written moreover with the foreknowledge of Snouck Hurgronje, van Heutsz published his celebrated, courageous and vigorous brochure De onderwerping van Atjeh. Van Heutsz, then a major of the General Staff and “burdened with countless enemies,” especially in army circles, chose as motto: “The Atjeh war gnaws at our colonial possession. It must end; let us at last show the civilised world that we are capable of ending it!”
His two principal conclusions ran wholly parallel to Snouck Hurgronje’s argument: “a freedom-loving, warlike people submits only under compulsion,” and “only he who shows that he possesses the power to make his will respected will bring Atjeh to submission.” Van Heutsz still held in the brochure to a scheepvaartregeling, and his aim was not so absolute as the philologist’s; but the brochure at last brought the new, strong and correct note. It was accordingly regarded by many either with disapproval or as unserious; only many younger men understood and endorsed it.
Snouck Hurgronje’s analysis
Snouck Hurgronje’s conclusions, as summarised in J. W. Naarding’s source-study Het conflict Snouck Hurgronje — Van Heutsz — Van Daalen, identified three causes of the persistence of the resistance.
The first was that Atjeh was no single-headed state that could be subdued by satisfying the head of state, destroying the state power, or occupying the seat of state, but “a complicated grouping of a number of federations of small agrarian communities,” so that the situation could be mastered only by the subjection of the ten-thousand-headed people and its local chiefs.
The second was that “Acehnese nationality was a religious nationality,” drawing its strength and conviction from Islam. The Atjeh war, in Naarding’s phrasing, “was not just an ordinary war between two peoples, which could be ended in the ordinary way by a peace, but a new period in the world-historical drama: the Holy War between believers and unbelievers, which received continual spiritual nourishment and guidance from the headquarters of the faith, Mekka, and which permitted an armistice but no lasting peace.”
The third lay in the phenomenon that this holy war was waged by bands which showed themselves masters of guerrilla warfare but which had at the same time developed the bendewezen into a profitable “nationaal nevenbedrijf,” finding fertile soil in “the brutalising and devastating effect of the long war” and “in the popular character inclining towards lawlessness.”
But — and here, du Croo noted, lay the indication for both subjugator and pacificator — “the main occupation of the Acehnese people nevertheless remained agriculture, and the Acehnese farmer was in his deepest nature like all farmers: a quiet man, if only one left him, his field, his beasts and his family in peace.”
The great art, and this was the new Atjeh problem, would be to put an end to the relationship between the practitioners of the normal peace-trade and those of the abnormal war-trade of the Acehnese, between peasants and bands. Snouck had already indicated the means: even after the conquest and occupation of a district one must go on striking the remaining individual or grouped enemies so hard and so long that the Acehnese peasant would be restrained by fear from maintaining any relation whatever with the Acehnese djahat. But simultaneously — and precisely on this point Van Daalen would later fail — one had to instil in the same peasant, alongside that fear, trust in Dutch authority and Dutch power, and the certainty that he was fully protected against those bands. To achieve that it was equally necessary to win the trust of the well-disposed and indispensable chiefs, for only with and through the chiefs could the population be reached.
Snouck’s later formulation, in Verspreide Geschriften IV, was “the combination of means of pacification derived from sound principles of government with the unavoidably hard measures that must break the resistance.” Atjeh had therefore first to be conquered, thus subjected, and then permanently occupied, thus pacified; between subjection and pacification lay a transitional period.
The Legioen of Teukoe Oemar and the disaster of 1896
Deijckerhoff governed Atjeh in his own way, but felt that complete inactivity could bring no solution. That feeling led to a proposal to the Government which was to lead to the disaster of 1896: the Acehnese resistance party would be fought by Acehnese well disposed to the Dutch, equipped, armed and paid by the Dutch.
The Government accepted the proposal, and as commander of a Legion of Acehnese there appeared Teukoe Oemar, an adventurer from the west coast (the Meulabohsche), related to the princely house there and indisputably untrustworthy. Although T. Oemar had repeatedly submitted and just as repeatedly attacked Dutch troops afterwards, Deijckerhoff continued to place rock-firm trust in him: T. Oemar was appointed oelèëbalang of Leupoeëng (XXV Moekims) and in September 1893 was even solemnly installed as Panglima Prang Besar.
It began very well: T. Oemar fought with success and Dutch authority was restored over the greater part of the territory. Then, in 1896, the Panglima Prang Besar went over to the resistance party with the Legion the Dutch had armed and paid. Deijckerhoff had to resign; van Heutsz got his eventual chance; and “in 1898 the Netherlands is delivered from the Atjeh obsession; the paralysis that held us captive for a quarter of a century yielded to the unyielding will of one man.”
The road to van Heutsz’s governorship
In the aftermath, Vetter as Regeeringscommissaris was to be succeeded by Major-General De Moulin, who died almost at once. Van Heutsz’s column struck the hardest blows. The very day after Vetter’s departure, in June, T. Oemar suffered an unexpected defeat: the Dutch outpost Aneu’ Galong, occupied by the Acehnese, was retaken after a splendid night march and a lightning attack with cold steel by the marechaussée of captain Jhr. Graafland, well supported by a platoon of the 3rd Battalion armed for the first time with repeating rifles — the fact that Dutch soldiers still faced Acehnese repeaters with single-loaders being another of van Heutsz’s grievances. It was the first public appearance of the young élite corps in which the new fighting tactics against the Acehnese enemy were embodied. The blow told: 110 dead remained in the captured fortification after a fierce and honest fight which cost the Dutch six dead and thirty-three wounded, four of them officers. More than that: Teungkoe Mat Amin, eldest son and successor of the fiercest religious resistance leader Teungkoe di Tirò, who had died in 1891, lost his life there.
Van Heutsz, still fighting and leading his column, was extraordinarily promoted colonel — but simultaneously appointed Chief of the General Staff, and thus removed from Atjeh. That proved a false move by his opponents: as Chief of the General Staff he gradually succeeded, well supported by Snouck Hurgronje, in convincing the Governor-General of the correctness of their shared view. When general Van Vliet retired in March 1898, van Heutsz was appointed Governor of Atjeh with Snouck Hurgronje as adviser. Before that, he had served under Stemfoort — “a soldier of the old Atjeh stamp” not inclined to seize and pursue T. Oemar immediately and unceasingly — and under Major-General Van Vliet, who took office as Governor in November of that eventful year and was likewise no man for the tempo-Van Heutsz.
Significance
The period 1890–1898 is, in du Croo’s construction, the negative pole against which the whole later story is measured: it demonstrated that conciliation without power produced only emboldened resistance, and it produced in the report of Snouck Hurgronje and the brochure of van Heutsz the two documents from which both the conquest of Atjeh and, a decade later, the pacification under H. N. A. Swart derived their doctrine.
See Also
- Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje
- Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz
- C. Deijckerhoff
- Teukoe Oemar
- Legioen van Teukoe Oemar
- The Subjection of Atjeh (1892)
- De Atjehers (1893-1894)
- J. W. Naarding
- Karel van der Heijden
- J. van Teijn
- Teungkoe Mat Amin
- H. N. A. Swart
- 1896
- 1898
Source
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 III, pp. 14–19.