The Battle of Aneu Galong (1896) — also called the capture of the Aneu’ Galong fortress or the defence of Aneu Galong — was the engagement of the Acehnese War in which Netherlands troops carried the fortress of Aneu’ Galong in the interior of Great Acheh, killing the patriarchal generation of the family and following of Teungkoe Sjech Saman di Tiri. The battle is recorded by Snouck Hurgronje in a bracketed footnote to his account of Teungku Tiro in The Achehnese Vol. I, and is the chronological anchor of the colonne Schmidt narrative in G. W. T. Dames’s Oom Ambon van het K.N.I.L. (1954). The two source accounts differ on a point of identification that the chroniclers do not themselves resolve: in Snouck’s account the fallen man is Mat Amin, “the son of Teungku Tiro”; in Dames’s account the eldest son and successor of Teungkoe Sjech Saman di Tiri falls as commandant, and Tgk. Mat Amin is a separate geloofsgetuige (faith-witness, martyr) killed in the same engagement.
Background: Mat Amin’s Inheritance
Teungku Tiro — the most prominent ulama of the Acehnese war, who had been recognised as commander-in-chief of the holy war against the Dutch — died in January 1891 after a sudden illness, expressing the conviction that poison had been administered to him by some agent of his son Mat Amin. Notwithstanding this, Teungku Tiro had Mat Amin summoned to his bedside when dying, and solemnly warned him to forsake his evil ways and to seek the counsel of devout ulamas. “He seemed however to realize how little chance there was of his son’s ever proving his true successor in any respect.” Mat Amin “was not wont to hearken to advice. In his dress he assumed the character of an uleebalang, and while his father, in receiving distinguished guests, always rose to meet them, the young man would remain sitting until they came up to him. Even the Achehnese consider Mat Amin proud, ignorant and headstrong, and when after his father’s death he gave the rein more than ever to his evil passions, the great body of the adherents of Teungku Tiro at once melted away.”
As a guerrilla leader and teungku by title, Mat Amin carried on the collections of the haqq sabil and the leadership of such bands as still adhered to the name of Teungku Tiro, but without his father’s combination of religious authority and military command. The bands under his leadership were, in Hurgronje’s account, “a great burden to the people,” and his life was “in other respects also far from harmonizing with the teaching of his father.” The story goes that during the last years of the latter’s life Mat Amin lived openly with another man’s wife, and that Teungku Tiro, to give him a severe lesson, forbade him access to his presence; and this appears to have so enraged the young man, that he brooded over some device to rid him of this tiresome father.
The fortress of Aneu’ Galong was one of the strongholds to which the remnant of Mat Amin’s following had retired after his father’s death. The Battle of Aneu Galong thus came at the end of a five-year descent of the Tiro inheritance from its religious-military zenith under Teungku Tiro to the diminished bende (band) of his son.
The Engagement: Two Accounts
Snouck Hurgronje’s Account
Snouck Hurgronje records the event laconically in a bracketed footnote to his account of Teungku Tiro:
“Mat Amin was killed in action in 1896, when the Dutch troops captured the fortress of Aneu’ Galong. Two other sons of Teungku Tiro, Teungku Beb (died 1900) and Teungku Mahidin or Ma’ Et, together with their kinsman Teungku Chot Plieng (died 1901) much respected for his piety and learning, continued to do their utmost to maintain the collections of the sabil contributions in the dependencies on the North Coast. Great Acheh no longer furnishes a field for the labour of these men and their fellows.”
In Snouck’s account, therefore, the fallen man is Mat Amin himself, “the son and successor of Teungku Tiro”; the Dutch capture of Aneu’ Galong in 1896 is the engagement that brings the line of Teungku Tiro to a military close in Great Acheh, and the surviving sons (Teungku Beb, Teungku Mahidin or Ma’ Et) and the kinsman Teungku Chot Plieng continue the sabil collections only in the dependencies on the North Coast.
Dames’s Account
G. W. T. Dames, in Oom Ambon van het K.N.I.L. (1954), records two distinct casualties at the same engagement. In Dames’s words:
“Van de vier zoons van Teungkoe Sjech Saman di Tiri was de oudste, tevens de opvolger, in 1896 gesneuveld als commandant bij de verdediging Aneu Galong.”
(“Of the four sons of Teungkoe Sjech Saman di Tiri, the eldest, who was also the successor, fell in 1896 as commandant at the defence of Aneu Galong.”)
In addition to this eldest son and successor — the commandant of the defence — Tgk. Mat Amin also fell at the same engagement as a geloofsgetuige (faith-witness, martyr): “De bij Aneu’Galong gevallen Tgk. Mat Amin.” The phrase geloofsgetuige — witness of the faith — is the book’s term for those who fell in the resistance as sjahid, martyrs of the prang sabi. In Dames’s account, therefore, Tgk. Mat Amin was not the eldest son himself but a separate fighter whose infant son Tgk. Tjhi Ma’at — a zuigeling (an infant at the breast) when his father died at Aneu Galong — would inherit the holy war.
The Discrepancy
The two accounts differ on whether Mat Amin was himself the eldest son and successor of Teungku Tiro (Snouck), or a separate geloofsgetuige killed in the same engagement as the eldest son (Dames). The two source chronicles do not resolve this discrepancy; it is preserved here with explicit attribution to each. The names “Teungku Tiro” and “Teungkoe Sjech Saman di Tiri” denote the same patriarch of the Tiro family; the spelling variants of the place-name (Aneu’ Galong, Aneu Galong, Aneu’Galong) are aliases of the same fortress.
1896 as the Turning Point of the Resistance
The year 1896 is, in Oom Ambon van het K.N.I.L., the moment at which “het lijdelijk afwachten was afgelopen en de troepen zelf tot actie overgingen” — the passive waiting was over and the troops themselves went over to the offensive. Dominee Thenu — who had come to Aceh in 1894 — addressed the troops before battle for the first time in 1896. The Battle of Aneu Galong therefore belongs to the same turn as the broader Dutch offensive of the late 1890s, the offensive that would culminate in the Van Heutsz-era colonnes of the early 1900s. The capture of Aneu’ Galong is, in the military history of the Acehnese War, one of the engagements by which the Dutch offensive, resumed in 1896 after the defection of Teuku Uma, began to break up the organised centres of the Acehnese war-party in Great Acheh itself.
Aftermath: The Brothers of Teungku Tiro
After the fall of Aneu Galong the work of collecting the sabil contributions in the dependencies on the North Coast devolved on the slain man’s surviving brothers. In Snouck’s account these are Teungku Beb (who died in 1900) and Teungku Mahidin — also called Ma’ Et — together with their kinsman Teungku Chot Plieng (died 1901), a man much respected for his piety and learning. In Dames’s account the surviving brothers are Tgk. Lambada, Tgk. di Boekét and Tgk. Tjhi Majét — three of the four sons of Teungkoe Sjech Saman di Tiri, the eldest having fallen as commandant at Aneu Galong. The two enumerations are not easily reconciled and may reflect different kinship reckonings of the same Tiro family. In either case, Great Acheh no longer furnished a field for their labour; the centre of religious-military activity shifted to the dependencies on the North Coast, where the surviving brothers maintained the sabil collections until the close of the century.
The boy Tgk. Tjhi Ma’at, son of the Tgk. Mat Amin who also fell in the same defence, was a zuigeling — an infant at the breast — when his father died. By 1911 he would be fifteen, and the last leader of the Tiriō bende. The boy would grow up to refuse submission on the grounds that “Zijn Vader was als geloofsgetuige gevallen, hij zou in diens voetstappen treden” — “His father had fallen as a faith-witness; he would follow in his footsteps.”
Significance
The Battle of Aneu Galong is significant in two respects. In the chronicle of the Tiro family it is the moment at which the patriarchal generation of the family was killed — the successor-son (in Dames’s account) and the geloofsgetuige Mat Amin (in Snouck’s account, the son and successor himself) — and the inheritance of the resistance was transferred to the surviving sons and the infant grandson. The boy who was a zuigeling at Aneu Galong would, fifteen years later, be the last leader of the Tiriō bende, and would be killed by the korporaal Nussy on 3 December 1911 at Tangsé. The battle is therefore the beginning of the end of the Acehnese religious resistance, and the precondition of the colonne Schmidt.
In the wider perspective of the war, the fall of Aneu’ Galong marks the close of the succession of Teungku Tiro in Great Acheh, and the consequent shift of the remaining religious leadership of the war to the dependencies on the North Coast. It belongs to the same series of Dutch successes of 1896 — the year in which the offensive was resumed after fifteen years of suspended action — that opened the way for the methodical close of the war under Van Heutsz’s governorship from 1898. The capture thus stands, in Hurgronje’s account, at one of the turning-points of the Acehnese War.
See Also
- Aneu Galong
- Teungku Tiro
- Mat Amin
- Tgk. Tjhi Ma’at
- Teungku Beb
- Teungku Mahidin
- Teungku Chot Plieng
- Tgk. Lambada
- Tgk. di Boekét
- Tgk. Tjhi Majét
- Death of Teungku Tiro
- Defection of Teuku Uma
- Dominee Thenu
- Van Heutsz’s governorship
- North Coast (of Acheh)
- Great Acheh
- Colonne Schmidt campaign against the Tiriō Teungkues (1910-1911)
- Tangsé
- Prang sabi
- Sjahid
- Achehnese War
- 1896
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A. W. S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R. J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E. J. Brill, 1906.
Oom Ambon van het K.N.I.L., by G. W. T. Dames, Maj. Inf. K.N.I.L. b.d. (‘s-Gravenhage: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1954), chapter “De colonne Schmidt.”