Cheukie was one of the distinctive punishments of the Achehnese adat — a penalty which the uleebalangs, as territorial chiefs, might inflict upon their subjects, but which the imeums and other religious officers might not. As C. Snouck Hurgronje explains, the imeum could only obtain payment of his dues by amicable means: “They dare not for instance apply the punishment of cheukie or other adat-penalties or fines, or excommunicate rice-fields, or identify thieves, or exact a deposit of ha ganchéng in dealing with suits to recover debts, or embody men among their followers etc. At any rate, imeums who venture on such measures have already reached the rank of independent uleebalangs.” The right to inflict the cheukie thus marked, like the langgèh umòng or “excommunication of the rice-fields,” the boundary between the subordinate religious official and the truly territorial lord.
The adat-punishments in general were applied “at the whim of the uleebalang,” not only in the case of illicit intercourse but also of other favourite sins of the Achehnese. Among these punishments Hurgronje enumerates: fifty or more strokes of the lash inflicted by the rakans of the uleebalang in the presence of a crowd of the fellow-villagers of the accused; holding up to public gaze for a few moments by suspension from a tree by a rope passed under the arms; exposure for a whole day to the sun; being tied up for a whole night in a place swarming with mosquitos or close to a nest of red ants. To these might be added the older punishment for ill-treatment of women, in which the offender was set on a cow-buffalo and led round followed by a hooting and jeering crowd — a form of disgrace which the late chief of Lho’-Kruet on the West Coast used to apply to all sorts of other offences. “There are no definite adat-rules in regard to all these punishments”; they are “sometimes made to appear to have as its sole purpose the punishment of immorality,” but in practice their application was at the discretion of the chief.
The cheukie took its place among these adat-penalties, and was reserved — together with other grave punishments — to the sultan himself. As Hurgronje sets out the “seven prerogatives” of the sultan, “they alone had the power to inflict certain punishments, five in number, which could never be imposed by uleebalangs, viz. the lopping off of hands, impaling, a sort of crucifixion which consisted in the exposure to view of the dead body of the offender nipped in a cleft tree-trunk, the slicing off of flesh from the body of the condemned (sayab), and the pounding of the head in a rice-mortar (srō).” The cheukie, while less dramatic than these sultanic prerogatives, lay within the regular competence of the uleebalang, and was a token of the same principle — that the punishment of the body, in whatever degree, was an act of territorial jurisdiction. Its prohibition to the imeum was a constant reminder of the limits of religious as opposed to civil authority in Achehnese society.
The institution of the cheukie and its cognate adat-penalties throws light on the wider Achehnese system of criminal justice, in which “imprisonment, generally in chains, serves less as a punishment than to accelerate the payment of a heavy fine, or to detain the prisoner for further enquiry when it is feared that he might otherwise make good his escape.” The favourite punitive instrument of the uleebalang was the fine, supplemented where necessary by the langgèh umòng or “excommunication of the rice-fields,” by which a stake was fixed in the rice-field of the guilty party with the white spathe of a young cocoanut palm at its upper end, and the owner was forbidden to till his field until the case was settled. The cheukie stood, in this system, between the merely coercive langgèh umòng and the capital and mutilating punishments reserved to the sultan — a graduated scale of bodily disgrace through which the uleebalang kept the peace of his territory.
See Also
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.