The Desecration of Dutch graves at Lampoeloe (1874) was the profanation, on the morning of 26 April 1874 — within hours of van Swieten’s departure from Atjeh — of the Dutch military cemetery at Lampoeloe by Atjehneezen who overran the abandoned bivouak of Penajoeng, looted the legerplaats for “ledige flesschen, kisten en anderen rommel,” and then, in an act Borel calls “schandelijk” (shocking, scandalous), broke open the graves, “zelfs lijken opgegraven en met echte kannibalenwoede aan stukken gehakt” — even digging up the corpses and hacking them to pieces with true cannibal fury. Borel’s verdict is the lapidary: “het was de eerste wrange vrucht, door het verderfelijke stelsel der passieve houding afgeworpen” — it was the first bitter fruit of the pernicious system of passive posture.
The Context
On 26 April 1874 the last Dutch troops withdrew from the bivouak of Penajoeng into the Kraton — now the hoofdplaats of Kota Radja — as part of van Swieten’s reduction of the forward positions after his declaration that the war was “geëindigd.” The bivouak had been the principal Dutch base since the landing of 6 December 1873. Around it, in the kampong of Lampoeloe near the boschrand, lay the Dutch military cemetery — the graves of the men who had fallen in the battle of Lemboe of 25–26 December 1873, the storm of the Mesigit of 6 January 1874, the daylight raid of 13 January, and the long weeks of cholera and sickness in the bivouak. The cemetery was, by colonial convention, sacred ground. The Atjehneezen had always buried their own dead with reverence; the Dutch had treated enemy dead with “erbied.”
The Desecration
No sooner had the last Dutch soldier withdrawn than the Atjehneezen swarmed into the gewezen legerplaats. They began by looting what the Dutch had left behind: “ledige flesschen, kisten en anderen rommel” — empty bottles, boxes, and other rubbish. Then they turned to the cemetery. The graves were broken open. The corpses were “opgegraven” — dug up — and “met echte kannibalenwoede aan stukken gehakt” — hacked to pieces with true cannibal fury. The bodies of the Dutch dead, who had been buried with military honours only weeks before, were mutilated and scattered. The act, Borel writes, was “schandelijk” — scandalous — and “des te minder te verschoonen” (all the less to be excused) because the Dutch had always treated the enemy dead with eerbied.
Borel’s Judgement
Borel’s verdict on the episode is the lapidary: “het was de eerste wrange vrucht, door het verderfelijke stelsel der passieve houding afgeworpen.” The desecration was not, in his account, an act of random Atjehnees savagery. It was the direct and foreseeable consequence of the passive system that van Swieten had imposed on the campaign. By abandoning the bivouak of Penajoeng without ensuring that the cemetery could be protected, the Dutch command had delivered the graves of its own dead into the hands of the enemy. By reducing the garrison and withdrawing to the Kraton before the country was pacified, van Swieten had invited the very atrocity that followed. The desecration was, in Borel’s reading, a moral indictment of the afwachtende houding — proof that the passive system did not spare blood but merely displaced it, and that the blood it spilled was Dutch. The Atjehneezen, Borel concedes elsewhere, were “woest, dapper, vrijheidlievend, onafhankelijk, fanatiek,” and “uit eene geheel bijzondere stof gekneed.” The desecration of the Lampoeloe graves was the fanatieke side of that character, given its head by the withdrawal.
See Also
- Second Aceh Expedition (1873–1874)
- Lampoeloe
- Penajoeng
- Departure of Jan van Swieten from Atjeh (April 1874)
- Van Swieten declares the Aceh War ended (1874)
- Afwachtende houding
- Jan van Swieten
- Generaal Pel
- Atjehnees volkskarakter (Borel)
- 1874
Source
Onze vestiging in Atjeh, critisch beschreven, by G. F. W. Borel, Kapitein der Artillerie. ‘s-Gravenhage: D. A. Thieme, 1878. pp. 114, 122–123.