The enquête-commissie on the First Atjeh Expedition was the Dutch commission of inquiry (enquête-commissie) before which the commanders of the failed first Atjeh expedition of 1873 were brought, and before which they were censured. In Hoe Atjeh te onderwerpen (1893), the retired colonel W. A. Coblijn made the treatment of these officers a leading example of his thesis that the true authors of the disaster were not the soldiers but the government that had sent them unprepared.
Coblijn’s defence of the commanders
Coblijn argued that in war mistakes are made almost always, and that every general who has no success and is brought before an enquête-commissie can be condemned; in an enquête-commissie the difficulties are never sufficiently weighed. The commanders of the first Atjehnese expedition were, he wrote, most respectable men, who had served their country with honour for years and years and stood most favourably known in name and fame; they had been unfortunate in the war and had perhaps committed errors — but in what condition had they found themselves? In a most difficult condition, in which error, if not altogether to be pardoned, ought not to have been punished with the hardness wherewith they were punished by being brought before an enquête-commissie. Who had brought them into that condition? Who else than the Government. History, therefore, must yet decide who were the chief guilty of the great échec that was suffered: the commanders of the first expedition or the members of the Government; dit heeft de Enquête-commissie niet ten volle kunnen doen — the Enquête-commissie has not fully been able to do justice.
The Havelock parallel
For the defence Coblijn quoted Colonel Malleson’s history of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8: how the writer of history judged the government of Lord Canning, who caused General Havelock to be superseded because he had been obliged to retreat — Havelock who won all his battles and whose ultimate want of success was owing in great measure to the fatuous action of the Government of India: Supersession! The first thought of a feeble Government when their hopes have not been fulfilled! And with Malleson he recalled that this was not the way in which Rome treated her generals: Terentius Varro carried rashness to its extreme when he fought Hannibal, yet the senate, recognising the patriotism, thanked him that he had not despaired of the republic.
Significance
The enquête-commissie is significant in the historiography of the Atjeh-oorlog as the constitutional instrument by which the failure of 1873 — the retreat of the expedition of generaal Köhler, fallen before the kraton — was answered in the mother country. Coblijn’s criticism fixed the question that the parliamentary literature of the following twenty years was to repeat: whether the enquête had established the truth or had shielded the government at the expense of the soldiers. The eerste échec itself he counted as the great tactical and strategic defeat by which the whole character of the war was determined: the Atjeher had learned that he could defeat the Dutch.
See Also
- First Aceh Expedition (1873)
- J. H. R. Köhler
- Atjéh-enquête
- Hoe Atjeh te onderwerpen (Coblijn, 1893)
- W. A. Coblijn
- Aceh War
- 1873
Source
Hoe Atjeh te onderwerpen, door W. A. Coblijn, gepensionneerd Kolonel van het Oost-Indisch Leger (‘s-Gravenhage: De Gebroeders van Cleef, 1893), pp. 27–29. OCR-filename: 20260716_140310_DLP-100-Hoe_Atjeh_te_onderwerpen_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.