The formation of the Province of North Sumatra was the administrative reorganisation, decreed by the central Indonesian government in early 1951, by which Atjeh was merged with Tapanoeli and the former federal state of East Sumatra into a single province — reducing Atjeh, in Henri J. H. Alers’s phrase, to “an anything-but-autonomous residency” and precipitating the chain of events that led, two years later, to Teungkoe Moehamad Daoed Beureu-éh’s rebellion and Atjeh’s accession to the Negara Islam Indonesia.
Background: Atjeh’s contested autonomy
Atjeh had, since the 1945–1946 social revolution, been governed largely as a self-contained polity under Teungkoe Moehamad Daoed Beureu-éh as republican military governor. During a visit in August 1949, the head of the Republic’s Emergency Government, Sjafrudin Prawiranegara, had conceded on every point of Daoed Beureuh’s demands and recognised Atjeh as a de jure autonomous province — a status the central government at Djokja then partly disavowed by cable, before allowing the arrangement to continue on a merely “de facto” basis, judging its own legal authority to disavow the concession doubtful in the first place.
The merger and its politics
In early 1951, buoyed by recent successes in liquidating the former federal states and ending the Ambon affair, the central government proceeded regardless of Pusa objections — voiced most sharply at a Poesa congress held 23–27 December 1950 to campaign for the retention of Atjeh’s autonomous status — and created the merged province of North Sumatra, comprising Atjeh, Tapanoeli, and the former federal state of East Sumatra. Alers records that the government began addressing correspondence to a “resident-coordinator” of Atjeh even before Daoed Beureuh’s dismissal as governor had been formally completed; Daoed Beureuh simply returned such letters unopened. He was subsequently ordered transferred to a ministry post in Djakarta and, when he requested resignation from government service instead, had it granted “with suspicious speed.” He was replaced by the Javanese official Danubroto as resident-coordinator.
Consequences
Danubroto’s attempt to restore oelèëbalang-class and non-Atjèhnese officials to posts held since the revolution by Poesa members emboldened the surviving Uleëbalang class, which organised as the Badan Keinsjafan Rakjat under Teuku Mohammed Ali Samalanga. Alers presents the North Sumatra merger as the underlying grievance behind Daoed Beureuh’s escalating denunciations of central-government officials as “kafirs” from 1951 onward, and treats it as the structural precondition for the rebellion he would proclaim in September 1953.
See Also
- Teungkoe Moehamad Daoed Beureu-éh
- Danubroto
- Badan Keinsjafan Rakjat
- Teuku Mohammed Ali Samalanga
- Poesa
- Atjèh’s accession to the Negara Islam Indonesia (1953)
- 1951
Source
Om een rode of groene Merdeka: Tien jaren binnenlandse politiek Indonesië, 1943–1953, by Henri J. H. Alers (Eindhoven: Uitgeverij Vulkaan, 1956), Chapter VII §35 “De Negara Islam Indonesia in Atjeh,” pp. 266–268.