The fortification of the V Moekims was the erection, in the first weeks of 1893, of groote versterkingen (large fortifications) in the Vth Moekims of Groot-Atjeh by the chiefs Toekoe Mat Amin, Mat Saleh and the Iman van Longbattah, as reported by the Atjehsche Courant of 28 January 1893 and quoted by Coblijn in the naschrift of his pamphlet Hoe Atjeh te onderwerpen.
The prohibition of contact
The same report stated that the people were forbidden, under the severest penalties, to come within the Dutch lines: for the men the penalty was the cutting off of one of their feet (het afhakken van een der voeten), and for the women the cutting off of one of their breasts (het afsnijden van een der borsten). Coblijn closed his quotation with the newspaper’s own conclusion: De tegenstand schijnt hoe langer hoe meer een kwaadaardig karakter aan te nemen — the resistance appears to assume an ever more malignant character.
Significance
The fortification of the V Moekims is significant in the documentary record of the last years of the concentratie-stelsel as a press testimony of 1893, the year of the brochures of Van Heutsz and Coblijn, that the war party of Groot-Atjeh — the same chiefs of the Mat Amin party who would still lead the resistance of 1896 — was openly preparing new fortified points of resistance and forcibly cutting the population off from the Dutch lines, while in the capital the question of the definitive solution of the Atjeh question was under discussion. Coblijn used the report to close his pamphlet: the Atjehnese would only respect power — het zwaard (the sword), without untimely interference of politics, could alone achieve the subjugation.
See Also
- Atjehsche Courant
- Tengkoe Mat Amin di Tiro
- Toekoe Imam Longbattah
- Groot-Atjeh
- Moekim
- Hoe Atjeh te onderwerpen (Coblijn, 1893)
- Aceh War
- 1893
Source
Hoe Atjeh te onderwerpen, door W. A. Coblijn, gepensionneerd Kolonel van het Oost-Indisch Leger (‘s-Gravenhage: De Gebroeders van Cleef, 1893), pp. 117–118. OCR-filename: 20260716_140310_DLP-100-Hoe_Atjeh_te_onderwerpen_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt; Atjehsche Courant, 28 January 1893 (as quoted).