The pacifying administrative work of 1908–1918 was the civil side of H. N. A. Swart’s governorship of Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden: the reconstruction of a province ruined by thirty-five years of war, undertaken simultaneously with the last military operations against the bands. Du Croo built his account on the survey given by J. C. Lamster in his Atjeh article in the Haagsch Maandblad of May 1938, supplemented by Swart’s own recollections, the Koloniale Verslagen and the maandverslagen.
Lamster’s survey
“While one heavy blow after another was being dealt to the resistance party,” Lamster wrote, “while the marechaussee patrols tracked down and rendered harmless the last irreconcilable oelamas into the remotest wildernesses and the deepest hiding places, in the subjected territories pacification was already in full swing.”
“Contact was maintained as intensively as possible in every respect with the well-disposed population. As soon as it was known that uitgewekenen (those who had gone over to the resistance) were beginning to show signs of rapprochement, it was made known to fellow villagers or family members that the keumpeni would make their return as easy as possible. For many the single act of submission was in itself a great difficulty. For many who had wandered about for years, social conditions had entirely changed. Villages had been moved, old fields abandoned, cattle had been sold or had run away, household goods and tools had disappeared; for the promotion of agriculture, stock-raising and trade our administration had taken numerous measures with which most of the uitgewekenen were unfamiliar.”
“They were, however, wise enough not to trouble the newly submitted at once with all manner of novelties. Measures were also taken so that, with the help of family, of friends, or if need be of a modest interest-free advance from a people’s credit bank, they could begin their new life on a reasonable footing.”
The charge of buying the peace
Several critics reproached Swart’s administration at the time, and later, with having bought the resistance men to rest and having in effect bought the whole pacification — a charge made among others in Dr. R. Broersma’s Atjeh als land voor handel en bedrijf (1925). Even in 1923–1925 there was heavy katjauen about it, including in Atjeh itself.
Du Croo answered from his own experience. As acting controleur of Meulaboh in 1925 he was struck by the improbably numerous entries on the budget headed onderstand (support) to relatives of chiefs, to Teukoe Gam and Teungkoe Poetoes. “That did indeed look odd and wrong. Had those people, then, been bought into quiet after all?” But diligent search in archives, reports and memoranda showed that each of those items had its own history, its own “the why and the wherefore.” It had as a rule been just and wise policy, which had supported such people and thereby laid “a practical and inexpensive bridge to normal conditions.”
The one caution du Croo added was that after 1918 the administrative official had to guard against the easy and pleasantly generous “a dip into the money-bag” towards those who also wanted support and who set the oelèëbalang or oelèëbalangtjoet on to press their wishes — “familie is familie!” — but who did not qualify for such aid. “Swart’s makeshift little bridge was not to be turned into a permanent and expensive piece of road engineering.”
Order, cleanliness and the criticism of “uiterlijk vertoon”
Swart’s promotion of order, tidiness and punctuality was branded by some as outward show and naturally as far too heavy a burden on the population — “that simply lay in the atmosphere of that sometimes morbidly ethical age.”
Du Croo set against this his 1925 memory of Meulaboh: nowhere, not even in muddy Timor, had he found such a “varkensstal” as the keudé of Meulaboh — and yet one could see it had been well, regularly and neatly laid out and built. But “the pressure from above no longer existed; that Governor who travelled everywhere, fussy about detail and punishing with costly paint, no longer went about — and so neglect had followed.” Along the coast road the iron bridge railings had rusted away everywhere because they were no longer painted. Du Croo then held “keutelige” inspections himself; the third, after thorough warnings, brought in 168 guilders in fines, the keudé-holders having naturally waited to see whether the toean would really punish. “En toen wérd er geverfd, toen wérden de gammele daken van petroleumblikken in de menie gezet, en dat was geen façade maar noodzaak: er bestaat nu eenmaal een noodzakelijke hygiëne bij woningbouw en -onderhoud in pasarbuurten.”
Communications and the kampong paths
Lamster continued: “The improvement of the means of communication was vigorously continued, the connection of the Atjehtram with Deli was completed, the Gajo road to the interior, laid out through heavy mountain terrain, was put in order for motor traffic, and in place of the muddy, slippery little paths full of mud holes there came neat, simple village paths strewn with fine gravel, which were gradually planted with shade trees.”
“Administrators and constabulary patrols were unceasingly at work to bring improvement in the condition of the neglected and unhygienic villages. In entirely new districts, consultation was first held with the chiefs and the population. When weighty decisions have to be taken, there is nothing on which the Acehnese sets so much store as on moefakat (deliberation to consensus). The administrator who knows how to make skilful use of this, and who takes the trouble to talk for hours where necessary even with the simplest village man, almost always achieves a good result in the end.”
“Little by little the population itself began to see the advantage of more settled conditions, of pleasant villages with well-maintained roads; it began to take pleasure in cooperating in all these improvements…”
Agriculture and irrigation
“I have always tried,” Swart related, “to obtain very good workers in Atjeh for the matters in which I took an interest. Workers who felt for their task. Above all the irrigated rice cultivation in Pidië had to be improved. On the North Coast there was a good and easy outlet for the rice to Sumatra’s Oostkust, where there was always a rice shortage. So I sought and found a collaborator who could help me with improvements to the existing watercourses, the loeëngs. What had been done in that respect up to then, and what the Acehnese did himself, was insufficient. Moreover, waterworks in the great rivers were needed with a view to irrigation.”
“The Acehnese is a farmer. Hence I also encouraged crops other than rice: palm oil cultivation, for which the population had a liking, pepper cultivation, with all the difficulties of advances (pangkal) and price fluctuations, and the planting of ficus elastica, which succeeded well in Meulaboh.”
The pepper cultivation in particular brought difficulties. The Koloniaal Verslag of 1908 recorded: “the pepper advances are being made directly to the pepper planters; there is a shortage of personnel for supervision, but above all: the chiefs will give no cooperation, because they see their private interests harmed by those advances; they were formerly the providers of advances.” Du Croo added that those pepper advances were still causing trouble in 1925. “One senses: that was something the chiefs would not let be taken from them.”
In August 1908 a simple temporary adviser for agriculture was appointed, who lent better seed-padi to the population; at harvest the loan had to be repaid with an equal quantity of the best padi. That was new, and the suspicious Acehnese at first had little confidence in it; but the mistrust was gradually overcome, so that in the end not all applicants could even be helped.
In Poelò Raja and Meulaboh, where in 1908 there was a great shortage of plough cattle, eighteen thousand guilders were made available for the purchase of buffaloes.
Estate agriculture
Alongside peasant agriculture Swart also sought to promote the cultures — or rather to bring them to Atjeh. He was a pupil of Van Heutsz and saw, as Van Heutsz did, the importance of large-scale agriculture for the population too.
In 1910 the interest of entrepreneurs began to show itself, partly as a result of the then favourable conjuncture; everywhere in the Buitengewesten agricultural parcels were sought. That benefited in the first place the east coast of Atjeh. This district, with a mixed Acehnese-Malay population, had suffered least from the resistance and was governed by chiefs who promoted the pacification especially with an eye to their own business interest. Moreover, the east coast bordered on the plantation country of Sumatra’s Oostkust; the administration co-operated to make the entrepreneurs’ plans succeed; better roads and the Atjehtram promoted traffic; and there were not always justified high expectations of the soil. “At a feverish tempo,” according to Jongejans, “the plantation region of Atjeh’s East Coast was created, whereby at the same time the foundation was laid for the financial prosperity of the subdivisional treasuries of Tamiang and Langsa.”
Rubber came first, oil palm followed in 1911; the Gajòweg opened a closed district, though tea and coffee achieved little there; and in later years the west coast (Meulaboh–Singkel) also drew the attention of the entrepreneurs. Jongejans’s figures, cited by du Croo, record that up to the end of 1937 there had been issued in Atjeh sixty-nine agricultural concessions covering 71,069 hectares, seventy-four leasehold parcels covering 67,287 hectares, and thirteen option parcels covering 287,000 hectares.
Volksonderwijs
But in all those first years the administrator felt how urgently good, simple and above all practical volksonderwijs was needed: elementary education for the people with, alongside it, a more extended education for the chiefs’ sons.
That conviction could not be conveyed in a few years. The Koloniaal Verslag for 1908 recorded: “the spread of education among the Acehnese youth is viewed with regret by a very influential part of the population. In the first place by the Teungkoes, who, although they must admit that this education is not in conflict with the hoekom (Muhammadan law), nevertheless fear that the intellectual development of the young people will make them averse to learning the recitation of the Koran.”
It began with the chiefs’ sons. The Koloniaal Verslag of 1908 recorded: “in general the opportunity, offered practically free of charge, of giving their sons a better upbringing met with more approval from the fathers and guardians than from the mothers; it often cost those fathers and guardians persuasion to obtain the consent of their wives” — “the Acehnese woman is not easy!”
Elementary education for the Acehnese girl was almost equally indispensable, “for the Acehnese woman is no outcast, no mere beast of burden; she takes her own and by no means insignificant place in Acehnese society.” It was therefore a matter of convincing the chiefs of the necessity that the girl should go to school as well as the boy, to learn domestic work and hygiene alongside writing, reading and a little arithmetic. The former village-school pupil, and above all the trained chief’s son, would later — and that was the lesson of Java — want a more developed wife beside him. Girls’ education had the full interest and support of Mevrouw Swart.
There was in the beginning a painful shortage of good teachers, as everywhere in the barely opened Buitengewesten. Building the little school was manageable: a simple wooden or bamboo building the population could put up without much trouble. But the teachers were another matter. Van Heutsz, “the father of this popular education, or better still, the man who made the village school financially possible,” solved the teacher question in his own pithy way, entrusting Ziesel with a trial of simple schools with the village schoolmaster of his grandfather’s day as model — “But above all: take hold of it and do not sit with your hands in your hair. Something is always better than nothing!”
So in Atjeh too the matter was tackled, with an eye to training the best possible teachers as quickly as possible, since “a bad teacher spoils so much precisely in a beginning period that ten good teachers can afterwards scarcely make it good again.” In 1910 a Normaalcursus was therefore founded at Koeta Radja, which brought the necessary improvement in quality.
In 1908 twenty-one village schools were opened in Groot Atjeh. The growth of the whole province was:
- 1911: 106 village schools;
- 1912: 125 village schools, 6,000 pupils; 3 girls’ schools;
- 1913: 151 village schools, 6,800 pupils; 6 girls’ schools, 240 pupils;
- 1914: 165 village schools, 8,200 pupils; 6 girls’ schools, 280 pupils;
- 1915: 184 village schools, 10,700 pupils; 6 girls’ schools, 418 pupils;
- 1916: 196 village schools, 11,300 pupils; 9 girls’ schools, 704 pupils;
- 1917: 220 village schools, 12,261 pupils; 10 girls’ schools, 1,140 pupils;
- 1918: 250 village schools, 14,751 pupils; 20 girls’ schools, 1,321 pupils.
Jongejans, writing in 1938, recorded the later development: “Two-year courses for the training of village schoolteachers were set up in various places, whereby the quality of the teaching staff at the village schools could be improved… at present (1938) the situation is already such that of the more than 600 village teachers a good two-thirds belong to the Acehnese or to another people indigenous to this province… These little schools may be found deep into the interior, from primitive sheds with walls of plaited bamboo, an earthen floor and an atap roof, consisting of a single room, to trim wooden buildings with cement floors and tiled roofs of two or three classrooms… The number of school years is three, sometimes four; the school fee varies from 2½ to 50 cents a month according to the means of the parents, but the majority of the pupils pay no more than five or ten cents.”
Jongejans added: “If, however, even for the education of boys little can often be achieved without the vigorous support and cooperation of the oelèëbalang, this holds even more strongly for the education of girls… many schools, particularly in the countryside, stand or fall with the support of the oelèëbalang, without whose encouragement or evident appreciation the bulk of the parents would not think of giving their children any education other than the old, tried religious instruction of the teungkoe. Although the number of village schools in all Atjeh now already amounts to 328, with more than 600 teaching staff and more than 36,000 pupils, the percentage of literates at the census of 1930 still stood at only 1.1% (Java 5.5%).”
Public health
With and beside the school came in Atjeh too the gradually expanding care for public health. “En daartoe,” said Swart, mounting his familiar hobby-horse, “is voor alles noodig dat de gampongs, huizen en erven behoorlijk zindelijk worden gehouden, dat practische hygiëne wordt toegepast. Want de Atjeher is een vuilpoets. Daarom eischte ik ook van de hoofden dat zij behoorlijk gekleed waren, wanneer zij voor mij, de ambtenaren of de officieren verschenen, that is why my wife and I have striven to bring the Acehnese girl to school and to teach that girl cleanliness and hygiene and to make of her a better housewife.”
A smallpox epidemic struck the north coast in 1915, and vaccination and re-vaccination were carried out on a large scale throughout the province; the Koloniaal Verslag of 1916 recorded that the epidemic had been brought to a standstill. But in 1918 fighting was still necessary in the Boven Wòjla near Meulaboh over that same vaccination.
The Sarekat Atjeh, December 1916
It must have been a great satisfaction for Swart to be able to record in the Koloniaal Verslag of 1916 that in December of that year a meeting was held at Koeta Radja, in his presence, of progressive young oelèëbalangs and Acehnese officials “who found no satisfaction in the old, narrow conceptions, who wished to modify the outdated adat usages, who wished to promote the raising of the Acehnese woman and of both secular and religious education. Thus arose the Sarekat Atjeh, of which 200 chiefs and officials became members.”
That first gathering, at which nearly all the prominent chiefs were present, was especially remarkable because the young and progressive oelèëbalang of Peureula’ was elected chairman while the well-known, very old-fashioned and conservative oelèëbalang of Keumangan became honorary chairman: “young and old went together.”
Road building
A highly important part of the administrative work remained road building. The country had to be opened up in all directions, and that all-sidedness brought difficulty because the funds were limited and the needs very great. One had therefore to begin with the main roads, and those were the coast roads, which along the west coast were for the time being unsuited for through traffic because the spurs of the mountains repeatedly reach the coast there — and that would have been too expensive in those first pacification years, and indeed long after 1918. The fright caused by the resistance of 1925/1926 became — fortunately, du Croo remarked — also the cause of the final execution of through roads and of the connecting roads between the north, east and west coasts.
In those years, seven years after Swart’s administration, it was “sad and shameful” to establish the neglect of roads and bridges: there was not only no money for road building but none for maintenance, hardening and paint for the bridges. The redemption sums of the heerendiensten plus what the budget could make available for construction and maintenance were “om te weenen.”
Swart had the first and most thorough care devoted to the principal coast roads: everything at once cost too much money, the more so as an impossible number of bridges was needed. First gravel roads, then hardening. “Thus work was carried on during those years, and thus Swart laid the basis for the network of communications that opened up Atjeh.”
The great value of that first road building in the Buitengewesten and the correct insight of the administrative officials of the time were confirmed in later years by the results: “roads, roads and once again roads” proved, despite all disparaging and destructive criticism, the administrative watchword for those first years.
Naturally construction by heerendienst was the easiest and the only financially possible method. But heerendienst remains heerendienst, and it is logical and just that with the pacification and the development of land and people this hated form of taxation-in-labour should gradually disappear. On 11 August 1908 the statutory regulation of the heerendienst came into force; the maximum number of heerendienst days was brought down from fifty-two to twenty-four, while proposals were submitted to make redemption possible. But those proposals implied that either the convict or the free labourer must do the work on the road — far more expensive and impossible to pay out of the small redemption sums: “the dilemma that all the Outer Provinces have experienced.”
The administrative reorganisation of 1908
Swart also brought about a new administrative division of the province in 1908: five afdeelingen were formed, each under an Assistant Resident — Groot Atjeh, the Noordkust, the Oostkust, the Westkust and Bambél (Gajò Loeös, the Alaslanden and Singkel). In afdeelingen where this already proved possible, a controleur conducted the administration, among others Idi and Singkel; Sabang came under a “burgerlijken” civil authority.
The following year already brought a change; the following sub-divisions could then be placed under civil administrators: the sagi of the XXII Moekims, Tamiang, Serbödjadi, Poelò Raja, Tapa’ Toean and the separately administered territory of the VII Moekims Pidië — that is, Groot Atjeh had reached the point where civil administration could be introduced everywhere.
In 1910 the afdeeling Bambél was abolished; Singkel was joined to the Westkust, while the Gajò Loeös and the Alaslanden became independent afdeelingen, each under an officer-gezaghebber.
Compensations and small measures
Leafing through the Koloniale Verslagen and Maandverslagen, du Croo wrote, one repeatedly meets “een vredeswerkje,” a piece of pacification.
In 1909 Swart was authorised to dispose of 6,000 guilders for provision, by way of interest-free advances, for the first needs of persons in need who had come in submission. He was also authorised to pay 4,000 guilders to the head of Peudada (Bireuën) as compensation for the burning of two houses belonging to him and the loss of his goods during a raid on the keudé of Peudada by ill-disposed persons in September. In the same way 5,000 guilders were paid to T. Radja Tjoet, oelèëbalang of Meuké’ (Tapa’ Toean), for the loss of his possessions in a raid on his koeta in February.
In 1910 the police functions passed more and more to the chiefs; the detention of women and children without the head of the household, for whatever purpose, was forbidden, as was the imposition of fines or securities on political units — except in the Gajò and Alas lands, where a lively and living solidary responsibility existed.
At Lam Njong a busy pasar cattle market arose on the site of the former benteng, and Swart was again authorised to dispose of 10,000 guilders as compensation to T. Maharadja Djeumpa, acting oelèëbalang of Peusangan, for the loss of his possessions through the doings of ill-disposed persons.
In 1913 the export of tobacco increased and “in this province little more was to be observed during the period under report of resistance against authority” — the report scarcely filled one whole page.
In 1915: “increasing confidence in the administration is noticeable — during the poeasa month (the fasting month) no attacks on Europeans occurred.” But alongside: “a smallpox epidemic on the North Coast; throughout the province vaccination and revaccination is being carried out on a large scale.”
In 1916: “the smallpox epidemic has been brought to a halt.”
In 1917: “more and more the population is applying itself to the planting of rubber.”
“And… yes… ‘the time of perang (war) and resistance was past’… Atjeh was beginning to become an ordinary, normal province.”
Swart’s testimony of 1927/1928
Swart revisited Atjeh in 1927/1928 and spoke again with T. Tjhi’ Peusangan, “one of the most vigorous and enterprising oelèëbalangs of the North Coast.” He was then to take a son of an oelèëbalang from Pidië to Holland for further education. T. Tjhi’ would gladly have let his favourite daughter, partly brought up at Batavia, study in Holland for dentistry — “but the mother, and in fact the adat as well, opposed this: an Acehnese young man and an Acehnese girl could not travel together to Holland under my escort. And shortly afterwards I received word that the daughter had become engaged to an oelèëbalang…”
Significance
The pacifying administrative work is, in du Croo’s argument, what distinguishes Swart’s governorship from every preceding one: the systematic reconstruction of the economic and social basis of Acehnese life, undertaken while the last bands were still being hunted, and carried far enough that by 1918 the province could be handed over to a purely civil governor.
See Also
- H. N. A. Swart
- J. C. Lamster
- J. Jongejans
- Volksonderwijs in Atjeh
- Sarekat Atjeh
- Gajòweg
- Atjehtram
- Heerendienst
- Administrative Division of Atjeh (1908)
- Van Militair naar Civiel Bestuur
- Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz
- 1908
- 1918
Source
Generaal Swart, Pacificator van Atjeh (“General Swart, Pacifier of Atjeh”), by M. H. du Croo, Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with the collaboration of H. J. Schmidt, Titular Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with a foreword by His Excellency Lieutenant-General K.N.I.L. (retired) G. K. Dijkstra (Maastricht: N.V. Leiter-Nypels, 1943), Chapter XIII, pp. 130–137.
Atjeh, by J. C. Lamster, in Haagsch Maandblad, May 1938, pp. 495–496; Land en Volk van Atjeh, by J. Jongejans, pp. 160, 251; Koloniale Verslagen 1908, 1913, 1915, 1916, 1917.