The onafhankelijkheidsfeesten (independence festivities) at Koeta Radja were the celebrations held in the capital of Atjeh in November 1913 for the centenary of the independence of the Netherlands, called into being in 1813. Moens, whose fourteen-day journey through Atjeh coincided with the last preparations for the festivals, recorded that all the officials, European and native, from the most distant onderafdeelingen (sub-divisions) of the land came to the capital to take part in them, and that they could do so entirely without concern for the posts they left behind.
The festivities as proof of the peace
In the closing chapter of the Reisindrukken van Atjeh, Moens enumerated the proofs of the deeply favourable political situation in which Atjeh found itself, and named as the sixth: het feit, dat alle ambtenaren, zoo Europeesche als inlandsche, ter viering der onafhankelijkheidsfeesten naar de hoofdplaats zijn vertrokken, zonder zich ook maar eenigszins over het door hen verlaten gebied ongerust te maken — the fact that all officials had gone to the festivities without troubling themselves in the least about the territory they left. The argument belonged with the others of his list — the well-attended schools, the busy markets, the trust of the population, the safety of the roads, the extension of native agriculture, and the general impression of calm — that the Atjehnese themselves considered the old times past: the chiefs resigned, the common people senang (contented).
Significance
The onafhankelijkheidsfeesten of November 1913 are significant in the history of the pacificatie as a symbolically charged moment: exactly forty years after the landing of the first expedition of 1873, the centenary of the kingdom’s own independence was celebrated in the capital of the conquered sultanate with the voluntary migration of the entire official class to the seat of the government. For the Amsterdam publisher of Moens’s booklet they belonged to the fact of the greatest significance that the series was reprinted to spread: there is peace in Atjeh, the Atjeh war is over.
See Also
- Koeta-Radja
- Moens’ journey through Atjeh (November 1913)
- Reisindrukken van Atjeh (Moens, 1914)
- Pacificatie van Atjeh
- H. N. A. Swart
- 1913
- 1813
Source
Reisindrukken van Atjeh, door W. Moens, oud-luitenant ter zee (Amsterdam: Jacob van Campen, 1914), pp. 49–50. OCR-filename: 20260716_140310_DLP-99-Reisindrukken_van_Atjeh_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.