The Ordinance of the 14th March 1881 — “with respect to the administration of justice among the native population of Great Acheh, with an explanatory memorandum by Mr. T. H. der Kinderen” — was the Dutch colonial government’s attempt to codify the customary law of Great Acheh shortly after the first phase of the Acheh War. The Ordinance was published at Batavia in 1881, but, as Snouck Hurgronje drily observes, it perished at its birth, and the Achehnese have never felt its effects.
The problem of codifying customary law
The Ordinance was cited by Snouck Hurgronje as a single contrasting instance in his general argument against the codification of native customary law. Throughout the East Indian Archipelago, he observed, the living law of the people had been handed down by example and usage, not by writing; even in those Malay states which possessed written undang-undang, the embodiment of custom in writing was a token that the institutions in question were beginning to fall into decay. Codification, in his view, was the recourse of those who wished to introduce by force an alteration in existing legal institutions; those who were content to leave things as they were seldom resorted to it.
The Achehnese situation
In Great Acheh itself, no single written document testified to the laws controlling the relation of chief to subject, of man to wife and children, although every sentence of an Achehnese judge bore witness to their existence. The Adat Meukuta Alam and similar collections, like the Hukum Kanun of Malacca, dealt chiefly with regulations regarding the court of the sultan and maritime commerce, while the real living adats were for the most part silently taken for granted. Against this background the Ordinance of 1881 appeared as a foreign importation, framed in a European bureau with the assistance of Mr. T. H. der Kinderen and resting upon no consent of the Achehnese themselves.
Failure of the Ordinance
The Ordinance perished at its birth because the territory to which it was to apply was not, in 1881, actually under Dutch control. The war had been allowed to be suspended since 1881, and the concentration policy that followed confined Dutch authority to a narrow perimeter around Kuta Raja. Inside that perimeter the Ordinance could not be applied to a population that knew nothing of it; outside it, the Dutch had no jurisdiction at all. The same year also saw the promulgation of the Dutch-language version, the Ordonnantie van 19 Maart 1881, cited by Snouck Hurgronje in his later discussion of the Kali Malikon Adil.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.