The peusah panchuri (from sah, Arabic qalīḥ, “true, certain” — causative: “to declare as certain, to ascertain”) is the Achehnese adat ceremony by which the killing of a thief is verified and legally justified. Under Achehnese law a thief is punishable with death, even if not caught red-handed — a great divergence from the law of Islam, which prescribes amputation of the right hand for a first offence, the left foot for a second, and so on, and that only on proof of a kind exceedingly difficult to adduce. Achehnese law, by contrast, treats the punishment as an act of private vengeance which only the victim of the theft or his representative has the right to exact; the slayer must, however, prove the deceased’s guilt according to the rules of evidence required by the adat, lest he become involved in a blood-feud.
The only proper method of proving the crime is for the uleebalang to establish the fact by personal investigation at the scene of the theft and to identify the thief — a process known to the Achehnese as peusah panchuri. In the XXVI Mukims this peusah should, according to the adat, be carried out only by the panglima sagi; in the XXV by any uleebalang; and in some parts of the XXII Mukims the uleebalang, if he resides at too great a distance, may be replaced by a conclave of three imeums. The elders and those learned in adat enumerate four sorts of testimony — the Achehnese having a great preference for the number four — which, whether taken alone or in conjunction, give the right to regard the accused as a thief. In practice, however, these rather more than vague rules are supplemented by tokens (tanda): the body of the slain thief has been found lying close to or in the neighbourhood of the stolen object, traces of housebreaking are present, the thing stolen is found in the possession of a receiver who points out the thief, and so forth.
The ceremony itself is dramatic and formal, characterised by set speeches no less than the Achehnese family ceremonies. The body of the thief, with the objects which serve as testimony, is left undisturbed until the uleebalang, notified as soon as possible, appears in the gampong attended by some imeums and keuchi’s. These authorities seat themselves over against the slayer, while the people of the gampong crowd around on all sides. The slayer is usually represented by a speechmaker of the gampong, and standing in his place he recites the circumstances of the killing — the missing rope, the open door of the stall, the man leading the buffalo in a place separated from his house by a single garden, his own drawn sikin, the cry for help, the blow. The uleebalang then turns to the elder and asks whether, if the story be so, the deceased is “buffalo-flesh.” The elder replies: “This fellow is even as the flesh of buffaloes, it is permitted us to eat it! Let us cry aloud now all together, the name of this fellow is thief! Cry with one voice, let us kill the thief dead!”
The formula by which the slain thief is declared buffalo-flesh sets the slayer free from all guilt of blood. In practice the proof is often fictitious: the slayer may break a piece out of the wall of his own house, place a chest which he has himself taken out near the body, or tie his buffalo to the leg of the slain man, so as to give the appearance of his having met him leading the animal away. Though all who attend at the verification are well aware of the fraud — the uleebalang often as much in the secret as the rest — the solemnly paraded fiction and the declaration “This fellow is as the flesh of buffaloes” suffice to close the matter. The ceremony thus exhibits in its fullest development that combination of formal speech, dramatic display, and adat fiction which pervades Achehnese public life.
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.