Sjafrudin Prawiranegara’s visit to Atjeh in August 1949 was the occasion on which the head of the Republic of Indonesia’s Emergency Government (Pemerintah Darurat Republik Indonesia), Mr. Sjafrudin Prawiranegara, recognised Atjeh as a de jure autonomous province after meeting the demands of its republican military governor, Teungkoe Moehamad Daoed Beureu-éh — a recognition the central government in Djokja would immediately, and only partially, attempt to walk back.
Context
Henri J. H. Alers’s Om een rode of groene Merdeka observes that, so long as the Republic itself was fighting for its bare survival — as it was until the end of 1949 — it had every reason to be satisfied with whatever resistance Daoed Beureuh, as republican military governor, could offer to any Dutch designs on that part of the Republic’s territory. How weak the actual tie between Atjeh and the Republic had become, Alers notes, is shown by the fact that after the second “police action” the Republic’s Emergency Government under Sjafrudin Prawiranegara preferred to keep moving about the Menangkabau region rather than establish its seat in the still-unoccupied territory of Atjeh itself.
The visit and its terms
Prawiranegara nonetheless visited Atjeh in August 1949, though — in Alers’s account — he received a rather cool welcome, and Daoed Beureuh pressed demands that circumstances alone compelled the government to meet. The stated grounds for these demands toward autonomy were Atjeh’s distinct political, economic, and cultural development, together with its ethnological and religious differences from the Christian Tapanoelese and Batak populations. The demands amounted, in practice, to full autonomy — not only in religious matters but, very pointedly, in economic ones as well; Alers notes that the Ulama class that led the Poesa had, since the 1945–1946 social revolution, taken over much of the Uleëbalang’s former economic position, including not merely landholding but the highly profitable trade with Malacca conducted entirely outside the foreign-exchange controls of either the Dutch or the Republic. Prawiranegara conceded on every point, and Atjeh became, in August 1949, a de jure autonomous province of the Republic — a status Alers stresses it had, in effect, already held for years.
The central government’s disavowal
The episode did not end there. The Central Government, sitting at Djokja on the Security Council’s orders, sent Prawiranegara a telegram effectively repudiating his measures on the grounds that a presidential decree required the vice-premier to obtain the approval of an advisory council not yet then constituted before taking any step with the force of law — rendering the creation of the province of Atjeh, in the government’s own reasoning, technically unlawful. The resulting uproar in Poesa circles subsided only once the Ministry of the Interior cabled that the province of Atjeh could nonetheless continue “de facto.” Alers questions how far the Central Government at Djokja in fact possessed the authority to disavow Prawiranegara’s action at all, noting that it had mandated its powers to him on 18 December 1948 and that he had not yet returned that mandate.
Significance
Alers treats the episode as the moment at which Daoed Beureuh learned exactly what he could expect from the Djokja government once sovereignty had formally passed to it — and situates it as the direct prelude to the government’s more forceful reassertion of unitary control that produced, in 1951, the merger of Atjeh into the Province of North Sumatra.
See Also
- Teungkoe Moehamad Daoed Beureu-éh
- Formation of the Province of North Sumatra (1951)
- Poesa
- Ulama–Uleëbalang social revolution in Atjeh (1945–1946)
- Atjèh’s accession to the Negara Islam Indonesia (1953)
- 1949
Source
Om een rode of groene Merdeka: Tien jaren binnenlandse politiek Indonesië, 1943–1953, by Henri J. H. Alers (Eindhoven: Uitgeverij Vulkaan, 1956), Chapter VII §35 “De Negara Islam Indonesia in Atjeh,” pp. 266–267.