On 2 September 1918, at a solemn gathering in the Governor’s residence at Koetaradja, H. N. A. Swart handed over the government of Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden to his designated successor, the civilian Governor and resident Van Sluys, and delivered the farewell address in which he declared the pacification established and the separation of civil and military authority no longer premature.
The address
“As you will remember,” Swart began, “on 10 June last it was already ten years since I took over the administration of this province, and I have therefore, on my departure, been Governor of Atjeh far longer than any of my predecessors.”
“In laying down the administration an important piece of Atjeh history is at the same time closed, since there will now be a move to an absolute separation of the Civil and Military Authority, as exists in all other provinces as well.”
“As you may well imagine, this has in recent days more than once given me cause to ask myself whether I feel that during that long period of administration I always did whatever my hand found to do in every field. Despondently I have then repeatedly shaken my head and reproached myself for not having done this and not having thought of that, and this although I was convinced that in all those years I had worked to the best of my knowledge and ability and had done what I could to achieve what I once considered to be my highest task in life, namely to give this province pacification, to establish here for good the so greatly desired condition of order, peace and security.”
“Fortunately, while acknowledging my shortcomings, I have remained convinced that that pacification is now established; in my view it has stood the test brilliantly these last four years.”
“That the political policy constantly followed by me in order to achieve that task has not always been to everyone’s liking is understandable; that mistakes were made in the process, perhaps even more than I thought, is in my view pardonable, since to err is human; but I hope that all those who knew better than I will nevertheless be convinced that in everything I did, even when I sometimes played the despot, I sought only the interest of land and people and had that before my eyes.”
“That in doing so I shunned publicity and practised secrecy, as has sometimes been asserted, and that the truth was repeatedly slighted by me, is a gross untruth. I never kept anything hidden; I have never been afraid of criticism. Those who could show me that I had made mistakes I always heard out, and I have been grateful to them for their observations, which I never disregarded.”
“Although experience has proved that for Atjeh it is extremely difficult and dangerous to predict coming events, I nevertheless dare to say here that in my view the possibility is excluded that the future will bring us such unpleasant surprises here as would show that that separation was still premature. Since 1915 already I have, in view of the political situation, been fully convinced of the possibility of that separation. Moreover that separation can be accompanied by the most loyal cooperation between the civil and military authorities, and with a little self-denial on both sides a difference of view need never lead to regrettable collisions.”
The departure of 22 September 1918
Swart left Atjeh in the early morning of 22 September 1918. De Atjehcourant reported:
“In the early morning of 22 September last, many went by car or special train to Oelèë Lheuë to witness the departure of the retiring Governor Swart, appointed Vice-President of the Council of the Netherlands Indies. At about a quarter to eight the retiring Governor arrived by car from Koeta Radja, accompanied by the acting Governor and the Provincial Military Commander. The band played the Wilhelmus. His Excellency and Mrs Swart passed along the various groups in the order named above and shook hands in farewell. Mrs Swart received flowers, after which the departing couple, accompanied by the committee of escort, took their places with the commander of H.M. Serdang in that vessel’s sloop and went aboard the s.s. Nias. As the sloop pulled away a threefold cheer rang out for a good voyage and for the welfare of the former Governor, while the crew of H.M. Serdang rendered the military salute from that ship.”
The paper added that each of the groups taking leave had its particular significance. The heads of the non-native population as well as the non-official European residents had always been able to count on the Governor’s co-operation; in their work and their business they had always been able to experience his interest. “Governor Swart was always ready to help. We speak from ten years’ experience; never did we come in vain for information; when we needed it for this paper or for the large dailies it was gladly furnished to us as fully as possible.”
Of the group of officials and officers, the paper wrote that it must have appeared from several recent speeches how Governor Swart valued all work performed in any part of the great goal he had set himself: the pacification of Atjeh. “The well-deserved tribute paid to him he always wished to share with the men who had stood by him in his efforts. The example of Governor Swart spurred officials and officers to scrupulous devotion to duty and great zeal, and by this he was able to secure everyone’s cooperation.”
“Here is the cool account of the departure of former Governor Swart; a report that gives you not the faintest idea of the significance of that farewell,” du Croo commented. “Who will … be able to render the feelings with which he shook the hand of those numerous Acehnese chiefs and notables over whom he had held authority for so long?”
Feenstra’s account
The fullest farewell notice was that of I. Feenstra in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant of 20 May 1919, though dated September 1918. Feenstra had been in Atjeh in those days of parting and had stood, as all did, in the reading room of the Atjehclub under the portraits of all the Atjeh generals:
“These oldest generals of Atjeh could hardly help looking grim; as guardians of the sovereignty of the Netherlands on a strip of sand between the sea and the unknown interior. What they handed over to one another was authority over narrow little coastal states. Sometimes only an apparent authority; sometimes only just confirmed with blood. The sea was blockaded, the land was blank on the topographical sketch map, the air was full of treachery and intrigue.”
“What later military governors could hand over to one another was already more. The little states without frontiers had been swept away, the petty tyrants cleared out, the sea was free of pirates and the mountains of the Oeloe were no longer unreachable. But there was still much shooting, stockades, cannon and barbed wire were still needed, and “keep your passes ready” was the first watchword the generals handed to one another.”
“But the rebellious peoples became bands, the bands with rifles became little troops with edged weapons, and, hunted between the hunger of the primeval forest and the marechaussee, the little troops became individuals — tough wild men who preferred the freedom of the well-hidden ladang (dry rice field) to the registered village pass. They too had to disappear. And they went, brave though they were as generals. They were laid low. Not because laying low is a sport of the Compenie, but because in this modern social pleasure garden, with all its straight little avenues and straight plots of legal paragraphs and regulations, no place is unfortunately reserved for a bit of gnarled, crooked-grown robber romance…”
“Atjeh acquired other champions and panglimas than the doomed klewang-swingers. They looked a good deal more sober than these and did not dance the tandak. There came surveyors and geologists, engineers for railways and irrigation works, commissioners and secretaries, inspectors and schoolmasters — yes, the last-named above all.”
“During a ten-year administration of Atjeh this general understood how not to act the general and to be exclusively governor. Slowly but surely the corps of administrative officials of Atjeh has been transformed. The lieutenants and captains who served as controleurs went back into the ranks and were replaced by civil officials; the majors who functioned as heads of divisions gave way to assistant residents. Military posts were abolished, little schools and village banks were founded. The change proceeded without shocks. People did sometimes grow uneasy. Certainly! Old Atjeh hands have little confidence and think conservatively. Wrongly so, as has appeared up to now.”
“It was in 1873 that the first general, Major-General Köhler, fell in the first Atjeh expedition. Now it is 1918 and the last general of Atjeh is going. Forty-five years, not yet half a century; it seems so short for the great work that has been done here, especially when one remembers that during the first few decades much had to be demolished in order to be able to build later. Forty-five years! The marble shields on the gate of Peutjoet are history and do not lie! That first general fell at Koeta Radja, by the missigit, a few hundred metres from his grave.”
“The last general now leaves Atjeh to the strains of the Wilhelmus; cheered on his way with an unmistakable warmth… What he left behind is a state building, small and new, but solid and well-timbered, in which his successor will now further arrange the furnishings to civil taste. There will not be much to rearrange. This last general already had a good civil taste.”
“So that now the last military governor can hand over to his successor, the first purely civil one, an Atjeh neatly dressed in the corset of civilisation. There is little colour and little flourish about that little suit — and in the end all countries and all peoples come to resemble one another like orphans from an institution, but so it has to be. The garment still sits somewhat awkwardly on Atjeh. Atjeh is also somewhat unwashed and uncombed and everything is still so new. But even now it looks very coquettish in its new suit and sways its hips like an inong (woman). That gracefulness will come in time.”
“It is a difficult errand, to bring the palm of peace to turbulent peoples. It is not enough to set it down in the drawing room with a compliment and never look at it again… Nor is it enough to pull down barracks and build little schools. Any schoolmaster wants that, and in the end any bricklayer can do it. But it is a great generalship to pull down those barracks that have become superfluous and to enlarge the spaces between them as tempers grow calmer… and the strategic motor roads better.”
Feenstra ended with a caution against the very title of pacificator: “General Swart has been called the pacifier of Atjeh. And certainly he was a pacifier, a bringer and bearer of peace and quiet. But the traveller who stood just now before the memorial gate of the fallen and now sits among the stern generals’ heads knows well that there was not one single pacifier. What does it matter which of the builders set the maypole in the roof of the building where peace and development were to dwell? … Is the much-mentioned pacification not merely a small part of the taut curve of progress, of the path we tread together and along which we ask in vain for height marks and milestones?”
His farewell wish was direct: “Governor Swart! With pride may You look back on the great work that you left behind You… Atjeh thanks You, thanks You from the bottom of its heart for all that You did for the welfare of land and people; Atjeh wishes You strength to take up Your new task cheerfully!”
The Nieuwe Courant correspondent
The Atjeh correspondent of the Nieuwe Courant wrote: “However much the departure of Mr Swart is to be regretted, it had to come one day. His administration lasted more than ten years, and it was from beginning to end a happy period for the sorely tried province. Better than elsewhere in the Outer Possessions, in many respects even better than in Java, the soil has in Atjeh been prepared for the scattering of the new seed. When this presently yields a rich harvest, when Atjeh shall be what the late Mr Van Deventer conceived to be its grand aim: a federation on the model of the Federated Malay States, to which attention was also carefully paid from Kotaradja as to neighbours from whom something good may be learned — when there shall have been made here not a precise copy but a very broadly conceived, even improved, elaboration of the same basic idea — then this will first and foremost be owing to General Swart.”
The same correspondent pointed to the care for education, the great success of the Hollandsch-Inlandsche schools and the native trade school in the former military encampment at Peuniti, and concluded: “All these are things of which a former generation could not even form a conception. It is the Spring, in which the swelling buds burst open with a force of growth no longer to be restrained; the awakening to new life of a portion of mankind that slept for centuries, gathering the latent strength which comes irresistibly to expression more and more. In the musty offices one does not see that — and that is the great danger.”
Significance
The handover of 2 September 1918 and the departure of 22 September closed forty-five years of military government in Atjeh, from the death of general Köhler at Koeta Radja in 1873 to the transfer of the province to a purely civil governor. It is the event with which du Croo’s book culminates and by which he defines the meaning of the title Pacificator van Atjeh.
See Also
- H. N. A. Swart
- Van Sluys
- Van Militair naar Civiel Bestuur
- I. Feenstra
- Oelèë Lheuë
- Koeta Radja
- Peutjoet
- Pacificatie van Atjeh
- The News-sheet for the Government of Atjeh and Dependencies
- 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 XVI, pp. 151–156.
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).