Van Bosse’s Second Chamber statement of 17 January 1872 is the declaration made by the Dutch minister of Colonies, Van Bosse, in the Second Chamber of the States-General during the debate on the ratification of the Sumatra Treaty of 1871. It is the most explicit ministerial acknowledgement, recorded in the parliamentary Handelingen, that the protracted Anglo-Dutch conflict over Sumatra had arisen out of Article 3 of the Treaty of 17 March 1824, and that the conflict had been aggravated by the original Dutch mistake in accepting the Acheh reservation.
The Statement
Speaking on 17 January 1872, Van Bosse declared — as Van der Kemp’s text has it — that “it is article 3 of the treaty of 1824 that has given rise to the conflict. It is in this article that a provision is given from which England derived, and could derive, certain rights. And over the extent of those rights, and over the meaning of this article, conflict has repeatedly been carried on since 1824.” The statement is cited by Van der Kemp from the Handelingen Staten-Generaal 1871–72, page 219, and is offered as the ministerial confirmation, on the threshold of the Acheh expedition of 1873, of the diagnosis that his own article had laboured to establish from the documentary record.
Context
The statement was made in the debate on the ratification of the Sumatra Treaty of 1871, by which Britain had at last renounced all remonstrances against the extension of Dutch authority on Sumatra and had relinquished the Acheh reservation attached to the Treaty of 1824. The Sumatra Treaty had been negotiated in London by the ministers Gericke and Van Bosse; and a separate convention of the same year had transferred the Dutch possessions on the Cape of Guinea to Britain (see Dutch Gold Coast cession). The two treaties together were now presented to the States-General for ratification.
Van Bosse’s statement is, in effect, the ministerial commentary on the diplomatic history that Van der Kemp reconstructs in the body of his article. The conflict over Sumatra, the minister acknowledged, had flowed from Article 3 — the article by which the High Contracting Parties promised that no treaty henceforth made by either with any native state in the Eastern seas should contain any article tending, directly or by unequal duties, to exclude the commerce of the other party. From this article Britain had derived, and could derive, “certain rights” — namely the right to remonstrate against any Dutch extension on Sumatra that might be construed as impairing British commercial freedom. The Acheh reservation, by which Britain had bound the Netherlands to respect Achehnese independence, had served as the standing proof that Dutch supremacy over the whole island had not been recognised in 1824.
Significance
Van der Kemp introduces Van Bosse’s statement at the close of his discussion of the Article 6 controversy in order to fix the diagnosis at the moment of its official acceptance. “In this conflict,” Van der Kemp comments, “we stood weak, especially through the mistake about the admission of the Acheh provision into the London treaty of 1824; the manner in which that mistake was committed is too characteristic not to be set out at length in the end.” The Sumatra Treaty of 1871 was thus, in Van der Kemp’s reading, the formal unwinding of an error committed nearly half a century earlier; and Van Bosse’s statement is the ministerial acknowledgment of that error on the eve of the Acheh War.
See Also
- Sumatra Treaty of 1871
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Article 6 controversy
- Cape of Guinea cession (1871)
- E. de Waal
- Gericke
- Acheh
- Sumatra
- Acheh War
Source
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159-239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.