De Indische Tolk (The Indies Interpreter) was a Netherlands Indies newspaper from whose columns the retired colonel W. A. Coblijn, in his pamphlet Hoe Atjeh te onderwerpen (1893), repeatedly documented the contemporary state of the Atjeh-oorlog.
The citations in Hoe Atjeh te onderwerpen
Three issues of the newspaper were quoted by Coblijn:
- No. 167 of 6 December 1892 — in connection with the piecemeal attacks upon Kaloet: the Tolk related that the kampong was ringed by small schansen (field-works) and by a covered way of 150 metres leading to a second fortification, Patenoi, while the main work, Pageroet, lay 600 metres behind it; and it gave the dispositions of the troops — of the 15de bataljon infanterie three companies were sent to Edi under overste Ter Beek, and now the garrison battalion was being nibbled at to create the garrisons among others of Telok Samawé and Samalanga: faute de combattants (for want of fighters), as Coblijn put it, everything remained as of old.
- No. 175 of 31 January 1893 — a brief van Kota Radja (letter from Kota Radja), quoted by Coblijn for its account of the state of feeling in the capital and of the dangers that could follow from the policy then pursued: the correspondence treated the question whether the population, after twenty years of war, should longer be led by negotiation and concession, and warned of the consequences of further retardment of the settlement.
- No. 177 of 14 February 1893 — under the rubric De Indische pers (The Indies press): the writer remarked that, the same Minister and the same Governor-General still holding the authority, the Atjeh policy had once again been changed and a scheepvaartregeling (shipping regulation) had to replace the blockade — a change he attributed to the influence from without, because Penang suffered so much damage from the blockade through the standstill of the pepper export and the thwarted smuggling trade in opium and war material. In the writer’s opinion it would now be best to send at the same time a third expedition, because the enemy through the blockade was weakened and impoverished, and the princes of the coastal states, in the anticipation of the sale of their pepper stocks, were most set upon the Dutch friendship; once the scheepvaartregeling had worked for some time, he feared, those princes — as a consequence of the money received — would again be more inclined to act against the Dutch.
Significance
The Indische Tolk is significant in the documentary record of the Atjeh-oorlog as the press channel through which the course of the war and of the policy of the concentration was judged in the Indies itself — the newspaper whose sketches of the fortifications of Kaloet and whose advocacy of a third expedition supplied the pamphleteers of 1893, both Van Heutsz and Coblijn, with their facts and their adversaries.
See Also
- Hoe Atjeh te onderwerpen (Coblijn, 1893)
- Battle of Kaloet (1 October 1892)
- Scheepvaartregeling (1892)
- W. A. Coblijn
- Aceh War
- 1892
- 1893
Source
Hoe Atjeh te onderwerpen, door W. A. Coblijn, gepensionneerd Kolonel van het Oost-Indisch Leger (‘s-Gravenhage: De Gebroeders van Cleef, 1893), pp. 64, 87–88, 90–91, 113–114. OCR-filename: 20260716_140310_DLP-100-Hoe_Atjeh_te_onderwerpen_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.