Insulinde was a Dutch colonial periodical in which J. B. van Heutsz, then an assistant-resident, published a review of H. van Kol’s brochure Land en Volk van Java criticising its estimate of the cost of the Atjeh-oorlog.
The criticism
Van Kol reported the exchange to the Tweede Kamer on 16 November 1897. Having stated in his brochure that the extra expenditure caused by the war amounted to three hundred and fifty million guilders over twenty-five years, “doch in eene kritiek in Insulinde merkte de heer van Heutz, Assistent-Resident, op, dat men alle extra uitgaven van het Civiel Bestuur, verlofsgelden en recherchevaartuigen, reis- en verblijfkosten en een deel der pensioenen enz. enz. er bij moet tellen.” — but in a criticism in Insulinde Mr. Van Heutsz, Assistant Resident, observed that one must add all the extra expenditure of the Civil Administration, leave allowances and search vessels, travel and subsistence costs and a part of the pensions.
Van Kol accepted the correction as tending in his own direction: others, he noted, had thereby arrived at an outlay of seven to eight hundred million, and the Java Bode of 13 April 1897 at a thousand million guilders and a hundred thousand human lives.
Significance
The exchange is of interest because it places the future conqueror of Atjeh and the war’s most prominent parliamentary opponent on the same side of a question of fact: both agreed that the official accounts understated the true cost of the war, and that neither the Ministry of Colonies nor the Indies administration could state it precisely — a point the Minister Bergsma had himself conceded five months before the debate.
See Also
- Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz
- H. van Kol
- Land en Volk van Java
- Java Bode
- Mr. J. H. Bergsma
- Atjeh debate in the Tweede Kamer (16-17 November 1897)
- 1897
Source
Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer: Debatten bij de behandeling der begrooting van Nederlandsch-Indië voor 1898, uitgave van de Sociaaldemokratische Arbeiderspartij in Nederland (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Br P95-178, p. 10.
Acknowledgement of sources. The material in this article derives from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer: Debatten bij de behandeling der begrooting van Nederlandsch-Indië voor 1898 (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.