Gericke — in full Gericke van Herwijnen — was a Dutch colonial administrator who served as Minister of Colonies in the early 1870s and who is mentioned by Van der Kemp as the co-author, with Van Bosse, of a ministerial declaration of 21 November 1871 touching the right of the Netherlands to recruit military forces in the East Indian archipelago.
The Declaration of 21 November 1871
The declaration, recorded in the Bijblad Handelingen Staten-Generaal (Bijl. 71-72, bl. 915), was made in connection with the debates surrounding the Sumatra-tractaat of 2 November 1871, by which Great Britain at last renounced its long-standing remonstrances against the extension of Netherlands authority over Sumatra. Gericke and Van Bosse declared, in Van der Kemp’s paraphrase, that the assertion “that one could more easily recruit forces on one’s own territory than under a foreign flag” no longer had “any shadow of ground” (geen schijn van grond meer). Van der Kemp introduces the declaration during his discussion of the Cape of Guinea clause of the treaty of 1824, and confesses that the successor ministry’s volte-face on so plain a point has always been “an ever-recurring riddle” to him.
The Recruitment Question
The recruitment question was no mere theoretical dispute. The right to raise troops on Netherlands colonial soil — as against the alternative of recruiting under British or other foreign flags — had been treated by the original negotiators of 1824 as one of the substantive advantages of undisputed Dutch sovereignty over Sumatra. By 1871, however, the cabinet in which Gericke served was anxious to minimise the practical value of the Sumatra-tractaat’s benefits in order to deflect attention from the simultaneous surrender of the Cape of Guinea. The declaration of 21 November 1871, co-signed by Gericke, served that minimising purpose; Van der Kemp, reading it against the earlier correspondence of Falck and De Waal, considered it a piece of political revisionism unworthy of the colonial record.
Significance in Van der Kemp’s Argument
Gericke’s appearance in Van der Kemp’s article is brief but pointed. He represents, together with Van Bosse, the face of the post-Sumatra-tractaat colonial establishment against which the historian’s critical judgment is directed. The juxtaposition of the original 1824 conception of Netherlands sovereignty over Sumatra with the 1871 ministerial declaration exposes, for Van der Kemp, the long civic cost of treating treaties as “dead letters” until international pressure forces their resurrection.
Account from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer (1897)
Cremer, defending the origin of the Atjeh-oorlog in the Atjeh debate on 16 November 1897, cited “den Minister van Buitenlandsche zaken, den heer Gericke van Herwijnen” for the evidence of Acehnese approaches to foreign powers.
In the comité-generaal of 1874 — the secret session of the Tweede Kamer whose record was afterwards made public — Gericke van Herwijnen had said, of the attempts of Atjeh to place itself under the suzerainty of Turkey, of America and of France: “Ik heb de bewijzen hier voor mij liggen” — I have the proofs lying here before me. He added, according to Cremer, that the French envoy had made communications to him on the subject.
Cremer used the statement as one of three pillars of his defence, alongside the declaration annexed to the treaty of 1824 and the British government’s complaints of ships plundered near Atjeh, referring those who wished once more to consider the necessity of the Atjeh war to the published papers and to the debate conducted in comité-generaal in 1874 and later made public.
H. van Kol answered on 17 November that the pretext of foreign interference had been “een verfoeilijk kluchtspel,” that the official papers on the occasion of the war, kept carefully secret for eight years, were known to him also, and that according to Kuyper in the Handelingen of 1874–1875, p. 1305, a “zot” and a “monomaan” had by “de inblazingen van een leugenaar” — the promptings of a liar made the viceroy the dupe of a false alarm.
Account from Verstege’s Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk (1886)
Verstege quotes Gericke van Herwijnen’s own closing words in the secret Kamerzitting of 17 April 1874, when he was Minister of Foreign Affairs: “Wij hebben alle middelen uitgeput om tot een vergelijk te komen met Atjeh, maar komen tot de overtuiging, dat ons niets anders overbleef dan het bezigen van geweld. In plaats van den aangeboden olijftak verkozen zij het zwaard. Dat is de schuld van Atjeh, en niet de onze” (“We exhausted all means to come to a settlement with Atjeh, but came to the conviction that nothing remained to us but the use of force. Instead of the offered olive branch they chose the sword. That is Atjeh’s fault, and not ours”). “Die woorden onderschrijven wij geheel”, Verstege writes, “maar juist daarom ging het niet aan, om in 1874 na den eersten aanloop te blijven steken en de Atjehers steeds olijftakken te blijven aanbieden, die zij steeds met klewanghouwen bleven beantwoorden” (“Those words we subscribe entirely; but precisely for that reason it was not admissible, in 1874, after the first onset, to keep sticking and to keep offering the Atjehers olive branches, which they kept answering with klewang blows”) — the principle by which he judges both the “war of philanthropy” of that year and the afwachtende houding that followed it.
See Also
- Isaäc Dignus Fransen van de Putte
- Sumatra Treaty of 1871
- E. de Waal
- Anton Reinhard Falck
- Cape of Guinea
- P. H. van der Kemp
Sources
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.
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, pp. 48–49, 62–63.
Acknowledgement of sources. This article combines material from the publications cited above; the material newly added derives from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897) and Een strijd in Atjeh (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg for the Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 23 note. OCR: DLP-158.