Oerip Kartodirdjo — published in the volume as mr. Oerip Kartodirdjo — was an Indonesian legal scholar who, in the early 1920s, served as secretary of the Leiden commission of professors that produced the Proeve-Oppenheim — a proeve van een staatsregeling voor Nederlandsch-Indië (draft state regulation for the Netherlands Indies). His name is recorded in Mr. Dr. Caron’s chapter De bestuursvormen in Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk (1946), which describes the Proeve as having been compiled by “a commission of professors in Leiden” to which, “besides Prof. Oppenheim, the professors Snouck Hurgronje, Van Vollenhoven, Carpentier Alting and Kleintjes contributed, while an Indonesian, mr. Oerip Kartodirdjo, acted as secretary.”
Significance
The naming of Kartodirdjo as secretary of the Proeve-Oppenheim commission is, in the context of Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk, the only explicit mention of an Indonesian contributor to the volume’s account of late-colonial constitutional thought. His role as secretary to a commission of senior Dutch professors working on a draft constitution for the Indies — in the early 1920s, before the transfer of sovereignty — places him at the intersection of Dutch colonial legal scholarship and the emerging Indonesian nationalist movement. The Proeve-Oppenheim itself was to exercise considerable influence on the Wet op de Indische Staatsregeling (Law on the Indies State Regulation) of 1925, though — as Caron notes — the final law fell short of the autonomous Indies government that the Proeve had envisaged.
For the Atjeh-focused reader, Kartodirdjo’s significance is indirect: the Proeve-Oppenheim commission on which he served was attempting to constitutionalise an Indies administrative order whose foundations, in the Atjeh-derived *korte verklaring* policy of Van Heutsz and Snouck Hurgronje, lay in the Atjeh War and its aftermath.
Dutch terms used in this article
- Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk — What the Indies Received and Gave
- Wereldbibliotheek N.V. — World Library Ltd.
- Nederlandsch-Indië — Netherlands Indies
- Proeve-Oppenheim — Oppenheim Draft
- proeve van een staatsregeling voor Nederlandsch-Indië — trial draft of a state regulation for the Netherlands Indies
- Wet op de Indische Staatsregeling — Law on the Indies State Regulation
- korte verklaring — Short Declaration
- bestuursvormen — forms of government
- pen — open/wide (Atjeh concept)
- Atjeh — Aceh
- Acheh — Aceh
- Mr. Dr. — Master of Laws and Doctor (Dutch academic titles)
- Dr. — Doctor
See Also
- Proeve-Oppenheim
- J. H. Carpentier Alting
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- Korte Verklaring
- Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz
- L. J. J. Caron
- Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk
Source
Wat Indië Ontving en Schonk, onder leiding van Dr. C. W. Wormser (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek N.V., 1946), p. 195 (chapter De bestuursvormen door Mr. Dr. L. J. J. Caron).