Rutgers van Rozenburg — a Dutch liberal member of the Tweede Kamer in the Vermeulen period — is the parliamentary voice who, in the 1896 Atjeh debate, joined Cremer in calling for “een drastisch optreden in Atjeh om, ‘deze kanker’ te verwijderen” — drastic action in Atjeh to remove “this cancer” — and who, in the 1904 debate on the expedition of Van Daalen, formulated the most extreme defence of the conduct of the war.
The 1896 call for drastic action
In the 1896 Tweede Kamer debate following the defection of Toekoe Oemar, Rutgers van Rozenburg (lib.) joined Cremer (lib.) in calling for drastic action in Atjeh, “ook in het belang van onze financiën” — also in the interest of our finances. They asked the minister of Colonies not to “corresponderen over ‘het bestendigen der bestendiging’” — to correspond about “the perpetuation of the perpetuation” — and not to come with a request of ƒ 300,000 when perhaps ƒ 3,000,000 was needed. They would rather see the construction of railways and irrigation works on Java interrupted for a time than the colonial existence in Atjeh — and subsequently in the whole archipelago — put at risk.
The 1904 defence of Van Daalen
In the 1904 Tweede Kamer debate on the expedition of Van Daalen — in which, according to the official figures, 2,922 inlanders (including 1,149 women and children) had been killed “in weinige dagen” — Rutgers van Rozenburg (lib.) interpreted the casualty figures as “de enkele uitspattingen, die niet te voorkomen waren bij de onvermijdelijke tuchtiging van land en kampong” — the mere excesses that were not to be avoided in the inevitable castigation of land and kampong.
Rutgers van Rozenburg then went “zeer ver in hetgeen hij geoorloofd achtte jegens de Atjehers” — very far in what he considered permissible against the Atjehnese. His formulation, preserved at length by Vermeulen, is the most extreme parliamentary defence of Dutch atrocities in the Atjehnese-war record:
“Wanneer een officier, een hoofdofficier of zelfs de gouverneur-generaal, om aan de Atjehse priesters hun voornaamste wapen bij het prediken van de prang sabil (heilige oorlog) uit de hand te slaan, last geeft gesneuvelde Atjehers in tweeën te deelen, ten einde de overlevenden te doen inzien, dat zij met het vechten vóór hun priesters en tégen de kompanie nog niet zeker zijn van hun entree in de Turkse hemel, ja dan is het te betreuren … dat het daartoe komen moest, doch … dan is dit niet alleen verschoonbaar en misschien gewettigd, maar kan het door ‘s lands belang en nooddwang geboden, kan het zelfs plicht zijn”.
— When an officer, a chief-officer or even the governor-general, in order to knock out of the hands of the Atjehnese priests their principal weapon in preaching the prang sabil (holy war), orders slain Atjehnese to be cut in two, so that the survivors may understand that, by fighting for their priests and against the Company, they are not yet assured of entry into the Turkish heaven — yes, then it is to be regretted … that it had to come to that, but … then this is not only excusable and perhaps justified, but it may be commanded by the interest of the state and by necessity, it may even be duty.
Reception
There were, Vermeulen drily notes, “weinig kamerleden die Rutgers van Rozenburg of Lohman in dergelijke theorieën wilden volgen, hoezeer zij ook het betrekkelijke gelijk aan hun zijde hadden” — few chambermembers who wished to follow Rutgers van Rozenburg or Lohman in such theories, however much they might have a relative right on their side. The speech is the right-liberal counterpart to De Stuers’s Catholic denunciation of the same expedition.
On the borrowing question
In the 1905-period debate on whether extraordinary expenditure — railways, irrigation works, school-building, the Atjeh-oorlog — should be financed by borrowing, Rutgers van Rozenburg (lib.) held the inverse of his party-colleague Bool: if the Indies were to finance public works and wars with borrowed money, future generations might end up paying too dearly for the works made for them. He was thinking, in particular, of irrigation works that had turned out badly.
Account from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer (1897)
Rutgers van Rozenburg is quoted by H. van Kol in his speech of 16 November 1897 in the Atjeh debate for a phrase about the treatment of Acehnese dead.
In the passage catalogued at Atrocities in the Aceh War as alleged in the Tweede Kamer (1897), Van Kol asked rhetorically what it mattered “of men geneuvelde Atjehers in tweeën deelt om hun entrée in den Turkschen Hemel te bemoeielijken” — whether fallen Acehnese were divided in two in order to make difficult their entry into the Turkish heaven — attributing the words in parenthesis to Rutgers van Rozenburg.
The remark is placed immediately after Van Kol’s quotation of the Dutch boast about the effect of the repeating rifles and the snaphan setan, and immediately before his account of the killing of Toekoe Tjoet Machmoed Lam Tenzah. Van Kol adduced the three together as evidence of “de vreeselijke demoralisatie als gevolg der bloedstorting.”
The practice alluded to — the mutilation of the bodies of prang sabil fighters in the belief that a body divided would be denied paradise — was the subject of the exchange between Goeman Borgesius and the Minister Bergsma on 22 September 1896, quoted by Cremer on 17 November 1897, in which both the Netherlands and the Indies governments were said to be most strongly opposed to mutileeren and the Governor-General to have forbidden it in the strictest terms.
Account from Verstege’s Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk (1886)
Verstege cites Rutgers van Rozenburg as the most persistent parliamentary warner against the retreat. In the sitting of the Tweede Kamer of 16 November 1882 he told the Minister: “Zoo als die politiek van denkbeeldigen vrede wordt voortgezet … dan zal het nog te vergieten bloed komen voor rekening van den onverantwoordelijken Minister van Koloniën” (“If this policy of an imaginary peace is continued … the blood yet to be shed will come to the account of the irresponsible Minister of Colonies”). On 21 June 1883 he brought the worrying state of Atjeh into discussion; the government’s answer already betrayed the intention of a considerable shrinking of the occupied terrain, and the vigilant member was “the interpreter of many in the country” when he said that such a return would be a step of the most fatal nature, ruinous chiefly in its consequences, for the future of the whole of India. On 19 December 1884, declaring that the breaking down of what had been built at a cost of streams of blood and treasures was to the vexation of the nation, he asked with reason who the military specialists were, “the Dutch Moltkes”, whom the Minister here in the country had consulted on the concentration plan — and got only an evasive answer. Verstege borrows from him the deservedly sarcastic name for the concentration itself: the “vertrekking op groote schaal” (“retreat on a grand scale”).
See Also
- Atjeh-oorlog (1873-1904)
- Van Daalen’s Gajo-Alas-Batak expedition (1904)
- Toekoe Oemar’s defection (1896)
- J. T. Cremer
- Lohman (De Savornin Lohman)
- J. K. J. de Stuers
- Prang Sabil
- Batig Slot
- 1896
- 1904
Sources
Schets eener parlementaire geschiedenis van Nederland van 1849 tot 1901, by Mr W. J. van Welderen baron Rengers, 4th rev. ed., Vol. IV: Oost-Indië 1891-1918 by Dr W. H. Vermeulen (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955), pp. 270, 262, 277, 291.
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. 10–11, 79–80.
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. 66-67, 75-77, 81. OCR: DLP-158.