T. Tjhi Toenong — also Teukoe Tjoet Moehamat, T. Tjhi Moehamat, and called by his party balang tjoet baroh — was the half-brother of T. Tjhi Bentara and the rival oeléëbalang of Keureutoe. While Tjhi Bentara was the oeléëbalang baroh (the new, the Dutch-appointed, sitting in the lower country), Tjhi Toenong was oeléëbalang Toenong — Toenong signifying that he held himself in the upper reaches, the free mountains, where he received his appointment from the pretendent-sultan with the tjap sikoereuëng (nine circles). He was, Zentgraff writes, the type of Atjehsche chief of that time, sympathetic and liked by the people, and his influence hung as a shadow over the authority of his half-brother.
The raids of 1902-1903
In June 1902 he overvalled a detachment of infantry of thirty men under v. Steijn Parvé; this cost the Dutch 8 dead and wounded, the attacker 14 dead. In August 1902 he did better. From spion reports he knew by which path a transport, under cover of twenty bajonets, would march from Simpang Olim; he laid an ambush in the high alang-alang beside the path near Meunasah Djeuro. There his men suddenly fell upon the troop with the klewang and shattered it completely. In the first onset 7 soldiers fell and the commander and 2 men were wounded. Three Native soldiers took to flight; a brave European soldier, Fortier, held the poor remnant together until lieutenant Van Gheel Gildemeester arrived with 40 men. The attackers had disappeared, taking five Dutch rifles.
The greatest blow T. Tjhi Toenong dealt the Dutch was in November 1903, when lieutenant Kok, with a patrol of forty-five bajonets from the keudé Sampoj Niët in two prauws with Atjehsche rowers, was to go up-river. Incautiously the next day’s objective had been spoken of the evening before, and the keudé knew of it; so T. Tjhi Toenong could set the scene of the drama. The troop was crossing the kall when at midnight a few shots were fired from the bank at the prauws; on this signal the Atjehsche rowers capsized the little boats and escaped by swimming. All the soldiers were thrown into the water, so that 42 rifles were lost; lieutenant Kok and 28 soldiers were drowned. The mass-grave of this patrol is on the Keureutoe-rivier.
Submission October 1904 and arrest March 1905
After Panglima Polim submitted in the second half of 1903, T. Tjhi Toenong knew that his hour too had come; on 5 October 1904 he submitted with his followers at Lho Seumawé. He was treated with clemency and allowed to live in Keureutoe. At first it seemed as though this stormy nature had come to rest at last; he had a son by Tjoet Meuthia and worked with his half-brother. But his fighting blood and his warlike wife could not break with the old comrades in the mountains, and gradually he began to drift. Or perhaps, Zentgraff notes, his half-brother’s faction made life difficult for him by intrigues. Who can say what was true and what was false in the accusations later brought against T. Tjhi Toenong, which led to his death and to the drama of the adelaarsjong?
The affair developed as follows. On 26 January 1905 a patrol under sergeant Vollaers, with sixteen bajonets, bivakked in the meunasa of Meurandeh Paja east of Lho Soekon. All security measures had been neglected; armed Atjehers were let inside the pagger on the pretext of selling fruit and chickens, and a couple were even allowed up the ladder to where the commander lay reading a book. Suddenly the signal was given; the whole troop was cut down with the klewang, the sergeant first. Of the seventeen soldiers sixteen were killed. After the Meurandeh Paja massacre the investigation pointed to T. Tjhi Toenong as one of the authors; he was arrested on 5 March 1905 at Lho Seumawé by lieutenant Van Vuuren.
Execution, 5 March 1905
He was condemned to death, and the sentence was to be the rope; but Van Daalen, then governor, found it improper that an Atjeher who had always been a brave fighter and commander should be hanged. He had a right to a more worthy death, and Van Daalen changed the sentence to death by the bullet. In the days before the execution T. Tjhi Toenong was still permitted to receive his wife. In the bitterness of those last days — he had not in a dozen fights been granted the crown of the sjahid — his hatred flared up again. He made Tjoet Meuthia, then pregnant, swear that she would bring up their son, then about five, in hatred of the kaphé, and that after his execution she would marry Pang Nanggroë. This she swore to him, and he knew that a woman of her character would keep that oath. In that certainty T. Tjhi Toenong walked in the early morning to the sea-beach at Lho Seumawé, where he was placed before the firing-squad. He died as a man, and he will have had the conviction that the Prophet would grant him the blessings of paradise, as to all who walk his way.
Significance
His execution set off the long drama of his son T. Radja Sabi, *l’Aiglon* and of Tjoet Meuthia and Pang Nanggroë — fourteen years of forest war in the mountains of Keureutoe. He was buried on the strand of Lho Seumawé; his grave, and that of T. di Boeah, one of his panglima’s, is one of the monuments of the war.
Exclusion from the succession
Against T. Tjoet Moehamat — described by du Croo as “a strong, fanatical Acehnese figure” — administrative errors were committed in 1899 which excluded him from the succession; such things, du Croo remarked, happened more often in those days. His half-brother became oelèëbalang instead.
The half-brother was married to the beautiful and fierce Acehnese Tjoet Meutia (“the pearl”), daughter of an irreconcilable resistance leader. The marriage was repugnant to her; the weak half-brother was no man for such a woman, so that she provoked the formula of repudiation and shortly afterwards married Tjoet Moehamat, “a man after her own heart.”
Resistance leader
Thus T. Tjoet Moehamat became a resistance leader with Tjoet Meutia beside him. He was the man of her heart and therefore a dangerous adversary for the Kompeuni, so that the sultan at once granted him an appointment as genuine oelèëbalang of Keureutòë and provided that appointment with the seal of the nine circles. T. Tjoet Moehamat became T. Tjhi’ Toenòng — of the upper districts — and the “false” chief below, the zetbaas of the Kompeuni (“the Company (the Dutch power)”), became of no further significance to the population. What the half-brother arranged, the upland man disarranged again.
At the same time he dealt out blows to the Kompeuni:
- In June 1902 a surprise attack on a detachment under Steijn Parvé: eight dead and wounded.
- In August 1902 an ambush against a transport at Meunasah Djeuro: dead and three wounded, five rifles lost.
- In November 1903 the operation against the 2e luitenant De Kok with forty-five men, who was to row up the river from the keudé Sampoj Niët in two prauws with Acehnese rowers, but who had spoken of his plans beforehand. At night a few shots suddenly fell; in the pitch dark the rowers capsized the prauws and swam to the bank; all the soldiers went into the water; the officer and twenty-eight men drowned and forty-two rifles were lost.
Submission, arrest and execution
That was the great time. But when the tide turned, when the Kompeuni (“the Company (the Dutch power)”) struck back hard and accurately, and when even a great resistance leader such as Panglima Pòlém gave up the struggle, T. Tjhi’ Toenòng also submitted. He again lived in the same gampong as his half-brother and worked together with him.
What precisely happened around T. Tjhi’ Toenòng thereafter remained obscure. On 26 January 1905 — at a time when H. N. A. Swart still governed at Lho’ Seumawè — the patrol of sergeant Vollaers, seventeen men, was surprised in the meunasah of Meurandéh Paja, east of Lho’ Soekon, where it had neglected all security measures and bivouacked carelessly. Sixteen men were killed; only one native fusilier escaped.
Swart considered it necessary to have T. Tjhi’ Toenòng arrested. The arrest and the investigation took place, but in the meantime Swart was transferred, Van Daalen became Governor, and Van Daalen changed the sentence of banishment pronounced upon T. Tjhi’ into the death penalty — although many were convinced that T. Tjhi’ was innocent and a victim of “the eternal, mutually entangled Acehnese intrigues.”
Aftermath
His pregnant wife and his little son were now the actual claimants to the oelèëbalangschap of Keureutòë, which the population also accepted; they turned against T. Tjhi’ Béntara, the half-brother, whom they suspected of or knew to be party to the intrigue, and who had temporarily to step down in view of popular indignation.
Tjoet Meutia was delivered shortly afterwards; the child died; and after forty-four days — forty-four being the good number par excellence — she married, and it was said at the wish of T. Tjhi’ Toenòng, a well-known resistance leader, Pang Nanggròë, who formed a band around her and around the child T. Radja Sabi.
Significance (du Croo, 1943)
The case of T. Tjhi’ Toenòng is du Croo’s chief illustration of the human cost of Dutch administrative error and of the harshness of the Van Daalen governorship. His exclusion from a succession that was his by right created a resistance leader; his execution created, in his widow and his infant son, the nucleus of the band that would keep Keureutòë in arms for years and produce the drama of T. Radja Sabi, the wandering child who did not submit until 13 March 1919 and did not become oelèëbalang of Keureutòë until 1937.
See Also
- T. Tjhi Bentara
- Tjoet Meuthia
- T. Radja Sabi
- Pang Nanggroë
- Execution of T. Tjhi Toenong (1905)
- Simpang Olim klewangaanval (1902)
- Meurandeh Paja massacre (1905)
- Van Daalen
- Panglima Polim
- Keureutoe
- Lho Seumawé
- Lho Soekon
- Simpang Olim
- Sjahid
- Kaphé
- 1902
- 1903
- 1904
- 1905
- Aceh War
- Tjoet Meutia
- Gotfried Coenraad Ernst van Daalen
- H. N. A. Swart
- Meurandéh Paja
Source
Atjeh, door H.C. Zentgraff. Gedrukt bij Drukkerij “De Unie”, 1938, Batavia. OCR-filename: 20260709_002148_DLP-81-Atjeh_OCR.txt.
Generaal Swart, Pacificator van Atjeh (“General Swart, Pacifier of Atjeh”), by M. H. du Croo, Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with the collaboration of H. J. Schmidt, Titular Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with a foreword by His Excellency Lieutenant-General K.N.I.L. (retired) G. K. Dijkstra (Maastricht: N.V. Leiter-Nypels, 1943), Chapter X, pp. 94–95.