Toeankoe Mohamad Daoed was the last dynastic candidate whom the Atjehnese publicly recognised as their Sultan during the Atjeh war. Verstege records that in August 1884 he was declared of age at Kemala, and that the Atjehnese afterwards regarded him as their lawful Sultan — a fact which Verstege adduced to show that any thought of retreating with honour by handing the land over to a pretender had become impossible: approaching him or another pretender now would only draw from every Atjeher the answer that the Dutch had nothing more to give than a paper crown, “the true crown Allah has already caused us to regain”.
The earlier riposta of 1875
To the same candidate the offers of Habib Abdoerrachman el Zahir ten years earlier related: on 20 May 1875, at the residence of the Lieutenant-Governor of Penang and in his presence, the Dutch agent for Atjehsche affairs, Mr. Lavino, met the Habib, who declared himself ready to go to Groot-Atjeh to try to obtain from the chiefs a mandate to negotiate; the foundations of those negotiations were to be the elevation of Toeankoe Daoed to Sultan and the appointment of the Habib as regent — an offer that the Indian government put aside entirely, “omdat de aard onzer vestiging in Atjeh, waardoor wij treffen in plaats van het vorstelijk inlandsch bestuur, niet vereenigbaar was met een nieuw Sultanaat” (“because the nature of our establishment in Atjeh, whereby we step into the place of the princely native government, was not compatible with a new Sultanate”), as Verstege quoted after Kielstra’s lecture in the Indisch Genootschap of December 1883. The general van Swieten’s annexation proclamation of 12 February 1874 had, in Verstege’s commentary, thereby already made an easy solution impossible.
See Also
- Annexation proclamation of Atjeh (1874)
- Herstel van het sultanaat
- Habib Abdoerrachman el Zahir
- Lavino
- Kemala
- 1884
Source
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 97-98. OCR-filename: 20260801_235605_DLP-158-Een_beroep_op_het_Nederlandsche_volk_in_zake_het_Atjeh_vraagstuk_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.