Lampagar was a kampong in the western part of the VI Moekims of Groot-Atjeh, near the mountain pass of Blang Kala, in which a Dutch military post was established in January 1876 at the request of the kampong’s own population, and which became, in the night attack of 2-3 May 1876, the scene of one of the war’s most terrible post disasters.
The post
The population of the kampong submitted at the appearance of General Pel’s troops in January 1876 and — as a large part did not flee with women and children as elsewhere, or soon returned — was counted friendly and well disposed. Its heads asked the civil and military commander for a nearby Dutch post to protect them against murdering and roving evil men; the request suited the commander’s own design for the western VI Moekims, whose always pro-enemy western part included the desecrated grave of the Italian general Nino Bixio and the only quick overland route from the IV Moekims through the pass of Blang Kala.
The southernmost, somewhat elevated part of the kampong was designated for the emplacement; the post commander was instructed to cause the least possible damage to the submitted population. The coconut timber for the palisade had to be fetched from a point 800 to 900 metres away across a rawah (seasonally wet depression), a rule meant to spare the kampong’s own trees; and the slowness of the work, the seeming sincerity of the population, led each successive post commander to drop the urgency of the palisade. At the end of March the garrison still lay in an open camp: a square, roughly 40 by 35 metres, enclosed only by a live fence with abatis, the north side adjoining the kampong Lamtjoet.
The disaster and the fortification
The night attack of 2-3 May — planned by Panglima Moeda of Piëng of Rēdeb in the XXII Moekims — broke into that open camp, killed two officers and seven other people, and changed every calculation of friendliness and safety in the area. Under military direction the camp was then turned into a properly storm-proof work — the coconut palisade being cut in Lamtjoet itself, the kampong being punished by fire — and on 17 May 1876 the fortification of Lampagar was complete, garrisoned at first by 70 and later by 100 men, with a civil official for the district. The Dutch pass system required that life’s goods between the IV Moekims and Olehleh passed through the control of Pakan Badak, so that Lampagar’s daily sense of Dutch authority lay in the pasar arrangements and patrol times of the posts around it.
In the strong stone dam in the lagoon north of Lampagar — a large old Atjehnese work whose purpose the Dutch could never discover — provisions for the post were landed by sea and carried overland to the post; in the surrounding mountains the enemy hung on, as the raid on kampong Lamtengah of the night of 6–7 May and the reports of a 600-strong band of Hadji Aboe in August showed.
Description and geography
The terrain about Lampagar is marshy; only towards the mountains does it become dry. A few footpaths lead through the kampongs. The important Atjeh-era stone dam in the lagoon to the north of the kampong, maintained over a long period by the Atjehnese themselves, served the Dutch as a landing place for their provisioning by sea.
Significance
The post was, with Pakan Badak and Boekit Seboen, the western anchor of the Dutch defence line in the pacified zone, and the only post whose history embodied all the guerilla-year motifs: a friendly population, an open camp, a plotted surprise, a punished kampong, and a fortification built of its own coconut trees within two weeks.
See Also
- Night attack on Lampagar (2-3 May 1876)
- Hoynck van Papendrecht
- Schnelle
- Panglima Moeda of Piëng
- Hadji Soliman of Lampagar
- Blang Kala
- VI Moekims
- Guerilla warfare in Groot-Atjeh
Source
Atjeh van 26 December 1875 tot 4 September 1876, door H. F. Meijer (Breda: P. B. Nieuwenhuijs, 1883), chapters I (p. 32), IV (pp. 70–71, 75) and VII (pp. 166–179).