Lho’ Kruet is a place on the West Coast of Acheh, remembered in The Achehnese for the severity and idiosyncrasy of its late chief, who applied the so-called “cow-buffalo” punishment to a wide range of offences — including, contrary to the spirit if not the letter of Achehnese adat, the offence of dina (adultery or fornication).
The Cow-Buffalo Punishment
Snouck Hurgronje, in his account of Achehnese criminal law, describes a form of adat punishment “now little in vogue” that was formerly resorted to in cases of ill-treatment of women. The offender was set upon a cow-buffalo and led about, followed by a hooting and jeering crowd. The essential feature of the punishment was public shame: the culprit, exposed to the derision of his neighbours, was made to suffer in honour rather than in body — a consideration which placed the penalty in the same category as the peulieh beusoe and other ordeals of public humiliation practised in various parts of the country.
In most places the punishment appears to have been reserved for the offence for which it was originally designed. The late chief of Lho’ Kruet, however, “used to apply this punishment to all sorts of other offences, not excluding dina.” The extension of the penalty to illicit intercourse was particularly striking, since dina was elsewhere dealt with under a more elaborate code that combined adat fines, the Mohammedan law of hadd, and (in some cases) the private vengeance of the injured husband.
The Uleebalang’s Arbitrary Authority
The episode at Lho’ Kruet is cited by Snouck Hurgronje as an instance of the wide arbitrary authority exercised by the uleebalangs of Acheh and its dependencies. As in other Mohammedan countries, the chiefs were at liberty to elaborate and inflict punishments of their own devising, sometimes with considerable ingenuity: the chief of Teunom, for example, was accustomed to cause adulterous lovers to be deprived of their virility by the objects of their passion, and to punish transgressors of the law of fasts by having them led about the country on all fours for some days, with rings in their noses like buffaloes, and forced to eat grass. The late chief of Lho’ Kruet’s liberal use of the cow-buffalo penalty belongs to the same category of personal and idiosyncratic jurisdictions.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.