Mentawai-eilanden — the Mentawai Islands — are an archipelago off the western coast of Sumatra (south of the Atjeh sultanate proper) that figured in the Vermeulen-period colonial parliamentary debates as the standard counter-example to the Dutch government’s allegation that piracy from Atjeh had been a principal cause of the 1873 declaration of war.
The piracy counter-example
In the 1897 Tweede Kamer debate on credits for Nieuw Guinea, Van Kol (s.d.) cited the colonial report for 1897 itself to the effect that on the Mentawai-eilanden prahus were still being robbed and their crews murdered — and that even Straat Madoera was unsafe after sunset. The argument was that, if such conditions elsewhere did not provoke Dutch intervention, the allegation of Atjehese piracy could not justify the declaration of war on Atjeh of 1873: “Mogen wij dan voor datgene wat wij zelve niet kunnen tegengaan, een onafhankelijke vorst (de sultan van Atjeh) van de troon stoten en hem zijn land ontnemen?” — May we, for what we ourselves cannot suppress, depose an independent prince (the sultan of Atjeh) from his throne and take his land from him?
Significance
The Mentawai-eilanden are, in the Atjehnese-war parliamentary record, the type-specimen of the colonial government’s selective application of the anti-piracy justification. The comparison would recur in subsequent liberal and socialist critiques of the war’s official motivering.
See Also
- Atjeh-oorlog (1873-1904)
- Declaration of war against the Sultan of Atjeh (1873)
- H. B. van Kol
- Sumatra
- Acheh
- Straat Malakka
- 1873
- 1897
Source
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. 267-268.