Aceh: the Line, and the Advice that Broke It

The Sumatra treaty of 1871 handed the Dutch a free hand on the island, and Aceh’s own contacts with the Ottoman caliph and with foreign powers were read in Batavia as a threat to the colonial position. In 1873 more than three thousand Dutch troops went ashore and were thrown back by Acehese fighters. General J.H.R. Köhler was killed. It was a national humiliation, and it set the next thirty years in motion: everything the colonial state did in Aceh after this it did partly to undo this.

The second expedition was better prepared and stronger, and it worked: Kotaraja was occupied. And it changed nothing that mattered. The sultan escaped, the resistance moved inland, and the Dutch found they had captured a capital in a war that did not run through capitals. This is the fact that governs the next twenty-five years. An occupying army had the one place it knew how to take, and the war was somewhere else.

Then twenty years of nothing working. Dutch garrisons stood in fortified posts, moved no further than the immediate surroundings of their own settlements, and were attacked by fighters who had mastered guerrilla warfare. The cost ran to millions of guilders a year. Casualties accumulated on both sides, and on the Dutch side disease did as much as fighting. The policy of the period, the systeem-Van der Heijden, was relatively passive and defensive: hold, and wait for the resistance to exhaust itself. It did not exhaust itself, because it was not held together by the things the policy assumed. It was held together by something the colonial administration could not see, because it did not have the vocabulary for it.

Snouck Hurgronje went to Aceh himself in 1891 and 1892: to Kotaraja, and from there inland. He spoke with Acehese leaders, with Dutch officers and administrators, with traders and scholars. He read the Arabic texts the ulama cited and knew the arguments they were making from the inside, and the reports he sent to Buitenzorg had a depth the colonial administration had never had. His conclusion was a taxonomy. The uleëbalangs, the traditional aristocracy, had material interests and could be bought: guarantee their property and their local authority and they would come over. The ulama could not, because their authority rested on knowledge of the law and on the conviction that the occupation of a Muslim country was an attack on the Muslim community as such, and that is not a negotiable interest. They could not be bought, co-opted or persuaded. They could be broken. This is not a phase of movement. It is the moment the colonial state was handed a vocabulary, and everything after it follows from it.

J.B. van Heutsz was appointed governor and military commander of Aceh in 1898, and the weight of the Dutch presence moved from defensive garrisons to offensive patrols driving inland: the resistance was no longer waited for, it was sought out. He and Snouck worked closely, the soldier and his intellectual adviser, and the strategy was the taxonomy made operational. The Short Declaration of 1899 was its legal instrument, a form of a few lines in which an uleëbalang acknowledged Dutch sovereignty and had his local authority recognised and protected in return. It split the Acehese elite in two and it isolated the ulama, who without the political cover of the nobles were more exposed and less able to mobilise. It was clever. Its price was paid by the people who would not follow the nobles who signed: villages that resisted were burned, and gampongs suspected of supporting the fighters were punished.

On 14 June 1904, on a plateau in the Gayo highlands far from the occupied coast, Dutch troops of Van Daalen’s Gayo and Alas expedition stormed the fortified kampung of Kuto Reh. The people had taken shelter inside it and they were in large part women, children and the elderly. When the firing stopped, Van Daalen’s own official reports counted nearly three hundred dead in this single action. Across the whole expedition of 1904, in a series of comparable attacks on fortified kampungs, more than two and a half thousand Acehese and Gayonese were killed. This map draws no Acehese formation here, because there was not one. Two blocks of chits facing each other across a plateau would be a lie about what happened, and a wargame vocabulary is not able to say what this was; the card has to say it instead. The news reached Snouck in Batavia through the reports that were routinely forwarded. He did not protest publicly. No letter of outrage survives in the archives. He was more distant from the campaign by then than he had been in the 1890s, but his silence was also a position.

The military problem was solved. Aceh was brought under colonial administration by a strategy that co-opted one half of a society and hunted the other, and the analysis that made it possible was the best scholarship anybody in the Dutch empire had produced about Islam. Cut Nyak Dhien ﵂ was betrayed by an exhausted companion, taken in 1905, and exiled in chains to Sumedang in West Java, where she died in 1908; her grave is a place of pilgrimage. Snouck stepped back to his study and to his books, and the reputation he left is a scholar of the first rank. Both of those things are true at once, and the theme exists because they are. This map is not a record of a Dutch campaign. It is a record of what a classification did after it left the desk.