Aceh Darussalam

What 1511 sent north

Drafted from Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (1988)formation

When Albuquerque took Melaka in 1511 he took a customs house rather than a trade. The commerce that had passed through the city did not stop; it went somewhere else, and a good deal of it went north.

The northern tip of Sumatra was a cluster of small ports before that. Pasai was the important one — the sultanate that had converted Melaka's own ruler a century earlier — and around it lay a string of harbours on both coasts, none of them individually much. Ali Mughayat Syah had been consolidating them into a single sultanate since the 1490s, and the Portuguese then handed him a windfall he had done nothing to earn.

Every Muslim merchant who would not trade under a Portuguese flag needed somewhere else to unload. Aceh was on the right side of the strait, upwind of Melaka, and Muslim.

What arrived, and what did not

What moved north was Melaka's business: its merchant communities, its shipping, its Malay court culture, its scholars. Within a generation Aceh was doing what Melaka had done, in the same language, with many of the same families.

What did not move was Melaka's authority. Aceh's sultans traced their line to their own coast and never claimed to be continuing anybody else's; there was no inheritance, no assertion of descent from the Melakan house, no attempt to present the new sultanate as the old one restored. Taking a city's trade and claiming its throne are different acts, and Aceh only ever did the first.

The other half

Pasai went the other way — by force, and to the same beneficiary.

The Portuguese took Pasai in 1521. Ali Mughayat Syah drove them out of it three years later and absorbed the sultanate into the one he was assembling forty miles up the same coast. So Aceh was built out of two things: the commerce that fled Melaka, and the coastline of the older sultanate next door.

It is worth noticing what that combination produced. A polity assembled from a refugee trade and an annexed neighbour has no ancient claim to make and does not need one — and Aceh spent the next century behaving accordingly, taking what it could reach and justifying it afterwards.

Pepper

Drafted from Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (1988)expansion

Melaka had produced nothing and taxed everything that passed. Aceh, forty kilometres of water further north, did something Melaka never could: it grew the commodity itself.

The pepper vine had come to Sumatra from India and took to the northern coasts. By the later sixteenth century Aceh was one of the largest suppliers on earth of a spice Europe would pay almost anything for. The sultan claimed a monopoly over the pepper of the coasts he controlled — growers sold to the crown, the crown sold to the merchants, and the difference was the state's income.

What that changes about a state

A port that lives on tolls needs the strait to be busy. A port that lives on its own crop needs the countryside to be obedient, which is a different problem and produces a different kingdom.

So a sultanate whose fortune came from the sea spent most of its campaigns on land, working down its own coastline. Its wars were against the pepper ports of the west coast, against the ones on the east, and against whichever rival might take them — not against shipping, and rarely for control of the water. The map of Acehnese aggression is a map of where pepper grew.

It also meant Aceh could be squeezed in a way Melaka could not. Tolls are collected at a single point that an enemy must either hold or bypass. A monopoly on a crop has to be enforced across a whole coast, at every landing where a grower might sell to somebody else.

How it broke

Exactly there.

Once the European companies could buy from a pepper chief directly, upcountry, without calling at the capital, the monopoly became a claim rather than a mechanism. The crown's cut had never depended on owning the pepper; it depended on being the only buyer, and the moment it stopped being the only buyer the whole arrangement was a formality.

The chiefs who sold around the capital were the same uleebalang who would later hold the country against the Dutch for thirty years. The thing that undermined the sultanate's revenue was the thing that gave the country its staying power.

Istanbul

Drafted from Reid, Journal of Southeast Asian History (1969) · sourceexpansion

Some time around 1562 Aceh sent an embassy to the Ottoman court, nine thousand kilometres away, asking for help against the Portuguese.

The two states had never shared a frontier and had no dealings before or after. The request went the length of the Indian Ocean, across a subcontinent's worth of other people's politics, to a court that had barely heard of the petitioner's enemies in that quarter of the world — and it worked, partially.

What came back

Cannon arrived, with founders who could cast more and gunners who could work them. Acehnese artillery is attested in Portuguese accounts for the rest of the century, which is the practical test, because the people being shot at had no reason to exaggerate.

One of the guns was still standing at the entrance to the royal enclosure at Banda Aceh three centuries later. It was called lada sicupak — one measure of pepper — because that, according to the story Acehnese told about it, was all the tribute the ambassadors had left by the time they finally reached the Caliph.

For a sultanate not yet seventy years old, on the far edge of the Muslim world, the whole thing is a remarkable piece of diplomacy. Aceh identified the one power capable of matching Portuguese gunnery, reached it across an ocean it did not control, and came back with the technology and the men who understood it.

What Aceh became, and to whom

Whether Aceh also became an Ottoman vassal is a genuinely disputed question, and the dispute is more interesting than either answer.

The Turkish account — recorded much later — has the Acehnese making a formal act of submission into the hands of Sinan Pasha, recognising the sultan's authority as Caliph, raising the Ottoman flag in their ports and on their ships, declaring themselves vassals and asking for his protection in return. On that telling, the guns were what an overlord sends a dependant.

Acehnese tradition tells it differently again, and some versions move the whole episode to the reign of Iskandar Muda, two generations later, where it flatters a greater king.

Reid's caution is the part worth carrying away. The version that reads the mission as tribute rather than as alliance is late, and it may owe a good deal to 1873 — the year the Dutch declared war, and the year Aceh had the strongest possible motive to describe itself as a country under Turkish protection. A sixteenth-century embassy was being remembered by people who urgently needed it to have meant something specific.

What is not in dispute is the ordnance, the founders, and the gunners. Whatever the transaction was called at either end, it left Aceh with artillery and with a story about the Caliph's protection — and three hundred years later, with the Dutch fleet off the coast, it was the story the sultanate reached for first.

Iskandar Muda

Drafted from Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (1988)peak

Iskandar Muda reigned from 1607 to 1636, and his name means the young Alexander — the same Alexander the Melakan chronicle put at the head of its dynasty's genealogy, which is a small demonstration of how much of this region's political vocabulary Melaka had set.

He took the pepper coast on both sides of Sumatra, took Pahang and Kedah across the water, and moved populations wholesale from the ports he conquered to the land around his own capital. The army he built was centred there: war captives settled where he could call on them, an elephant corps, and the artillery. None of it depended on the territorial chiefs.

Two armies, and the second undid the first

Aceh has two military systems in its documented life, and that is worth stating plainly because the second was built specifically to undo the first.

Iskandar Muda's arrangement was a force held at the capital and recruited from people with no local attachment, precisely so that no uleebalang could withhold it from him. It worked for one reign. After 1641 the chiefs recovered their levies, the force at the capital decayed, and Acehnese military capacity for the next two centuries was whatever the territorial lords chose to raise.

It was that second system, not the first, that fought the Dutch for thirty years — and fought them far more effectively than a single royal army would have, for the reason that there was no longer anybody whose surrender could end the war.

The fleet that did not come back

Drafted from Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (1988)peak

Aceh had thrown itself at Portuguese Melaka repeatedly since the sixteenth century — half a dozen sieges and major expeditions across a hundred years, none of them successful, all of them survivable. Iskandar Muda's assault in 1629 was different only in scale: it was the largest fleet the sultanate ever put to sea, drawn from a treasury and a conscripted military system that had just spent two decades conquering the pepper ports on both coasts of the strait.

What was actually risked

The army Iskandar Muda sent against Melaka was the same one built to answer to nobody but him — war captives and levies with no local loyalty, held at the capital, backed by an artillery train and an elephant corps the territorial chiefs had no share in. Putting most of it into a single naval campaign against a fortified Portuguese city was a wager that this new, centrally held force could finish what six earlier Acehnese generations of besiegers, working through the old chief-levied armies, had never managed.

The defeat

The wager failed completely. Melaka's Portuguese garrison, reinforced in time, destroyed the Acehnese fleet in the roads outside the city. Aceh lost not just ships and soldiers but the specific instrument Iskandar Muda had spent his reign building — a force that existed only because it was kept concentrated and paid for out of the centre, and that could not simply be replaced the way a chief's own levy could be reconstituted from his own district after a defeat.

What stopped afterward

Aceh never again mounted an offensive campaign beyond its own coasts. The long rivalry with Melaka, later Portuguese and then Dutch, settled into something closer to a standing hostility than an active war — pepper, tribute claims and the occasional raid, but no second attempt at the city itself. Iskandar Muda spent his remaining seven years ruling the empire 1629 had already stopped growing, and it was his son-in-law, not he, who would preside over its first real contraction.

Four queens

Drafted from Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (1988)contraction

Iskandar Muda's son-in-law and successor died in 1641 without a son. The orangkaya — the merchant aristocracy that Iskandar Muda had spent thirty years suppressing, executing and taxing — put his widow on the throne.

Safiatuddin reigned thirty-four years. She was followed by three more women, and Aceh was ruled by queens without interruption from 1641 to 1699.

Aceh was not alone in this. Patani, across the peninsula, had four queens of its own across a hundred and four years, from 1584 to 1688 — beginning fifty-seven years before Safiatuddin — and for much the same reasons.

It was not a rule and it was not a principle. It was a mechanism. A queen could not lead an army in person, could not accumulate a personal following among the war captains, and depended on the merchants for revenue. The orangkaya had watched what an unrestrained sultan did to them, and chose rulers who structurally could not do it again, four times running, until the ulama produced a fatwa against female rule and the practice stopped.

Not a matriarchy

It is worth being exact about this, because fifty-eight unbroken years of women on the throne invites a conclusion it will not support.

Descent at Aceh ran through men. Every one of these queens held the throne as the widow or the daughter of a sultan, and the second, third and fourth were chosen by a council of merchants. Nothing was inherited through the female line, and nothing in Acehnese law or custom made women eligible as women.

The distinction matters because genuine matrilineal succession does exist not far away — in Ghana, where al-Bakri states the rule outright, in Makuria, and in Asante, where the matriclan defined who could rule at all. Those are constitutional arrangements. Aceh is a merchant class solving a political problem four times in a row, and it happens that the solution wore a woman's crown.

The century of the chiefs

Drafted from Reid, The Contest for North Sumatra: Atjeh, the Netherlands and Britain, 1858-1898 (1969) · sourcecontraction

Male rule came back to Aceh in 1699, under an Arab dynasty, and again in 1727 under a Bugis one. Neither restored anything. The eighteenth century is a sequence of succession disputes, coups and counter-coups that brought the sultanate's political fortunes to their lowest point.

What had happened between 1641 and 1699 turned out to be permanent. The sultanate survived as a symbol whose status every Acehnese acknowledged and whose effective authority stopped at the edge of the port. The imams, the uleebalang and the other officers of the state had become hereditary, secular, territorial chiefs, and they stayed that way.

In Aceh Besar they organised. Three federations of chiefs emerged, each known by the number of mukim — parishes — it contained: twenty-six on the right bank of the Aceh river, twenty-five on the left, twenty-two in the much larger upland district. The war-leaders chosen to head them became hereditary in their turn, and were paid a gratuity by each sultan at his installation, which is a precise measure of who was confirming whom. By the nineteenth century Acehnese spoke of "the twelve uleebalangs who appoint and dethrone princes".

No sultan after this period could command obedience. Concerted action required the agreement of the important chiefs — and yet none of them ever tried to take the throne. The affairs of the court and the harbour were not their affairs, and each side could ignore the other except in a crisis.

The pepper coast

Then, in the space of about fifteen years, two things changed the economics of the whole country.

The British had been trying since 1762 to establish themselves in Aceh, and were rebuffed every time — the Acehnese had not lost their distrust of a foreign military post on their soil. In 1786 the British gave up and settled on Penang instead, which put a free port and a hungry merchant community a few days' sail away.

At almost the same moment, about 1787, an Acehnese called Leubé Dapa, chief of Susoh, contracted to supply pepper to a merchant from the failing British settlement at Bengkulen. He planted the undeveloped west coast between Singkil and Meulaboh, drew a stream of immigrants down from the north coast, and succeeded beyond all proportion. The new colonies were producing five thousand tons of pepper by 1803. By the 1820s the figure had roughly doubled — something close to half the world's supply.

Almost none of it went to the East India Company. It went to the merchants of Salem and Boston: twenty-one American ships called on the new pepper coast in 1802, and Americans dominated the trade until the 1850s.

So the wealth of Aceh moved decisively out of the capital and onto coasts the sultan did not control, into the hands of chiefs dealing directly with foreigners who had no interest whatever in the old rule that outsiders traded only at Banda Aceh.

Jauhar al-Alam

Sultan Jauhar al-Alam Shah, who reigned from 1795 to 1823, understood the problem exactly and lost anyway.

He had served aboard an East India Company ship in his youth. He spoke good English, employed Europeans as his chief advisers, and tried to introduce western notions of government. His offer to Britain was straightforward: help me subdue my vassals, and I will channel the trade through my capital to Penang.

Penang refused, and not by accident. The merchants there disapproved of his European advisers and, far more importantly, opposed the whole idea of royal authority over the commerce of the coasts. Their prosperity depended on the fragmentation Jauhar was trying to end.

In 1813 a Penang tycoon called Sayyid Husain — a British subject, and a descendant of a discarded branch of the Acehnese royal house — spent enough money among the dissatisfied chiefs of Aceh Besar to have his own son proclaimed sultan as Saif al-Alam Shah. The coup would have been impossible without him.

The naval war between the two sultans then wrecked the trade it had been fought over, and the British intervened to end it. Raffles, against the settled opinion of Penang, backed the legitimate claimant, and a treaty was signed with Jauhar at Pidié on 22 April 1819: arms and money from the East India Company, the removal of his rival, and in exchange a defensive alliance in which Aceh would admit no European residents and make no foreign treaty without British consent.

Almost none of it happened. Saif al-Alam was chased out by a British gunboat in 1820; no British agent was ever appointed; the chiefs of the upland federation went on refusing to acknowledge Jauhar; and he died in December 1823 without ever having re-entered his own capital.

The article nobody in Aceh signed

Three months later, on 17 March 1824, Britain and the Netherlands settled their colonial quarrel in London. Britain handed over its Sumatran settlement at Bengkulen and took Malacca, and undertook by Article 9 that no British settlement would be formed on Sumatra and no treaty concluded there with any native prince, chief or state.

Aceh was not a party to it and was not consulted. But the practical effect was that the one European power with an interest in Acehnese independence had contracted itself out of Sumatra — and the one with an interest in ending that independence had been left the island.

Half a century later the Dutch declared war, and the country they invaded was the one this century had made: a sultanate that was a symbol, a coastline of hereditary chiefs with their own revenues and their own arms, and no single authority anywhere whose surrender could end anything.

Thirty years

Drafted from Reid, An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (2005)end

The Netherlands declared war on Aceh in March 1873.

The first expedition landed, was fought to a standstill, lost its commander killed, and re-embarked. That had not happened to a Dutch force in the archipelago in living memory. The second expedition, later the same year, took Banda Aceh and the palace, and discovered that it had taken a town.

What followed was the longest and most expensive war the Dutch fought in Indonesia. The sultanate's field capacity had been the uleebalang levies since 1641, which meant there was no single army to defeat and no single authority whose surrender ended anything; when the Dutch bought or broke one chief, the war continued under the next, and increasingly under the ulama rather than the chiefs at all. Sultan Muhammad Daud Syah surrendered in January 1903, thirty years and some tens of thousands of deaths after the palace fell.

The last one still fighting

Sultan Muhammad Daud Syah's surrender in 1903 is the latest ending of any sultanate in this part of the world by well over a century. Patani, the next most recent, went in 1786.

Only one other polity in the archipelago outlasted it, and the contrast is worth holding onto: Sulu, which signed its sovereignty away by document in 1915. Two endings in the twentieth century, in the same seas, a dozen years apart. One is a signature on a contract. The other is thirty years of war, some tens of thousands of dead, and a sultan who did not stop until there was nobody left to fight alongside him.

What came after

Drafted from (ed.), Verandah of Violence: The Background to the Aceh Problem (2006) · sourceafterlife

The sultan surrendered in 1903 and the fighting did not stop. The Dutch abolished the sultanate; the ulama who had taken over the war from the chiefs kept it going for another decade, and the last of the Tiro teungkus — the family of Teungku Chik di Tiro, who had led the resistance until his death in 1891 — were killed in battle years after the surrender that supposedly ended things.

That is the pattern for the whole century that follows. Every settlement of the Aceh question is agreed by somebody, and somebody else keeps fighting.

The chiefs are destroyed

The uleebalang had run the country since the 1600s and had been the real power since 1641. The Dutch governed through them, which was sensible and, in the end, fatal to them.

In 1939 the reformist ulama organised themselves as PUSA under Teungku Muhammad Daud Beureu'eh. In 1942 a PUSA-inspired revolt broke out just ahead of the Japanese invasion. When the Japanese surrendered in 1945 they left the uleebalang establishment in charge, and independence was proclaimed in Jakarta. Within a year a violent social revolution had ended the authority of the chiefs permanently, and the ulama held Aceh.

Three hundred years of hereditary territorial lordship, closed inside about twelve months.

The bargain, and what happened to it

Aceh went into the Indonesian republic on two understandings: that its contribution to the independence struggle entitled it to an equal stake, and that the new state would be founded on Islamic principles.

The contribution was real. PUSA sent soldiers to fight the Dutch around Medan, bought national bonds in 1946 and two aircraft in 1948, and when Dutch advances had overrun everything else, Aceh was the only stronghold the Republic had left — enough that the vice-premier ran his office out of Banda Aceh for five months in 1949, in case the negotiations in the Hague collapsed.

In December 1949 that vice-premier, at the request of Acehnese leaders, decreed a separate Province of Aceh. After sovereignty was transferred, Jakarta questioned whether the decree had been constitutional — it had been issued three days after the administration that made it was dissolved — and in August 1950 Aceh was folded into North Sumatra in a reorganisation that left the country with ten provinces.

The sense of betrayal was severe, and it was made worse by what followed: an influx of non-Acehnese workers and troops, the end of Aceh's special foreign exchange arrangement, and a budget that increasingly favoured Java over the outer islands.

In September 1953 Daud Beureu'eh rebelled, joining the Darul Islam revolt that had begun in West Java and aimed to turn the republic into an Islamic federation. The most senior religious figure in Aceh had spent the 1940s delivering the province to Indonesia and spent the 1950s in the mountains fighting it.

Jakarta restored the Province of Aceh in 1957, and on 26 May 1959 granted it Daerah Istimewa — special region status, with autonomy over religion, education and customary law. It was enough for most of the rebellion. Beureu'eh himself refused to come down until 1962, and by then had reduced his demand from an Islamic state of Indonesia to the application of Islamic law in Aceh.

Gas, and a second war

In 1971 Mobil found natural gas at Arun, near Lhokseumawe. Production began in 1977.

In December 1976 Hasan di Tiro declared the independence of Aceh with something like two hundred supporters. He was the great-grandson, in the maternal line, of the Teungku Chik di Tiro who had fought the Dutch, and he had been schooled at a madrasah run by Daud Beureu'eh. The claim he made was continuity: that Aceh had been a sovereign state, that the Dutch had taken it by force, and that the republic in Jakarta was simply the latest occupier — "the Javanese colonial government", in the movement's standard phrase.

The propaganda worked because it did not have to be invented. When students filled the streets of Banda Aceh in November 1999 demanding a referendum, they recited verses from the Hikayat Prang Sabil, the holy-war poem that had been sung against the Dutch a century earlier. Parents were teaching those verses to children in the displacement camps.

What followed was worse than what it echoed. Counter-insurgency from 1977; military operations from 1989 to 1998 under the status known as DOM; six thousand special forces troops in 1990; the fall of Suharto and a brief opening; a cessation-of-hostilities agreement in 2002 that collapsed within months; and in May 2003 a declared military emergency, with forty thousand troops still in the province a year later.

How it ended

On 26 December 2004 the earthquake and tsunami destroyed much of Banda Aceh and the west coast, and opened the province to foreign aid workers for the first time in decades.

Peace talks began in Helsinki in January 2005. At the second round in February GAM accepted self-government within Indonesia rather than independence, and the memorandum was signed on 15 August.

So Aceh is not an independent country and did not become one. It is a province of Indonesia with a degree of self-government that no other province has, including authority over Islamic law — the thing Daud Beureu'eh went to the mountains for in 1953, arrived at fifty years later by people who had been fighting for something else.

The autonomy law Megawati signed in 2001 gave the province a name to go with it. It is called Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam — the same name the sultanate carried, in the same words, five centuries after Ali Mughayat Syah assembled it and a century after the Dutch abolished it.