Stories from Deli

Pram and Pelzer on the Millions of Deli (1902)

Pramoedya Ananta Tour in Jejak Langkah (Footsteps), 1985 wrote:

… I learned in Millions from Deli, a story written by the Dutch lawyer J. van der Brand who had worked in East Sumatra.

Brand had exposed the exploitative practices of the tobacco plantations in Sumatra. I don’t know whether he was just a good European and Christian or whether he was influenced by the thinking of the Ethical Policy being propagated by the Radicals. The Dutch government felt obliged to send an investigator, Judge J.L.T. Rhemrev, to check on the veracity of Brand’s allegations. The results of Rhemrev’s report- the tobacco plantation workers’ plight was even worse than Brand had reported. Perhaps that was why the results of his investigation were never published. The minister for colonies, J. T. Cremer, a former manager of the Deli Corporation, could only say that when he was in Sumatra, there were no such practices. He said he thought that the hot tropical weather seemed to affect the morals of some Europeans who lived there. How easy it was for Cremer to look for excuses-as if the weather had changed since he’d been there.

The Native rulers of Sumatra had sold off their people’s land to the tobacco plantations. They had overturned and subverted their traditional law lo give up the people’s rights over their ancestral lands. Over the last thirty years, thousands of acres had been sold off by greedy sultans to the tobacco capitalists, and also to the sugar plantations. I recalled the reports in the Sumatra Post of the cruelty of the European plantation owners, who never ceased in their search for fertile land …

Pram’s note was undoubtedly influenced by Karl Pelzer’s book Planter and Peasant (1978)

In 1902 the Netherlands public was deeply shocked by the account of Attorney J. van den Brand of the atrocious treatment of laborers on many plantations. The author was a lawyer practicing in Medan. The charges were so serious and the author so respected that it was impossible for the central government to ignore them. An investigator, Judge J. L. T. Rhemrev, was sent to East Sumatra to investigate Attorney van den Brand’s charges. Judge Rhemrev’s report confirmed van den Brand’s accusations. To the best of my knowledge, however, the report was never released, nor has any scholar been given access to it. My own interpretation for this is that the report would have been even more shocking than van den Brand’s book.

The (former) Minister of Colonies, J. T. Kremer of the Deli Company, had to answer the questions, for which he was indeed qualified, as he had held a leading position in Medan until 1883. As his answer shows, he was in an extremely embarrassing situation. Kremer maintained that during Kremer’s own residence in Medan, van den Brand would not have had grounds to accuse the planters the way he did in 1902. Kremer’s rather lame explanation was that the tropical climate must have caused a moral breakdown after his departure. One could ask whether’ the climate had changed after J. T. Kremer’s return to the Netherlands.

The immediate outcome of van de Brand’s charges and their verification by Judge J. L. T. Rhemrev was the establishment of the Labor Inspection Service of the Outer Provinces, charged with the task of making certain that the planters would not abuse their laborers but would provide them with all the facilities called for by law. It was obviously in the financial interest of the planters that an indentured laborer did not return to the country of his origin, but renew his contract. The usual reason for renewal of the contract was the loss of the worker’s savings during a carnival organized by the company at the end of the agricultural year. The Netherlands Indies Government had repeatedly attempted to abolish the indentured labor system but was opposed strongly by the planters, especially the tobacco planters.

It was, finally, the United States Senate that defeated the tobacco planters on this issue. In 1931 the Senate wrote a new tariff law banning the importation of products that had been produced by convict labor. The Blaine Amendment widened the ban by outlawing the importation of agricultural commodities produced by indentured labor, if they competed with domestic products. This affected Sumatran wrapper tobacco but, hypocritically, not such commodities as rubber, palm oil, sisal, or tea, as these did not compete with American products. Confronted by this unexpected barrier, the Deli Planters Association abolished the indentured labor system and penal sanction on all affiliated tobacco estates