INDONESIA: Troubled Aceh celebrates student successes

Aceh, Indonesia's resource-rich province on the western tip of Sumatra and one of several Indonesian provinces beset in recent times by separatist conflict, has had cause to celebrate recently with successes among its overseas students.

All 27 Acehnese students sent abroad to university have graduated in 2010, two finishing summa cum laude as the top of their year groups.

For around three decades, the Aceh region of Sumatra was wracked by war between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), a separatist guerrilla group led from exile in Sweden, and the state in the form of the notorious Indonesian armed forces.

GAM declared a ceasefire after the December 2004 tsunami to allow aid to reach the area. A peace accord was signed with the government in August 2005, brokered by Finland.

One of the planks of the peace agreement was education. The Aceh Scholarships Commission was established to finance worthy students through university. The 2010 crop were the first beneficiaries of this.

One of the summa cum laude students was at Islam Antarbangsa University in Malaysia, studying Islamic finance - which in the context of Aceh having special dispensation to administer Islamic shari'a law is seen to be especially relevant to development - and the other at Flinders University in Australia studying curriculum development.

A spokesman for the commission told the media: "As 'syariah' law is being implemented in the province, Zulkarnainsyah's [the graduate of the Malaysian university] training will prove extremely valuable."

In the second case the student is an ex-high school teacher. He is expected to help establish four teacher-training and development centres in Aceh.

Terance Bigalke, director of education programmes at the East West Centre in Hawaii and an expert on higher education in Indonesia, said the leading state-funded institutions in Aceh had suffered major losses during the tsunami.

The State Islamic University lost around 10% of its faculty, in particular its most experienced members who lived in areas most badly hit by the tidal wave.

Aceh Governor Irwandi Yusuf said the province lost some 2,500 teachers and professors in the tsunami. Earlier this year he said the people lost had been replaced with new staff, but the need was for better quality.

A large number of teachers, for example, are sent to Malaysia for training. "We need several more years to cope with this," Yusuf said in June.

"Institutions needed to try to develop their faculty including sending them abroad for graduate studies and PhDs," Bigalke told University World News.

"Within Aceh there is not the capacity to train PhDs so they need to partner with institutions on Java, or their preference is to get graduate degrees from abroad as it is of higher prestige," said Bigalke, a former Ford Foundation programme officer in Indonesia.

Scholarship students are required to sign a commitment to the province. "Before leaving, the recipients were asked to sign a document to say they would return to help build Aceh," a commission spokesman told the media.

"For Indonesia generally and certainly for Aceh there is a strong tendency for those who study abroad to go back. There is a high desire to return and it is an excellent idea to return to the institution they were at before [going abroad]," Bigalke said.

He estimated that the various overseas scholarship programmes meant that replacement to pre-tsunami levels of university faculty had been or would soon be reached. "Now what you see happening is that the institutions [in Aceh] are trying to gear up to be able to expand access and part of that is achieved by providing more opportunities [for faculty] abroad."

Over the last few years "we have managed to send around 2,000 of the brightest young minds in Aceh to higher education institutes abroad including in Australia, Germany, Taiwan, Malaysia and Turkey", Yusuf told the Jakarta Post newspaper.

Currently some 500 Acehnese are studying abroad, according to Yusuf.