Submitted for publication by local Aceh NGO

November, 2003

In conditions like these, it’s natural that children like Admi can’t hope of continuing their schooling, as the charges involved are impossible to pay.

According to Admi, at the moment in his village in Titeu Keumala district, Pidie region, there are no longer any adult males. Now there are only women and children. Even teenagers who have reached Junior High School age are no longer to be found in the village.

When asked if he wasn’t sad to leave his mother and young sisters behind in the village, Admi smiled bitterly. “It had to be done, didn’t it? It would have been bad to leave the house (unoccupied) too – I was afraid it would be burnt or looted. What’s more, we can’t all go to Banda Acheh because we don’t have the money to pay for rent and food,” he explained.

“How do your mother and sisters pay their way in the village?”

“Mum works in the ricefields. Sometimes Dad comes with money for Mum and my sisters. They eat what there is to be got in the village,” said Adri, as though he couldn’t explain further.

“Of your sisters in the village, how many are at school?”

“None of them go to school any more. The school is gone, it was burnt down. Even if there was a school, we don’t have the money,” he explained slowly.

“Who burnt the schools in the village?”

“We can’t say – if we said, we’d be taken away. What’s important is that we know,” he responded diplomatically.

More than 600 school buildings have been burnt since the coming into force of the military emergency in Acheh. And whenever they are asked for eyewitness testimony by journalists, the local residents of affected areas give ‘diplomatic’ responses. But the substance of their answers is varied. There are those whose testimony agrees with the TV and newspaper reports, that the perpetrators were an armed group dressed as ninjas, but there are also other accounts that raise question marks and riddles.

For example, there’s the testimony of another student from Pidei region who we met in Banda Aceh.

”It began with soldiers coming into the village. They built a post there. Then, after maybe a month someone on a motorbike drove through the village several times. About a week after that an office was burnt. But I don’t know what office it was.”

”Who was the motorcycle rider?”

“We know, if someone rides a motorbike with a red BL number plate, we know who it is,” he said.

“Then, after that. . .”

“Yeah, so after that, early on a Monday morning I went to school, and saw that the school had been burnt. There was nothing left but ruins and ashes.”

Since then, the student hasn’t been at school, and has fled to Banda Aceh, like Admi. He had only had the opportunity to sit in class up to Junior High School Class 3, and had nearly completed his mandatory 9-year study program.