The Age [Melbourne]
Friday, November 21, 2003

By Matthew Moore, Indonesia Correspondent

Banda Aceh - Six months after more than 600 of Aceh's schools were destroyed by fire, virtually none have been rebuilt and thousands of students can't go to school.

And some temporary schools built after the fires are in such poor condition that enough rainwater leaks through holes in the roof to allow grass to grow on the dirt floor.

One such case, the SDN Blang Bladeh School Jumpa District in Bireuen regency, was visited by The Age.

This rough-sawn timber school, built by the army in the weeks after the main school was burnt, has a corrugated iron roof made of sheeting burnt in the fires. The department of education in the province, which has been under martial law since May, reports that so far only 22 schools have been rebuilt, but even these figures seem doubtful.

A United Nations-funded organisation called the People's Solidarity Movement Against Corruption (SORAK) said the Government had last month released a list of 10 schools in West Aceh it claimed had been 100 per cent rebuilt.

The group's co-ordinator, Akhirudding Mahjuddin, said: "In fact, when we checked three of the schools there, work had not begun on any of them."

A spokesman for the department of education, Edi Mulya, said that more than 260 schools were operating in temporary accommodation and all would be rebuilt by next year.

When The Age visited schools in Bireuen regency, one of the worst-affected areas, there was no evidence of any rebuilding work under way.

Locals said they were unaware of any work done on any of the 139 schools burnt. Some schools had moved to local mosques, tents or other temporary accommodation provided by the army.

Zulfikar Mohammad, a member of the student executive at the University Malikussaleh in Lhokseumawe, near Bireuen, said that while schools in the towns were still able to operate, many in outlying villages were not functioning and a generation of children was missing out on an education.

In some cases village schools had been moved to temporary premises but there was no transport for children to travel to them, he said.

Under the special autonomy law that now applies to Aceh province, education is supposed to receive a guaranteed 30 per cent share of a large slice of profit from the rich Exxon-owned gas fields in Aceh - about $A50 million each year.

But Mr Akhirudding said corruption was endemic in the education department and funds routinely went missing for all sorts of projects. It would not be unusual if the same thing happened to the rebuilding project.

Although the military accused GAM separatists of burning 604 schools in the first days of martial law, many Acehnese are sceptical that so many schools could have been burnt by GAM when there were so many troops and police in the province.

Gazali Abdullah, the guard at the temporary building at the SDN Blang Bladeh School in Bireuen, gave the standard reply when asked who he thought had torched his school. "Persons unknown," he said.