The Aceh province -- and future plans

Indiana Daily Student reporter Rick Newkirk conducted several interviews with IU-Purdue University Indianapolis Director of the Center on Southeast Asia Dave Jones, who recently returned from a trip to Thailand and Indonesia.\n***\nDuring the first full week of January, Dave's colleague Patrick O'Meara received an honorary degree from Princess Sirindhorn of Thailand, and Dave visited a tiny, poor neighborhood in Bangkok. He departed Thailand Jan. 9 and spent the rest of the week in Indonesia, the country hit hardest by the tsunami.\n***\nThe Dec. 26 tsunami changed the world, both literally and figuratively. It left about 287,000 people dead or missing, according to recent reports by the affected countries' governments. Of those, Indonesia reported about 234,000 casualties -- 82 percent of the casualties. The fourth most populous country in the world, behind China, India and the United States, was the hardest-hit region by any natural disaster in recent memory.\nJones, who visited the country just two weeks after the tsunami, met with Indonesian university officials to discuss disaster relief. In one case, Jones said, he was the only non-Indonesian person in a meeting of the rectors, or presidents, of the universities in Indonesia.\n"The reports I heard were just chilling," he said as he described how an entire university, the Islamic State University of Ar-Raniry, had vanished in the tsunami.\nJones spent the majority of his time dealing with -- but not in -- Aceh province, located on the northwest tip of Sumatra Island in Indonesia. Aceh is the one piece of land in the world closest to the epicenter of the earthquake that spawned the tsunami. Nearly all Indonesian casualties were reported in the Aceh province, which is about half the size of Indiana.\nThe tsunami washed the most water over and wreaked the most havoc on Indonesia, but the social effects on the country were also unprecedented, Jones said. \n"Thailand was in a much better position to respond to this crisis than Indonesia was," he said. \nAceh province has been torn by separatist fighting for the better part of the past 30 years. In 1976, a group of rebels known as the Free Aceh Movement organized to fight for independence for the nation's "disadvantaged." Thousands have died from the fighting that ensued.\nThe region also is home to an enormous number of impoverished people. Jones said the area's poverty level contributed to Aceh's death toll in a way that most of the public is unaware of. When urban communities became overcrowded with Indonesia's poor, those citizens "encroached upon the waterfront," not only leaving more people closer to an imminent tidal wave but also deforesting the area's beaches, leaving those living inland more vulnerable to the tsunami.\nAnd Dec. 26, a province that couldn't catch a break caught a natural disaster that flooded it with even more turmoil.\n***\nDave has a plan for IU to help the tsunami victims\n***\n"The American people terribly overestimate the extent to which we extend our development funds," Jones said, adding that American financial response to the development of countries in unfortunate situations has been "terribly small" in the past.\nBut Jones has plans to use IU's non-monetary resources for the relief. The first facet of his plan would send a team of professors and community professionals from fields like trauma counseling and social work and from all eight IU campuses to the State University of Jakarta to train representatives from Indonesia's 16 state universities. Those representatives then would return to their communities to train Indonesian jobholders, including school teachers. \n"We would be training the trainers," Jones said. \nJones already has been in contact with IU faculty and says he hopes a team will be ready to depart for the region within the next month. A group also would stay behind to help people in Indonesia via a computer communications system Jones helped install in January.\nA second phase -- indefinite but under consideration -- would send students and professors to the region to work in the relief effort, doing jobs like reforesting Aceh's waterfront and building small homes that can double as artisan workshops. Jones said this part of the plan depends on government assistance such as grants, but he added that preliminary feedback was promising and the first wave of workers could be in Aceh by this summer.\n"The University is not in a position to rebuild a country," he said. "But what we do have is the expertise to bring planning and design and inspiration for these projects."\n***\nIn the days after Sept. 11, 2001, Americans received an outpouring of support from virtually every other nation on earth. During one speech, Dave had a message for his audience: "At this difficult time," he said, "we are all Indonesians."\n-- Contact Senior Writer Rick Newkirk at renewkir@indiana.edu.