Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam

Aceh is a special territory (daerah istimewa) of Indonesia, located on the northern tip of Sumatra Island with the area of approximately 57,365.57 km square or 12.26 % of size of Sumatra Island. Its full name is Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam and Banda Aceh is the capital. Aceh is surrounded by Malacca Strait in the north, North Sumatra Province in the east, Indian Ocean in the south and the west.
The first Islamic Kingdom in Aceh was Perlak, established in 804. It is thought to have been in Aceh where Islam was first established in South East Asia. Under the reign of Sultan Iskandar Muda (1607-36), 


Aceh was the most wealthy, powerful and cultivated state in the region. During that time, Aceh dominated in trades and politics. With the death of Sultan Iskandar Thani in 1641, Aceh's decline began. The British and Dutch both started to vie for influence. In 1824 the London Treaty was signed, giving the Dutch control over all British possessions in Sumatra in return for a Dutch surrender of their establishments in India and an abrogation of all claims on Singapore. The Dutch fought a long drawn out struggle in their attempt to subdue the Acehnese. Aceh war against the Dutch from 1873 - 1942 was the longest and the most expensive (in money and human life victims) fought ever for the Dutch, costing them more than 10,000 lives.
Aceh has substantial natural resources, including oil and gas - some estimates put Aceh gas reserves as being the largest in the world. Relative to most of Indonesia, it is a religiously conservative area.




Aceh was the closest point of land to the epicenter of the massive 2004 Ocean Indian earthquake, which triggered a tsunami that devastated much of the western coast of the region, including part of the capital of Banda Aceh. 167,736 Indonesians, the overwhelming majority in Aceh, were killed or missing and 500,000 made homeless. This event helped trigger the peace agreement between the government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), mediated by former Finnish president Maarti Ahtisaari, with the signing of a MoU on August 15, 2005. With the assistance of the European Union through the Aceh monitoring mission 
of December 2005, the peace has held.

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