Manna from heaven might be on the way for Syria’s cash-strapped overseas university
students.
Asharq Alawsat, Saudi Arabia’s newspaper of records, today
quotes authoritative sources as saying the Ministry of Higher Education envisages
mandating its Cultural Missions in world capitals “to include Syrian male and
female students in the categories they serve.”
The Saudi Arabian Cultural Missions (SACM)
would accordingly bear the Syrian students’ “tuition fees in the academic
institutions in which they are enrolled.”
The sources said the plan is under study and will be announced “after
implementation procedures are finalized later on because of the large number of
Saudi Cultural Missions around the world.”
Asharq Alawsat also quotes Dr. Abdulaziz al-Tuwaijri,
Secretary General of the Rabat-based Islamic Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization (ISESCO), as saying half-a-million Syrian students are
now deprived of education because of the bombing and shelling of schools and
universities by regime forces.
In Britain last month, nearly
50,000 people signed an online petition urging the government to give more
support to the hundreds of Syrian students studying there.
The
Guardian said the government has written
to British universities urging them to do all they can to assist Syrian
students, hundreds of who are struggling to cope with reduced or even vanished
funding from their home country.
Vince Cable, the
business secretary, whose department administers higher education, has written
a joint letter with the universities minister, David Willets, to Universities
UK (UUK), requesting that its vice-chancellor members help Syrian students by
deferring fees and providing access to hardship funds.
The letter sent says
the 670 or so Syrian students in Britain should be reassured the government and
universities "are doing all they reasonably can to help them and make them
aware of the support available".
Cable and Willetts say
the government is working with the higher education sector, the National Union
of Students and Avaaz to identify who most needs help.
Avaaz, the civic
activism group that promotes "people-powered politics,” is calling for the
Foreign Office to directly assist the Syrians in the way it did with Libyan
students in 2011 during the uprising against Gaddafi.
At that time the
foreign secretary, William Hague, ensured funding was resumed via the National
Transitional Council (NTC), the interim authority that replaced Gaddafi. An
Avaaz online petition on the issue attracted nearly 50,000 signatures.
The government argues
the situation with Syria is different, in that while it recognizes the
political opposition and has cut ties with the government of Bashar al-Assad,
the rebels are not close to being a government in waiting, as was the case with
the NTC.
