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KIDNAPPERS
In the aftermath of Gulf War II, Iraqi universities face violence and emigration.
| Sophie Diesselhorst (BERLIN). “The Iraqi education system used to be one of the best in the region”, according to the Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004, recently published by the United Nations Development Programme. Used to be. Before two major conflicts with the restrictive Saddam regime came along and destroyed a good part of it. Today, the degree of illiteracy among 15- to 24-year old Iraqis is significantly higher than that of 25-34 year olds, the report further states. Nevertheless, universities are crowded — and they can’t cope with the mass of students. The main reason for this is that infrastructure is virtually non-existent. 85% of the universities’ infrastructure was destroyed in the early months of 2003 as the US-British coalition fought for control over the country, according to Idris Salih, Iraq’s deputy minister for higher education.
Iraq, Basra University Central Library: Sciences reading room (looted). Source: IFLANET
In order to reconstruct the Iraqi higher education system after the second gulf war, USAid organised a 20 million dollar strategy. It was based on the cooperation of US and other foreign universities with Iraqi colleges. But it has not been very successful. Few foreign universities joined up with the programme and concerns were only increased after the death of an Oxford University academic who had been crucially involved in the programme. UNESCO and the British Council have furthermore drawn on a part of other countries’ pledges to send medical and engineering laboratory equipment and textbooks, mainly to universities in Baghdad and Basra. The British Council and the German higher education organization DAAD also try to help more directly by offering training courses for university administrators. During a conference on revitalizing higher education in Iraq, organised by UNESCO in Paris in February 2005, further monetary pledges were announced, among which pledges from Qatar and from Korea.
However, the delivery of resources has turned out to be a major problem. In February one Iraqi university president estimated that barely 10% of the pledged resources had actually reached their goal because of the country’s overall infrastructure disaster. Because progress is thus hindered, working conditions are still very bad, leading to a further brain drain of Iraqi academics. Many of them also have security concerns. According to Baghdad university president Mosa Al-Mosawe, 47 academics have been assassinated since the fall of the Saddam regime. Also, a new trend has been developing: students who need money try to get it by kidnapping their professors for ransom money.
Since the “victory” of the US troops in 2003, 260 academics have left the country in addition to the 2000 who emigrated because of the repressive conditions in universities under the Saddam regime. Unless Iraqi universities can offer a normal teaching and learning environment, hopes that they will return to prosperity are dim. Idris Salih nonetheless believes in the possibility of making universities work and prosper again. “This is the key to the future in building a new Iraq based on multi-party democracy and respect for human rights” he said after the Paris conference.
| Sources: “UNESCO in action education-Precarious future for Iraqi universities” by David Jobbins, Times Higher Education Supplement, for the new Courier, 2005, www.unesco.org
| “UN-Bericht: Irakkrieg erzeugt soziale Tragödie” by David Walsh, published May 2005 on the World Socialist Web Site, www.wsws.org
| “Country Profile: Iraq” on http://news.bbc.co.uk