roughly 200 have been killed, and estimates by various professors in Iraq
back up this figure. Intellectuals, professors, lecturers and teachers are
being assassinated on what seems to be almost a regular basis...."
------------------
http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN
=200409060018
New Statesman
Monday 6th September 2004
The slaughter of Iraq's intellectuals
Andrew Rubin
Monday 6th September 2004
Since the occupation began, some 200 leading Iraqi academics, most of them
in the humanities and social sciences, have been killed. Is the CIA
responsible?
By Andrew Rubin
Control, intimidation, and even murder of Iraqi intellectuals, professors,
lecturers and teachers has become more or less systematic since the US-led
invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. Under the subsequent occupation,
initially governed by a body called the Coalition Provisional Authority, US
military officials dismissed many Iraqi intellectuals from university
positions, often on spurious grounds; and a surprisingly large number fell
victim to assassination. The Union of Iraqi Lecturers believes that roughly
200 have been killed, and estimates by various professors in Iraq back up
this figure.
Intellectuals, professors, lecturers and teachers are being assassinated on
what seems to be almost a regular basis.
To date, the CPA has neither investigated the deaths nor made a single
arrest, despite its penchant for rounding up young Iraqis and treating them
in barbaric ways in Saddam Hussein's for- mer prison of choice, Abu Ghraib.
A US defence department spokesman, when asked recently about assassinations
among the Iraqi intelligentsia, dismissed the matter as simply "obscure".
The Iraqi interim government, installed and hand-picked by the United
States, has done nothing and said nothing about it. With the exception of a
few courageous individuals such as Saad Jawad, a senior professor of
political science at the University of Baghdad, people are unwilling to
speak out publicly. When a former doctoral student of Jawad's was killed at
the University of Mosul, Jawad's colleagues refused to sign a petition
supporting a strike. The political forces active in Iraqi society are
becoming more fractured, more factional, more sectarian, and more ethnically
absolutist.
One university president and several deans have been murdered. What is most
striking is that many of those killed since the occupation began were
trained not in the physical sciences, but in fields such as the soft
sciences and the humanities. In other words, they were not being murdered by
loyalists to Saddam Hussein for knowing something about any possible weapons
of mass destruction programme. Instead they were, and are, professors of
subjects such as French literature, history and the law, where the
discussion about conflict can be converted into the conditions for
reconciliation.
There is much speculation about who is responsible for these killings. Some
allege it is Mossad, the Israeli secret service, which obviously has an
interest in a weak and possibly theocratic Iraq - the better to declare
Arabs undemocratically minded terrorists. ("It's not personal; it's
business," one professor in Baghdad says of Mossad's possible motives.)
Denis Halliday, a former assistant secretary-general of the UN, has wondered
aloud whether this is the work of anti-secular fundamentalists hoping to
recruit students to the madrasas and to the tenets of Islamist
fundamentalism. Others have pointed to militias such as those commanded by
Ahmad Chalabi, once favoured by the Pentagon. At the same time, some allege
these are acts of revenge and fury over grades from disgruntled students,
now armed, along with the entire civil society, with weapons that the US
sold to Iraq without reservation less than two decades ago.
Part of the process of dismis- sing Iraqi intellectuals, professors and
lecturers was known as de-Ba'athification: with the exception of a few
returned exiles, former Ba'ath Party members make up the vast majority of
professors in postwar Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein's regime, all professors
who wished to keep their job were required to join the Ba'ath Party. Yet the
US repression of academics was less about protecting academic freedom than a
kind of American McCarthyism abroad.
One must ask whether there is a concerted effort to undermine a secular
democratic foundation in Iraq's universities; after all, the prime minister,
Iyad Allawi, is himself a former Ba'athist and murderer. According to Robert
Dreyfuss, writing in the American Prospect, $3bn of the $87bn going to Iraq
has been allotted to fund covert CIA paramilitary operations there, which,
if the CIA's historical record is to be consulted, are likely to include
extrajudicial killings and assassinations.
Not that the curriculum under Saddam Hussein was ever a source of a radical
renewal that could have actually provided the conditions for the emergence
of a secular, moral and democratic leadership. Known as "Arab culture and
socialism", the four-year undergraduate humanities course was a
brain-numbing, chauvinistic and hyper-nationalist occasion for unrestrained
celebration of Ba'athism, elevating the writings of party theoreticians to
canonical heights. Like many other universities in countries of the Arab and
developing world, Iraq's academic institutions, after years of rule by the
Ottomans, followed by British and French colonisation, were fundamental to
the modern reinvention of national identity. In Egypt, for example, the
curriculum underwent a process of Arabisation after the revolution of 1952.
Similarly, modern standard Arabic became the official language of Algeria, a
former French colony, only in 1962, and for the first time could be uttered
outside the mosques.
Yet despite the tyranny exercised over Iraqi society by Saddam Hussein, the
university classroom was (some professors often claim) a relatively
autonomous space for learning and instruction, where professors, lecturers
and students could be openly critical. They could even criticise the
government, so long as they never mentioned Saddam personally, or his two
sons. Even today, the textbooks retain the same content, altered only by the
elimination of images of Saddam and his sons.
Whoever is directly responsible for the dangers facing Iraq's institutions
of learning and its educators, the situation seriously threatens the
emergence of a secular, moral and democratic leadership from within Iraq. If
such a society is to emerge from beneath the scars caused by years of
sanctions, from the rubble left by a remorseless and mendaciously justified
war, intellectuals are the best and, in my opinion, the only chance of
enabling Iraq to realise its human capabilities.
Without the intelligentsia, the US and its allies will continue arrogating
to themselves the right to determine the form that Iraq's universities and
knowledge should assume. It is vital for the future of the country that Iraq
maintain the separation between the university and political society.
Andrew N Rubin, assistant professor of English literature at Georgetown
University, US, is the director of the International Coalition of Academics
Against Occupation ( [http://www.icaao.org]) and the author of a forthcoming
book, Archives of Authority
Victims of unknown assassins
Among the scores of senior academics who have been killed since the start of
the western occupation are:
Muhammad al-Rawi, president of the University of Baghdad; Dr Abdul-Latif
al-Mayah, professor of political science at Baghdad's Mustansiriyah
University; Dr Nafa Aboud, a professor of Arabic literature at the
University of Baghdad; Dr Sabri al-Bayati, a geographer at the University of
Baghdad; Dr Falah al-Dulaimi, assistant dean of college at Mustansiriyah
University; Dr Hissam Sharif, from the history department of the University
of Baghdad; Professor Wajih Mahjoub of the College of Physical Education;
Professor Sabah Mahmoud, ex-dean of the Education College, Mustansiriyah
University; Professor Abdul Jabbar Mustafa, head of the politics department
at Mosul University, Dr Layla Abdul Jabbar, dean of the Faculty of Law in
Mosul (and her husband); Dr Ali Abdul Husain Jabok, of the College of
Political Science at the University of Baghdad.
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current
and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.
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