<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2802" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff>
<H2><FONT face=Arial size=3>Dear Colleagues,</FONT></H2>
<DIV>Below is an article from today's WSWS providing more information about the
deaths, emigration, and harassment of Iraqi academics, including
physicians. The article attempts to demonstrate that the causes are
multi-factorial and long standing; its anti-U.S. 'bias' is very strong--though
perhaps plausible--and its conspiracy theories about the Israeli Mossad, the
Iraqi Interior Ministry, and the Badr Brigade, among others--are more
speculative than proven. I have also included an article from <EM>The
Guardian, 28 February,</EM> by the Iraqi-born novelist, Haifa Zangana, who
argues that there is a campaign to destroy intellectuals who speak out
against the opposition. He provides some telling examples. His email address is
provided.</DIV>
<H2><FONT face=Arial>World Socialist Web Site </FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=+0>www.wsws.org<BR></H2>
<H2>
<HR align=left>
</H2></FONT>
<P><B><FONT face=Arial size=-1><A
href="http://www.wsws.org/index.shtml">WSWS</A> : <A
href="http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/news/news.shtml">News &
Analysis</A> : <A
href="http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/news/mideast.shtml">Middle East</A>
: <A
href="http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/news/me-iraq.shtml">Iraq</A></FONT></B></P>
<H2>Hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals assassinated by death
squads</H2>
<H5>By Sandy English<BR>6 March 2006</H5>
<P><A href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/acad-m06.shtml"><B><FONT
face=Arial size=-1>Back to screen version</FONT></B></A><B><FONT face=Arial
size=-1> | <A href="http://www.wsws.org/cgi-bin/birdcast.cgi">Send this link by
email</A> | <A href="https://www.wsws.org/phpform/use/comments/form1.html">Email
the author</A></FONT></B></P>
<P>Hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals have been assassinated since
the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to a petition to the United Nations
Special Rapporteur on Summary Executions from the European peace group BRussells
[sic] Tribunal on Iraq.</P>
<P>The petition has been signed by Nobel Prize winners Harold Pinter, J. M.
Coetzee, José Saramago, and Dario Fo, as well as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn,
Cornel West, and Tony Benn. A Green party member of the European Parliament from
Britain, Caroline Lucas, has called for support for the investigation.</P>
<P>The exact figure of deaths is unknown; estimates range from about 300 to more
than 1,000. According to Iraqi novelist Haifa Zangana, writing in the
<I>Guardian</I> last month, Baghdad universities alone have lost 80 members of
their staffs. These figures do not include those who have survived assassination
attempts.</P>
<P>Intellectuals from all regions of Iraq have been killed. They include
specialists in physical education, journalism, Arabic literature, and the
sciences. Physicians have also been targeted at a high rate.</P>
<P>The victims have been Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, and Turkomans, and
they have held a variety of political views. They have been shot down at work,
at home, and in their cars or have simply disappeared.</P>
<P>Zarngana writes that Abdul Razaq al-Na’as, a Baghdad University professor,
was murdered on January 28 when two cars blocked his entrance and gunmen fired
on him. He was a vocal opponent of the occupation on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya
television.</P>
<P>Dr. Abdullateef al-Mayah, a well-known academic, was killed in 2004, 12 hours
after he criticized the Iraqi Governing Council on al-Jazeera television.</P>
<P>In the <I>Independent </I>over a year ago, Robert Fisk had already noted the
growing trend. “The dean of the college of law in Mosul, murdered last month,
was the most gruesome killing. ‘She was in bed with her husband when they came
for her,’ a Baghdad colleague told me yesterday. ‘They coolly shot both of them
in their bed. Then they cut off both their heads with knives.’”</P>
<P>The BRussells Tribunal website (<A
href="http://www.brusselstribunal.org/">www.brusselstribunal.org</A>) contains a
number of letters from Iraq about the situation. One describes the murder of
Professor Nawfal Ahmed from the Institute for Fine Arts in Baghdad on December
26, 2005:</P>
<P>“Unknown armed men had assassinated a university professor of the institute
of fine arts, on Monday morning in Toopchy district in Baghdad. A source from
the ministry of defense said that; armed men fired a stream of bullets towards
professor Nawfal Ahmed, on eight morning, while he was getting out of his house,
heading to his working office.”</P>
<P>Another letter from Tara Al-Hashimi, the daughter of the late Dr. Wissam
Al-Hashimi, a geologist and internationally known expert in carbonates,
says:</P>
<P>“[M]y father (Dr. AL- Hashimi) has died. He was kidnapped early in the
morning on the 24th Aug 2005 while going to work, his recent papers were stolen.
A ransom was given but unfortunately he was shoot twice in the head and died.
May his soul rest in peace. As his ID was taken from him it took us about 2
weeks to find his body in one of Baghdad’s hospitals.”</P>
<P>The murders have forced Iraqi professionals to leave the country in large
numbers. Death threats, often letters accompanied by a single bullet, are
common.</P>
<P>In January, the <I>Washington Post</I> reported the case of a leading Iraqi
cardiologist, Dr. Omar Kubasi, now an exile in Amman, Jordan:</P>
<P>“Kubasi left Baghdad after he and nine other doctors received letters,
written in a childish hand, telling them they would be killed if they did not
stop working in their native Iraq. He and his colleagues had been objects of
threats before, but the last carried a foreboding urgency.”</P>
<P>No one has been prosecuted or even arrested in any of the murders. No group
has claimed responsibility. A variety of organizations are widely suspected by
Iraqis, including the Israeli Mossad (which assassinated Iraqi scientists
working on the country’s nuclear program in the 1970s and 1980s), the American
military (which has harassed and beaten Iraqi academics) and, in the north, the
Kurdish Peshmerga.</P>
<P>There are clearly a variety of groups operating, but the evidence points to a
leading role of death squads organized by the supporters of the pro-American
government, especially in the Interior Ministry, in conjunction with Shiite
fundamentalist militias such as the Badr Brigade.</P>
<P>The same groups, believed to be responsible for the recent anti-Sunni
pogroms, are popularly called the “black crows” because of their black
uniforms.</P>
<P>“They’re also called the men in black. Nobody dares identify them although
everybody knows who they are. They are groups selected by some political parties
that have infiltrated the Interior Ministry and directly report to it,” remarked
Mutahana Hareth Al-Dari, a spokesman of the Iraqi Association of Muslim
Scholars, in this week’s issue of the Egyptian <I>Al-Ahram Weekly
Online</I>.</P>
<P>The immediate reason is not hard to find: most of these intellectuals opposed
the American occupation of their country.</P>
<P>As Haifa Zangana notes: “Most were vocally opposed to the occupation.... Like
many Iraqis, I believe these killings are politically motivated and connected to
the occupying forces’ failure to gain any significant social support in the
country. For the occupation’s aims to be fulfilled, independent minds have to be
eradicated.”</P>
<P>This is a part of a program of cultural destruction, and it emanates from
Washington.</P>
<P>The appearance of death squads in Iraq stepped up after the installation of
John Negroponte as ambassador to Iraq in June 2004. Negroponte was the
ambassador to Honduras at the height of the American-sponsored
counter-insurgencies in Central America in the 1980s. He is an experienced
operative in creating and managing extra-judicial killings, the so-called
Salvador option.</P>
<P>Similarly, veterans of US “dirty wars” in Latin America—James Steele, who
oversaw counterinsurgency operations in El Salvador during the height of the
killing there 20 years ago, and Steve Casteels, who worked with US anti-guerilla
and anti-drug operations in Colombia, Peru and elsewhere—were brought in to
oversee the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s operations.</P>
<P>The goal, however, is not simply to silence critics of the puppet regime. The
assassination policy is an attempt to create a tractable population.</P>
<P>It includes weakening Iraqis even on the physical level. The murders and
emigration of physicians have been particularly devastating in a country once
known for the high quality of its health care system that now confronts
electricity shortages at hospitals and skyrocketing incidences of infectious
disease and traumatic injury.</P>
<P>But the killing of art historians, geologists, and writers must be explained
as an attempt to destroy the intellectual health of Iraq.</P>
<P>The loss of academics “is causing a drop in the quality of higher education,”
according to the UN’s <I>IRINnews.org</I>. “ ‘The best professors are leaving
the country and we are losing the best professionals, the real losers are the
next generation of students—the future of Iraq.’ Abbas Muhammad, a student of
Pharmacology at Baghdad University said.”</P>
<P>The country’s intelligentsia was already depleted in the period from 1990 to
2003, when an estimated 30 percent had left the country for economic
reasons.</P>
<P>The goal now, encouraged or allowed by Bush administration, and implemented
by its stooges in Iraq, is to destroy the historical consciousness of the Iraqi
people, as a means of further subjugating them to US imperialism and its Iraqi
supporters.</P>
<P>According to the UN’s International Leadership Institute, “84% of Iraq’s
higher learning institutions have been burnt, looted or destroyed.” The thefts
from the Iraqi Museum of April 2003, the untrammeled looting of hundreds of
archaeological sites and the burning of libraries place Iraqi’s access to
culture, history, and science in grave danger. The assassinations and the flight
of Iraqi professionals are the most criminal part of this process.</P>
<META content="Adobe PageMill 3.0 Win" name=GENERATOR>
<P>
<CENTER> </CENTER>
<P></P>
<P>
<CENTER>
<HR>
<FONT size=5>Death of a professor</FONT> <BR><BR><FONT
face=arial,helvetica,sans-serif size=3>There is now a systematic campaign to
assassinate Iraqis who speak out against the occupation</FONT> <BR><BR><FONT
face=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif size=2><B>Haifa Zangana<BR>Tuesday February 28,
2006<BR><A href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/"><FONT color=#ff3300>The
Guardian</FONT></A></B> <BR><BR></FONT>
<DIV id=GuardianArticleBody>In a letter to a friend in Europe, Abdul Razaq
al-Na'as, a Baghdad university professor in his 50s, grieved for his killed
friends and colleagues. His letter concluded: "I wonder who is next!" He was. On
January 28 al-Na'as drove from his office at Baghdad University. Two cars
blocked his, and gunmen opened fire, killing him instantly.
<P>Al-Na'as is not the first academic to be killed in the mayhem of the "new
Iraq". Hundreds of academics and scientists have met this fate since the March
2003 invasion. Baghdad universities alone have mourned the killing of over 80
members of staff. The minister of education stated recently that during 2005,
296 members of education staff were killed and 133 wounded.
<P><!-- This site/section combo is not set up to show MPU's -->Not one of these
crimes has been investigated by the occupation forces or the interim
governments. They leave that to international humanitarian groups and anti-war
organisations. Among them is the Brussels Tribunal on Iraq, which has compiled a
list to persuade the UN special rapporteur on summary executions to investigate
the issue; they do so with the help of Iraqi academics, who risk their lives in
the process. Their research shows that the victims have been men and women from
all over Iraq, from different ethnic, religious and political backgrounds. Most
were vocally opposed to the occupation. For the most part, they were killed in a
fashion that suggests cold-blooded assassination. No one has claimed
responsibility.
<P>Like many Iraqis, I believe these killings are politically motivated and
connected to the occupying forces' failure to gain any significant social
support in the country. For the occupation's aims to be fulfilled, independent
minds have to be eradicated. We feel that we are witnessing a deliberate attempt
to destroy intellectual life in Iraq.
<P>Dr al-Na'as was a familiar face on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya TV. He had often
condemned the continued presence of US-led troops in Iraq, and criticised the
sectarian interim governments and their militias. His case echoes the
assassination of the academic Dr Abdullateef al-Mayah. A prominent human rights
campaigner and critic of the occupation, Mayah was killed only 12 hours after he
had appeared on al-Jazeera denouncing the corruption of the US-appointed Iraqi
Governing Council.
<P>Militias have replaced the disbanded Iraqi army, applying their own rule of
law. Some units operate under a semblance of "legality" - the "wolf brigade",
attached to the interior ministry, is infamous for its terror raids on mosques
and the torture of civilians.
<P>Last month the journalist Abdul Hadi al-Zaidi accused the government's
militias of targeting intellectuals. He is one of a group of Iraqi journalists
who, in the aftermath of al-Na'as's assassination, went on strike, demanding an
immediate investigation into the "systematic assassination campaign" against
intellectuals opposed to the occupation.
<P>After the July London bombings, Tony Blair promised the British people to
"bring those responsible to justice". In Iraq, the British government does
exactly the opposite. The law of occupation states that: "All foreign soldiers,
diplomats or contractors implicated in the killing of Iraqi civilians are immune
from arrest or trial in Iraq." Both the British and US governments turn a blind
eye to the systematic violations of human rights and murders committed by their
clients in Iraq.
<P>It has become obvious that the occupation forces, with their elite troops and
$6bn-a-month budget, cannot hold Iraq. The only honorable and realistic way out
is genuine dialogue with the Iraqi resistance over a complete withdrawal of
foreign troops and adequate reparations and debt-cancellation to rebuild the
country.
<P><B>·</B> Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi-born novelist and former prisoner of
Saddam's regime; a longer version of this article will appear in Not One More
Death, published next month by Verso
<P><A href="mailto:haifa_zangana@yahoo.co.uk"><FONT
color=#ff3300>haifa_zangana@yahoo.co.uk</FONT></A></P></DIV></FONT><BR></CENTER></FONT></STRONG></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff>__________________________________________________________<BR>"When
a people forget a language, they forfeit the heart of who they <BR>are and
the ability to comprehend the stories that are central to their <BR>cultural,
spiritual and emotional health."--Keren
Rice.<BR>____________________________________________________________________<BR>"That's
what hybrids were invented for: survival in changing ecologies."--Lisa Doolittle
<BR>_______________________________________________________________________<BR>"To
celebrate this award, and the work it recognizes of those around the world, let
me recall the words of Gandhi: 'My life is my message.' Also, plant a
tree." Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize for
Peace.</FONT></STRONG></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff>__________________________________________________<BR>Denis
Salter<BR>Professor of Theatre<BR>McGill University<BR>853 Sherbrooke St.
West<BR>Montréal, QC<BR>H3A 2T6<BR>Tel (514) 398 6550<BR>Regular Fax (514) 398
8146<BR>Computer Fax (309) 294 0444<BR><A
href="mailto:denis.salter@mcgill.ca">denis.salter@mcgill.ca</A><BR><A
href="mailto:d.salter@videotron.ca">d.salter@videotron.ca</A><BR>__________________</FONT></STRONG></DIV></BODY></HTML>