Iraqi academics . . .

[Denis Salter]

Dear Colleagues,
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 The Guardian, 28 February, 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.
World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org


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WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq

Hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals assassinated by death squads
By Sandy English
6 March 2006
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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.

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.

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 Guardian last month, Baghdad universities alone have lost 80 members of their staffs. These figures do not include those who have survived assassination attempts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the Independent 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.'"

The BRussells Tribunal website (www.brusselstribunal.org) 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:

"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."

Another letter from Tara Al-Hashimi, the daughter of the late Dr. Wissam Al-Hashimi, a geologist and internationally known expert in carbonates, says:

"[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."

The murders have forced Iraqi professionals to leave the country in large numbers. Death threats, often letters accompanied by a single bullet, are common.

In January, the Washington Post reported the case of a leading Iraqi cardiologist, Dr. Omar Kubasi, now an exile in Amman, Jordan:

"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."

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.

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.

The same groups, believed to be responsible for the recent anti-Sunni pogroms, are popularly called the "black crows" because of their black uniforms.

"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 Al-Ahram Weekly Online.

The immediate reason is not hard to find: most of these intellectuals opposed the American occupation of their country.

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."

This is a part of a program of cultural destruction, and it emanates from Washington.

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.

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.

The goal, however, is not simply to silence critics of the puppet regime. The assassination policy is an attempt to create a tractable population.

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.

But the killing of art historians, geologists, and writers must be explained as an attempt to destroy the intellectual health of Iraq.

The loss of academics "is causing a drop in the quality of higher education," according to the UN's IRINnews.org. " '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."

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.

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.

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.






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Death of a professor 

There is now a systematic campaign to assassinate Iraqis who speak out against the occupation 

Haifa Zangana
Tuesday February 28, 2006
The Guardian 


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. 
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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

· 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 

haifa_zangana at yahoo.co.uk



__________________________________________________________
"When a people forget a language, they forfeit the heart of who they  
are and the ability to comprehend the stories that are central to their 
cultural, spiritual and emotional health."--Keren Rice.
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"That's what hybrids were invented for: survival in changing ecologies."--Lisa Doolittle 
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"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.

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Denis Salter
Professor of Theatre
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke St. West
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Tel (514) 398 6550
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