Violence
Escalates Against
Students And Teachers In Iraq
By Sandy English
02 February 2007
World
Socialist Web
The kidnapping of three law professors
and a student on Monday and the deaths on Sunday of five students at
a girls’ secondary school underscores the collapse of the Iraqi
educational system brought on by the American invasion.
Both incidents occurred in
the Baghdad area. The law professors, teachers at Nahrain Law School,
were Adnan al-Abid, Amar al-Qaisi, and Abdul-Mutaleb al-Hashimi. Dr.
al-Hashimi’s son, a student at the school, was also kidnapped.
The four were seized as they were leaving the premises of the university.
The five girls, ranging in
age from 12 to 16, were killed when the Kholoud Secondary School came
under mortar fire at about 11:00 a.m. More than 20 other students were
wounded in the attack.
According to the New York
Times, primary and secondary schools have been targeted in the past
month. Ten students were killed at the Gharbiya Secondary School in
Baghdad. In early December, a girls’ high school in a Christian
neighborhood of Baghdad was closed down after posters appeared that
threatened to kill the students
The worst atrocity occurred
on January 17, when bombs exploded at the prestigious Mustansiriya University
in Baghdad, killing more than 70 students, most of them female, and
wounding scores more. The blasts occurred when students were lining
up in front of minivans to taken them home.
The attacks were anticipated.
According to journalist Nir Rosen writing on IraqSlogger in December,
the Sunni fundamentalist group Ansar Al Sunna had put up posters and
banners in Sunni neighborhoods calling for a boycott of universities
by Sunni students. Mustansiriya University, in particular, had been
targeted.
In response, a banner had
been hung up at Mustansiriya University saying, “We will not surrender
to terrorism, and that is our response.”
Students from the Iraqi College
of Dentistry had earlier written an appeal to the Iraqi government protesting
the relocation of their institution to Mustansiriya University, calling
it “the campus of horror and dread.”
The massacre at Mustansiriya
University prompted student protests. Approximately 60 students from
the University of Technology in Baghdad staged a sit-in, demanding protection
for faculty and students.
One of the students, Yasmin
Mohammad, told Aljazeera about the January 17 bombing: “This attack
is not targeting a specific sect. The university has students who are
Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and Christians. It is a war on everything associated
with Iraq.”
On January 23, a Professor
of Economics at Mustansiriya University, Diya al-Meqoter, was shot in
the head and chest. Meqoter had hosted a popular television show that
granted poor people funds to start small businesses. Meqoter was also
the head of the Consumers’ Association, a group that combated
price gouging by businesses.
More than 300 University
professors have been assassinated since the US invasion of 2003. Nearly
40 percent of Iraq’s professionals have left the country, including
more than 3,000 professors. Hundreds more have flowed into the relatively
safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan.
A report issued by the United
Nations in 2005 found that fully 84 percent of Iraq’s higher education
facilities had been “destroyed, damaged and robbed” since
the US invasion two years earlier.
In 1982, UNESCO awarded Iraq
a prize for eradicating illiteracy. At the time, Iraq had one of highest
rates of literacy for women. In 2004, UNESCO estimated that the literacy
rates for adults—after a year of American occupation and 12 years
of UN-sponsored sanctions—stood at 74 percent. A UNESCO survey
conducted in January 2007 estimated that only 37 percent of women in
the countryside are now literate.
According to the same survey,
only 42 percent of boys and 30 percent of girls of school age attend
classes.
Universities in other parts
of the country are open, but have become deserted. Many schools in Basra,
Mosul, and Diyala are empty. Parents are keeping their children home
from primary and secondary school.
The destruction of Iraq’s
cultural infrastructure began with the looting of the National Museum
in April 2003. The American occupation forces allowed this disaster
to happen. Since then, the destruction and occupation of schools (30
percent of schools are occupied by American forces in Ramadi) and the
nurturing of sectarian hatreds by the Bush Administration have caused
a nearly total collapse of the Iraqi educational system.
This can only be by design.
To the extent that a population is deprived of education and knowledge,
it is easier to subject it to semi-colonial domination. Thus, school
has become impossible for millions of youth. Teachers and professors
are shot. Libraries are shut, and newspapers are bombed.
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