/ 25 July 2006

Learning in times of war

Professor Mosa al-Mosawe has lost 34 of his staff since 2003. And when he says ‘lost”, he doesn’t mean that they have resigned or retired, or simply moved on to pastures new. He means that they have been shot or kidnapped, never to be seen again.

‘Around 50 students have also gone missing,” he says, speaking on a cellphone from his office in Baghdad University. But in other respects, he says academic life there is ‘almost normal” — with a heavy emphasis on the ‘almost”.

Mosawe is president of the largest university in Iraq, with about 7 000 staff, 70 000 undergraduates and 10 000 postgraduates.

Baghdad University has been bombed three times: first, during the conflict with Iran in the early 1980s, then in the Gulf war of 1991 and, most recently, in the invasion of 2003.

‘Some 70% of our complex in the centre of Baghdad was damaged this time, as well as 50% of our sites at Abu Ghraib and Jadriya,” says Mosawe, who has been present through all three conflicts.

He joined the college of engineering in 1979 after three years doing a PhD at Sheffield University in the United Kingdom in civil engineering. ‘It it is a very popular career in Iraq. You’re never unemployed,” he says with a laugh. Developing a bleak sense of humour goes with the territory.

More than 2 000 academics fled Iraq during two decades or more while the Ba’ath party tightened its grip on power. ‘It was difficult to express your ideas at that time,” Mosawe says, ‘unless you spoke in favour of the regime. The penalty was execution.” Or 11 years in solitary confinement in the case of Hussein al-Shahristani, former head of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, who refused to become involved in the regime’s much-disputed programme for the development of nuclear weapons. Since the 2003 invasion, he has joined delegations with Mosawe and other leading academics. They have visited universities in the United States, the UK and Australia to appeal for help in replacing computers and laboratory equipment looted from campus buildings in the wake of the bombing.

‘At one time we were very restricted about where we were allowed to travel,” Mosawe points out. ‘Everything’s much more open now. On campus you can discuss what you want without feeling threatened. The downside is that you have to be very careful when you walk out on the streets.” Or drive.

Hassan al-Rubaiei, dean of the school of dentistry, died in a hail of bullets in December 2004, when his car was sprayed with automatic gunfire as he was driving along the western bank of the Tigris. The motive for the attack was unknown, but other academics have been targeted for attempting to uphold the country’s secular academic tradition.

Mosawe believes that the threat of an Islamist takeover of universities has been exaggerated by the media, and is more determined than ever that the Baghdad campuses will function as normally as circumstances allow. ‘We work from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon without breaking for coffee or lunch,” he says. ‘Even I go home at three, and carry on doing my paperwork there. I have a generator there to cover the times when the electricity fails. We usually have two hours on and four hours off. There are generators at the university buildings as well. But we can’t stay long into the night as we used to. By blowing up electricity sub-stations, the insurgents are trying to give us the impression that things were better in Saddam’s day.”

He clearly feels they weren’t. ‘Despite killings and threats to our workers, we’ve managed to rebuild 60% of the damaged structures on our three sites,” he says. ‘The library has been open again since 2004. We still need more books, computers and laptops, but we are progressing step by step. There are Internet cafés on all sites as well. But we do have a major problem in acquiring laboratory equipment. We need hard currency to import it from outside. And although we have had promises of loans and donations, it’s not always easy to get them honoured.”

All the same, he is surprisingly upbeat about the future. ‘Like a lot of Iraqis, I’m optimistic that the insurgency will stop some time. It may be next week, next month, next year. In the meantime, we carry on. We’ve just had a very extensive exam period and my staff are currently very busy marking papers.” Almost normal. —