IRAQ SCHOLARS RELUCTANT TO RETURN

While the mainstream media obsesses on the South Carolina primary, the fallout from the Iraq war continues to bury Iraqis in ways that are totally overlooked by the press in the United States.

The most recent study reported on CORKSPHERE, http://corksphere.blogspot.com/, a blog by Bill Corcoran devoted exclusively to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, has to do with all the academics who are refusing to return to Iraq because security conditions are anything but secure.

IRAQ'S SCHOLARS RELUCTANT TO RETURN

The continuing shortage of academics is damaging higher education throughout the country.

By Zaineb Naji in Baghdad (ICR No. 243, 18-Jan-08)

http://www.iwpr.net/?p=icr&s=f&o=342062&apc_state=henpicr

Zahra, a doctoral candidate studying immune-system diseases, shook her head in disappointment when she saw the list of professors who were supposed to review her thesis.Three had fled the country. While one promised to attend her defence of her thesis, another was unable to make it because of the security situation. Zahra, 40, who received her PhD two months ago, did most of the work on her own.

She doesn’t blame her professors – one left Iraq after receiving a bloodstained bullet in an envelope together with a note which read, “You’re wanted because you are a scientist.”

“I thought that the good security situation might encourage the professors to return to Iraq,” said Zahra, who did not want her real name to be used. “On the contrary, some are still fleeing the country, and the universities are still suffering from a shortage of lecturers.

”Widespread threats against Iraqi university staff have all but stripped the country of its intellectual core, particularly in Baghdad. According to the country’s higher education ministry, 240 lecturers were killed from 2003 to October 2007.

Approximately 2,000 academics have fled the country, according to Tariq al-Bakaa, a former minister of higher education who served under the 2004 government of the then prime minister Ayad Allawi.

Most have fled to Jordan, Gulf States, Libya and Syria, where some have established the Syrian International University for Science and Technology. Many others cannot find work or are struggling to make ends meet in their countries of refuge, but are wary of returning.