Students, universities, occupation, and resistance

Yahia Said, a researcher at the London School of Economics who has visited Iraq a number of times since 2003, spoke to the April meeting of the Iraq Workers' Solidarity Group about the student movement, university life, and the resistance in Iraq.

Immediately after the fall of Saddam, the old student unions re-established themselves. There was the Communist Party's General Union of Students in the Iraqi Republic (GUSIR). There were unions that came in with the political parties arriving from exile - unions associated with the Shia Islamist Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), with the Dawa party, with the Kurdish parties...

Some of them were doing good work. I was a member of GUSIR for many years and part of their Executive Board. It was good to see them hit the ground running immediately after the fall of Saddam.

The unions helped address immediate student needs - fix student hostels and so on. For example, the main hostels at Baghdad University had been occupied by the Americans. The students had to negotiate to get them out of there.

But the unions represented very clearly divided political interests - Communists, Islamists, Ba'thists. The Ba'thist union, the National Union of Iraqi Students, is still alive and well, and it actually participated in the elections of 30 January 2005.

If you go to the campuses, people say that there are still lots of students who consider themselves Ba'thists, but I'm never been able to meet any of their members. This is a union which used to run torture chambers at the university.

Over the time since 2003, many small unions have emerged which cross the political boundaries. There are hundreds of them. They are more like what you would call in Britain student societies. But they do very interesting work. These are the people who are not after some political programme, but about protecting the students and making their lives better.

There are no big "good guys". The good guys are small groups. GUSIR are good guys, but they are in disarray now. They did very well early on, but they are much less visible now. Something went wrong, I don't know exactly what.

My knowledge is limited to Baghdad University. I've talked to out-of-town students in Baghdad, but I haven't visited other universities.

In the Political Science department at Baghdad University, for example, there is the Union of Students for Human Rights, which is a group of maybe 100 students. They have Shia Islamists, they have Sunni Islamists, they have Communists, they have people from Fallujah who are pro-resistance, they have people who are pacifist-oriented - but they are working together on issues they care about, especially for the right of students to organise and against corruption, which is rampant.

At the universities there are members of the faculty and the administration who are diverting funds, denying students services and hostels. Many of these small student unions are dealing with that sort of issue.

Before the transfer of authority in June 2004, the Minister of Education was an Islamist, and he tried to put restrictions on student life and intervene in favour of Islamist students. He was kicked out, and now the Minister of Education in the Interim Government is an ex-Ba'thist, and he's pulling in the other direction. When the new transitional government is formed, we'll probably go back to Islamist control.

Huge funds are being spent from donors, but misspent and misappropriated. Some scholarship money is trickling down. But the hostels are still in a dire state.

At Baghdad University they had three hostel buildings. They gave the students one building; one was occupied by the Americans, and the other by the National Guard. So the hostel was constantly being mortared by the insurgents. The students became a sort of human shield.

The management of the hostel steals the fuel that is supposed to go to generate electricity, so they don't have any electricity in the hostel.

It's a complete mess. Total corruption. The students went to the university authorities to complain about the fuel, and they were beaten up by university guards.

The students squatted a disused building at the university to accommodate out-of-town students. The security came and beat them up and threw them out. Now that building is being used for commercial purposes to the benefit of people in the university management.

Many of the out-of-town students have had to get money from their parents to rent a flat in the city. The Baghdad students have a very long and dangerous commute to the university. They have to leave university early each day so that they can get home before it gets dark.

The professors have not had access to new books and new journals for many years. There are no computer rooms, but private internet cafés at the university where you have to pay.

Curricula are extremely antiquated. After 2003 a quick clean-up was done on the political courses. It was not very thorough or rigorous, and a lot of stuff remains the same, nationalist and xenophobic. There is some discussion and agitation among the students about this, but not as much as you would expect.

The universities do function. They have been accepting new students. The campuses are full, and lively. People are graduating. There have been threats against women students, but at Baghdad University there is still a good proportion of female students.

There are no guns on the campuses. There are checkpoints at the gates, and you're not allowed to bring in guns.

There have been periodic scares when the insurgents have called a national strike and threatened everyone who goes to university with being blown up, but students have usually ignored those threats.

There is a state-owned university in almost every governorate, and Baghdad has two. There are number of small private universities established over the last ten years - Saddam had his own privatisation drive.

The universities are quite big. Baghdad University is huge. Iraq has a very young population, almost everyone wants to go to university, and education is free at the state universities. (The Americans have not suggested introducing tuition fees). The percentage of students who move on to do PhDs and postgraduate studies is huge.

Education is very highly regarded in Iraqi society. Until Saddam started fighting wars, oil money allowed many people to get into higher education. There were many students at the universities in Iraq, and Iraq used to send thousands of students to study abroad on state scholarships. In the current Iraqi government, most of the ministers graduated from British universities, and most of them have PhDs.

The emphasis is on technical subjects, which are very highly regarded - medicine, engineering, science. Those technical subjects are mostly taught at university level in English, not Arabic. There were some moves for Arabisation in the 1980s and 90s. Social sciences are in Arabic.

There is a huge urge among young people to leave Iraq, at least for a while - to get a scholarship or something. There is almost no chance of university graduates getting a job in Iraq. There was high graduate unemployment even before 2003. Before 1990 when you finished university you went to the war (with Iran), and in the 1970s you would get a job with the government.

From the very start the Islamist unions started intimidating women students and trying to prevent male and female students from sitting together or talking together. That has made them quite unpopular on campus. Even students who believe in Islam think it is too much interference. Iraqi campuses are usually much more liberal than the rest of society. On campus women are dressed quite differently than outside.

In Islam, the drive to veil women was a result of the poverty caused by the sanctions. It was a result of the degradation of the lean years after the war in Kuwait. Many Iraqis are looking forward to moving away from all that as soon as there is more prosperity.

Iraqi society has become more Islamic than anyone would have expected, but it has not gone so far as to accept what the Islamist student unions were trying to do, especially among the student body.

Lots of professors have been assassinated. But in Iraq, anyone who is doing something, who is successful in some way, or seen as successful, is seen as a target by the various terrorist groups operating in the country. Many of the successful and active people happen to be university professors, but the attacks are not limited to them. Many businessmen and government officials have been killed too.

There is no specific campaign against university professors - a successful surgeon or a successful engineer is equally at risk. There are a whole lot of nihilistically-minded gangs who are trying to paralyse society.

They have a political motive, which is to try to prevent change and stop society moving on, or trying to perpetuate a situation of instability which they can use to make money and pursue criminal activity.

Some of them are Ba'thists, some are al Qaeda people. But there can be different motives for different assassinations. A professor may be killed because he was a big Ba'thist in the past, or kidnapped because a gang thinks it can get a big ransom from his family. Some groups combine crime with political motives. They make money by demanding ransoms, or by smuggling, in order to fund the resistance, for example.

Until six months ago, overall, over ninety per cent of resistance attacks were aimed at military targets. They were legitimate, so to speak, because they were against the occupying forces. However, 80% of the casualties were Iraqi civilians. Even when the resistance groups attacked US forces, usually they killed Iraqi civilians.

The proportions have changed over time. An increasing proportion of attacks now is aimed at Iraqi civilians. The hard-line Islamists and Ba'thists are still a small part of the resistance, but they have become more active.

Many of the nationalists were unhappy about so many civilians being killed. And the biggest change came with the elections. Once they saw that most Iraqis don't want the violence - they want to vote and to end the occupation through peaceful means - many people who were in the insurgency got the message and stopped.

A lot of the resistance is nationalist-Islamist - Hamas-type groups. There are lots of tiny separate groups whose only authority is whoever happens to be their local cleric. Many of those clerics have been calling on them to stop attacks on civilians and on Iraqi military targets, or even to join the Iraqi armed forces.

It was reported that the Association of Muslim Scholars had called on people to join the Iraqi policy and army. They have denied that. But many clerics have been making that call.

Ba'thist ideology died twenty years ago. The last ideological, believing Ba'thists quit the party when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Ba'th party became like one of the East European Communist Parties before 1989 - a way to access jobs and privileges and resources.

That didn't make it much prettier. Many people now feel very guilty about not doing anything - just keeping a low profile and trudging on. In 2003, when the regime fell, many people realised that they could have toppled it themselves ten years earlier, had they dared.

Everyone, if they felt safe enough, would tell you in private that they hated Saddam - that relatives or neighbours got tortured or killed - but they all kept a low profile, and some of them joined the Ba'th party so that they could get jobs.

There are maybe fifty to a hundred thousand people in the resistance, and of those maybe two thousand are Ba'thists. There is no overall leadership. The bulk of it is a collection of small groups. At the top of each group is typically an ex-special forces guy, or a former army officer, and then the group gets guidance from its cleric.

A big proportion of the Iraqi special forces came from Fallujah. Saddam Hussein trusted them. Fallujah is also home to many seminaries. Many of those special forces people embraced a very austere form of Islam, close to Wahhabism.

These guys are both nationalists and Islamists, like Hamas. But unlike Hamas, they don't have a developed political structure. And, although they are from Saddam's old special forces, these guys hate the Ba'th party. Saddam did not trust even the Republican Guard.

There's another bit of the insurgency which is mafia. Then there are the al-Sadr people, who are a different type. And then there are the al-Qaeda types and the Ba'thists. They are very effective, because they have lots of resources, but they are a very small part of it.

It's safer to be a resistance fighter than a student. If you're a student, when you go on the streets, the Americans may shoot you, or the resistance fighters may shoot you. If you are a resistance fighter, only the Americans are shooting you, and you can shoot back.

In terms of good guys in the resistance, a reference point is the Association of Muslim Clerics. But they are good guys up to a point. They are good in terms of their opposition to the occupation and to terrorism, but they are extremely conservative Islamists.

There are no good guys - or the good guys are very tiny groups. The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions is largely good. It's an easy point of reference, but it's limited. And there are issues with IFTU. There's a need to drill down deeper and diversify contacts.

In some universities the administration has forced elections for student councils to negotiate with the administration, without proper preparation. Of course two years is not a short time. They should have had elections. The problem is that the authorities have never clarified the election procedures or what the rights and responsibilities of these student councils are.

The story about Saturdays is a typical stupidity from the Iraqi government. There are many people in the current government trying to build a modern, liberal, democratic, secular Iraq. That's good. But society has to "buy" these changes. And the modernisers have been trying to smuggle in changes from above as fast as they can, maybe trying to push them through before the Islamists come to power.

Iraq used to have only a one-day weekend, Fridays. The Interim Government said it should be two days, Friday and Saturday. Many Muslims object, saying that it should be Thursday and Friday if it is two days.

The Saturday weekend makes a lot of sense, because a Thursday-Friday weekend would mean that Iraq would be out of touch with Europe and the United States for four days.

Of course, those who want to throw stones at it say that people who want Saturday off are all Jews and Zionists.

But this is a caretaker government, which under the UN Security Council decisions should not do anything permanent or long-term, like changing the weekly holiday. Despite all the other pressing issues, they decided to go ahead with this Saturday decision. I think it's a correct decision. The wrong thing is that it was smuggled in without public consultation, pushed through by a government without legitimacy or a mandate.