UN report: life getting tougher for Iraq's nurses

Nissrin Muhammad, 36, sees death every day and worries how her children would survive if she were killed.


The only means this widowed mother-of-five has to support her family is to continue working in the dangerous and deteriorating conditions of a public hospital in the capital, Baghdad.

Nissrin works 13 hours a day to feed her children. Spending her days tending to sick and bullet-ridden bodies, she is increasingly worried that the day will come when she will be the one lying on the operating table.

“I love to help people. I graduated in nursing with the aim of helping to save lives but in the past two years, we are losing more [lives] than improving health conditions,” Nissrin said. “I am stressed and sometimes I go into an empty room behind the hospital’s cafeteria to cry and alleviate the tension that I am living under.”

Iraq is suffering a dearth of nurses. Those who could afford to have already fled to neighbouring countries. Those with working husbands stay at home, afraid of the escalating violence. But the rest must soldier on in their fight against fear and poverty.

“They are our main support. Without their work, doctors cannot do their job because nurses are the ones who maintain the lives of patients after the medical diagnosis. Losing their work means losing lives,” said Dr Yehia al-Mawin, senior official at the Ministry of Health’s strategy department. He added that women represent 80 percent of all nurses.

More than 160 nurses have been murdered since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and more than 400 wounded, according to al-Mawin. In addition, he said thousands had fled the country or were forced to leave their work after receiving threats from insurgents and militia fighters.

Meagre salary

Nissrin said she feels like a warrior herself. With a salary of US $150 a month, she struggles to make ends meet.

“Our salary [nurses’] was always one of the worst in the country but families used to give us extra money when we delivered their children, or when patients had successful operations or treatments. But today, even this extra benefit has disappeared,” Nissrin told IRIN.

“People are getting poorer and cannot afford to [give nurses money]. Often, the [patients’] family does not have money even to buy medicines,” she said.

On the one day off she has each week, she goes in search of food to buy. Most of the shops in her neighbourhood are closed because of ongoing sectarian violence, so she has to walk to another district, and take more risks in the process, to get food. With her meagre salary, she said a typical meal might be some rice, beans and a carrot.

Meat was too expensive, she said, and she had stopped eating it anyway because it reminded her of dead bodies. “After what I see in the hospital with the victims of attacks, it is hard to imagine eating something like that,” she said.

Nissrin starts work at 7am. At lunchtime, she takes a two-hour break to pick her sons up from school, warm up some food for them and then go back to the hospital.

“I prepare the food every night after I return from hospital at 10pm. I check if the children did their homework, clean the house and sleep like a rock,” she said.

If her children fall ill, Nissrin asks a neighbour to help look after them. Once, when they were particularly sick, she asked her boss if she could take time off to tend to them. “He just said that two lives were not more important than the hundreds that come into the hospital on a daily basis in need of my services,” she said.

Weak and disheartened

When she feels weak and disheartened, she pulls out a photo of her children and reminds herself why she endures what she does. She dreams of a day when nurses will be respected and appreciated for what they do. “Sometimes I feel indignation that even with millions of people depending on our work, they still see us as a lowly profession and treat us badly,” she said.

With more than 150 patients to look after on a typical day, Nissrin has the additional burden of having to accept physical and verbal abuse from angry patients, or their friends and relatives, demanding immediate treatment. This sometimes amounts to punches in the face or worse.

“In the most recent incident, a husband of a patient broke a glass over my head because his wife urinated and I was late changing her. I tried to explain that 50 injured patients had just arrived in the hospital and we were just three [nurses] helping the doctors. He told me that I was useless and beat me,” Nessrin said.

Education International union condemns attacks on teachers

"Teachers should be guaranteed a safe and secure working environment," says EI in a letter addressed to the President of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, on 16 November.

Since February this year, 180 teachers have been killed and up to 100 have been kidnapped.

The dramatic escalation of violence against education institutions and teachers has prompted an exodus of academics and teachers as well as sharp decrease in school attendance. Currently, only 30 percent of Iraq’s 3.5 million students are currently attending classes compared with 75 percent in the previous school year.

EI General Secretary, Fred van Leeuwen, urges the Iraqi government to support educational institutions and teachers, and give them the resources to promote peace and tolerance through education.

Below is the content of EI's letter in English:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr Jalal Talabani
President
Convention Centre (Qasr al-Ma’aridh)
Baghdad
Republic of Iraq

Brussels, 16 November 2006

Mr President,

Education International, the global union federation of teachers representing over 30 million members in 169 countries, is very concerned by the continued killings and abductions of Iraqi academics and teachers.

Hundreds of academics have been killed in Iraq since March 2003. The Iraqi Minister of Education has stated that 296 members of education staff were killed in 2005 alone. According to the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs, 180 teachers have been killed since February 2006 and up to 100 have been kidnapped. Over 3250 teachers have fled Iraq.

Not only do abductions of teachers constitute serious violations of the right to live and work in a secure environment, but of the right to life itself. Education International does not only refer to the recent mass kidnapping in the Ministry of Higher Education’s scientific research directorate. Abduction and murder ravage families and put at stake the future of Iraq. The killings of teachers and closures of schools punishes the young people and does not give a message of optimism and hope.

Education has a major contribution to make to the future of the country and the current violence prompts an exodus of teachers. The resulting massive brain drain of teachers is a catastrophe which affects the reconstruction and nation-building process significantly, and will continue to do so for years to come.
The violence against teachers also contributes to a dramatic decrease in school attendance rates. According to recent statistics from the Ministry of Education, only 30 percent of Iraq’s 3.5 million students are currently attending classes. This compares to approximately 75 percent of students attending classes in the previous school year.

Educational institutions and teachers should be supported and given the resources to promote peace and tolerance through education, rather than being targets of violence.

Education International therefore urges your Government to ensure a safe and secure environment for lecturers, teachers and students. Education International will contact the United Nations Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions to request that the matter be investigated.

Education International sincerely trusts that this message is one your Government can support.

Sincerely yours,

Fred van Leeuwen
General Secretary

cc:
Iraqi Ministries of Defence, Interior and Higher Education
Speaker of Iraq's parliament: Hajim al-Hassani
Kurdistan Teachers Union, KTU
UNCHR Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions

TUC in solidarity with Iraqi teachers

UK unions stand in solidarity with Iraqi workers and educationalists
Responding to the kidnapping of Ministry of Education officials in Baghdad this week (not all of whom have been released as yet), TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber has sent the following message of solidarity with Iraqi workers and teachers;


'This cowardly attack on some of the people most involved in keeping the education system going is a terrible reminder of the persistent persecution being suffered by workers and academics in Iraq. Workers in the education sector are in the front line, facing intimidation, harassment and sometimes death, all for the simple reason that they are trying to bring enlightenment, empowerment and education to Iraq's children and young people.

'British trade unionists have little experience of the pressures under which Iraqi workers and educationalists operate every day, but we stand in solidarity with them in their struggle to build a new Iraq - non-sectarian, non-discriminatory and free

IFCTU report - academics murdered and kidnapped in Iraq

Up to 150 people kidnapped in Baghdad
By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press

Gunmen wearing Iraqi police commando uniforms kidnapped up to 150 staff members from a government research institute in downtown Baghdad on Tuesday, the head of the parliamentary education committee said.


Alaa Makki interrupted a parliamentary session to say between 100 and 150 people, both Shiites and Sunnis, had been abducted in the 9:30 a.m. raid. He urged the prime minister and ministers of interior and defense to rapidly respond to what he called a "national catastrophe."

Makki said the gunmen had a list of names of those to be taken and claimed to be on a mission from the government's anti-corruption body.

Those kidnapped included the institute's deputy general directors, employees, and visitors, he said.

Police and witnesses said the raid began with gunmen closing off roads around the institute in the downtown Karradah district.

Police spokesman Maj. Mahir Hamad said the entire operation took about 20 minutes. Four guards at the institute put up no resistance and were unharmed, he said.

A female professor visiting at the time of the kidnappings said the gunmen forced men and women into separate rooms, handcuffed the men, and loaded them aboard about six pickup trucks. She said the gunmen, some of them masked, wore blue camouflage uniforms of the type worn by police commandos.

The abductions appeared to be the boldest in a series of killings and other attacks on Iraqi academics that are robbing Iraq of its brain trust and prompting thousands of professors and researchers to flee to neighboring countries.

Recent weeks have seen a university dean and prominent Sunni geologist murdered, bringing the death toll among educators to at least 155 since the war began. The academics apparently were singled out for their relatively high public stature, vulnerability and known views on controversial issues in a climate of deepening Islamic fundamentalism.

Ali al-Adib, a Shiite lawmaker, said there was little question Tuesday's incident was a mass kidnapping and demanded that U.S. troops be held responsible for the security lapse.

"The detention of 150 people from a government institution without informing the higher education minister ... means this is an abduction operation," al-Adib said.

"There is a political goal behind this grave action," he said.