WHEN terrorists murdered 70 students and teachers Tuesday outside Baghdad’s Mustansiriyah University, they were trying to slaughter Iraq’s future. It was yet another indiscriminate crime. The war, civil or otherwise, isn’t just draining blood but also causing brain drain.
The dead were Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. The majority of them were young people on the threshold of careers that would have helped rebuild their country. The nihilism of this butchery shows quite clearly that the terrorists are bigots who have no interest whatsoever in Iraq’s tomorrows. As the war rages on, a period of time that is now longer than America’s involvement in World War II, members of the professional Iraq middle class are busy packing their bags for points abroad. When it comes to rebuilding your country or keeping your family alive, the question of voluntarily remaining in a war zone for the betterment of society is a nonstarter. It has been estimated that around 40 percent of these skilled and educated workers have already quit the country.
But even leaving is becoming a problem. In Europe, fears of terrorism coupled with covert racism mean, even well-qualified Iraqis have trouble gaining residence permits, let alone work commensurate with their skills and experience.
Today, Iraq needs doctors and engineers and lawyers and accountants, especially the doctors. It also needs its university professors because they are the people who nurture and train the young minds who will lead Iraq in 10 and 20 years’ time. Tuesday’s murders demonstrate a deliberate policy of targeting higher education. More than four hundred academics have now been killed, most of them singled out for assassination.
Professionals who could afford to leave but still chose to stay often send their families abroad. The future for them is bleak. They know that the terrorists have them in their sights. Daily life is a nightmare of uncertainty. Academics are peculiarly vulnerable because their focus is on the lecture hall, the library and the research laboratory. They tend to lack the support networks of lawyers, accountants, civil servants or doctors. Inside the university they busy themselves with building young minds, which outside its walls the men of violence are intent upon destroying.
Without educated professionals, any state would become a wasteland. Graduates, heal, legislate, organize, construct, invest and bring inspiration through the arts to the country, which trained them. Iraq’s terrorists want to turn the place into an intellectual desert. Only in such sterile surroundings of ignorance, xenophobia and corrupted religious ideologies could their evil and violence go unchallenged and thrive. However a much-diminished phalanx of academics still stands between them and their ambitions. These teachers continue to pass on their knowledge and wisdom to their students, though the guns and bombs reverberate outside the lecture halls. They are indeed some of the most outstanding of Iraq’s many unsung heroes.
