|
|
|||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
News Search
|
|
14-05-2005 The Scotsman Students escape war zone By Gethin Chamberlain THE picnic had been underway for about 30 minutes when the men from Muqtadr al Sadr's office appeared in the park near to the university in Basra. It was 15 March. The students, from a mixture of religions and sects, had brought along radios to play music and men and women were dancing. Some of the women were wearing jeans. They knew that they were being provocative, but they had sought and been granted the appropriate permissions for the picnic, and they were determined to make their point. The two clerics who had turned up with the Sadr group gave the orders to break up the party, and the men fell upon the students, beating them with sticks and pistols. Girls in jeans were singled out for special treatment. About 15 of the students were bundled into cars and taken away. It was an incident which confirmed the worst fears of those who suspected a growing intolerance among religious hardliners in Basra, Iraq's second city. But the reaction to what happened that day was less predicable. There were sit-ins and demonstrations by the students, who appeared to have the support of the majority of the population. The men from the Office of the Martyr Sadr [Muqtadr's father] found themselves on the defensive. But perhaps the oddest by-product of the events of that day may be the link they spawned between the students of Basra and Scotland. Two months on, Hassan Sabah, one of the 45 or so students who was in the Basra park is standing in the middle of a Tesco store in St Andrews, helping to unload the overburdened trolley on to the conveyor belt at the till. Strawberries, tiger prawns, asparagus and hollandaise sauce, oatcakes, oven chips, tiramisu, pizza, lasagna, bread, tarte au chocolat... They are planning to have another picnic, this time with some of the students from St Andrews. Pat, the woman working the till, is watching the little group. "And you're all from Iraq?" she asks them, looking a little bemused. She rings through a jar of pickled onions and three haggis, selected by Karen McLuskie, who works for the Foreign Office in Basra and whose idea the trip was. A former St Andrews student, she decided to take a group of students to her old university and to Edinburgh to give them an insight into a different way of doing things. She landed at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire at 4:30am on Sunday morning with her three members of staff and the seven students she had shepherded from Basra university. Aghast at what had happened in the park, she put together a programme aimed at helping the students create a new student union which could stand up better to such intolerance. Staff from the British consulate in Basra made discreet inquiries around the university to establish who carried most clout, then selected ten people for the trip. At the last minute, the three women selected pulled out under pressure from their parents, but they pressed ahead with the trip with the remaining seven. The students were excited. They had never been outside Iraq, never seen the sea. When their coach stopped at a service station on the way up to St Andrews, they piled out to take pictures of the artificial waterfall and ducks. Karen tried to tell them that there were much nicer things to see. They thought every house on its own on the way up was a castle; Karen told them to wait till they got to Edinburgh. "I realised how beautiful it was to them," she said. They reached St Andrews at 3pm. Later, Hassan and Hazim Abdulatif, the leader of student union, are sitting on the rocks next to the sea, taking pictures of each other and everything around. "It is very different to Basra, it is all so different," Hassan says. They are here for a week, to learn as much as possible about the way student unions work in UK. When they return tomorrow they want to set up a new constitution and a student newspaper. The trip involved a series of meetings with student and university leaders before moving on to Edinburgh to meet Jack McConnell, the First Minister. Showing them round the debating chamber at Holyrood, he recalls how at his first student union conference in 1979, a guest speaker from Iraq reported on the emergence of a new leader, Saddam Hussein, and some of the problems they were already experiencing. The students insist on taking his picture. Hazim, 26, is the most senior member of the group. He explains that they want to gain experience of different systems and to make contact with students outside Iraq. "We are human beings, curious to know more and more. It is also important to consider that Iraq after the collapse of the old regime is in a new phase. It is a very critical phase," he says. He believes that the trouble they faced stemmed from hardline wahabis, a sect which regards all others as heretical. "I believe they are responsible for killing many innocent people. They claim those people are co-operating with foreigners and that it is treason," he says. Hassan, 21, explains what happened when they tried to hold their picnic in March. They had submitted requests to the university and the political parties, he says, and had obtained the required permissions. They had been in the park for about 30 minutes, with the police and Iraqi security forces in attendance, when a group of men arrived from the Office of the Martyr Sadr (OMS), about 50 to 70 strong. With them were two clerics. "We didn't do anything, we were just singing and dancing," he says. "One of the clerics stood in the middle of the park and shouted to his followers to kick out all the girls who wore trousers and the men who did not have Iraqi haircuts." The men who attacked them, he says, were untidy. "They were not well-uniformed. They beat us with sticks and pistols and tennis rackets. After that they destroyed our radios and one of us wanted to attack them but they beat him hard. Some of us wanted to protect the girls by cordoning them off. One girl had been surrounded by three men and the fourth attacked her. She was a Christian and an Armenian. "In accordance with the beliefs of this religion they think it is forbidden for women to wear trousers. Most of the girls at the picnic wore jeans but I swear that all the women had their own modesty and chastity." Hassan says that two of the policemen in the park joined in the attack, which lasted about 20 minutes. About ten of his friends were arrested, he says. "I'm not sure, but my friends said they took two girls as well. The girls began to cry." He acknowledges that the students knew that there might be trouble. "We have to blame both sides, the students and this group, because we arranged the picnic in a very sacred month for Shia, the first month of the lunar year. The OMS say it is forbidden." But he is critical of the thinking behind the attack. "As Muslims we believe that Mohammed coexisted with all different groups," he says. "History never told us that the followers of Mohammed attacked their enemies. The greatest majority of students rejected what happened and because of this we had sit-ins and demonstrations. We believe that students and people in Basra prefer to have some sort of separation between religion and government." They fly back to Basra tomorrow to begin work on strengthening their own student union. There is no intention to simply replicate the Scottish systems, rather to use them as a source of ideas for change. "There is no way of comparing the two countries. Everything, the nature, the weather, the human beings, the nature of people is completely different," says Hazim. And though their trip is sponsored by the UK government, there are clear differences between themselves and their hosts. Hassan thinks it strange that British soldiers did not turn up for 30 minutes. "I have to blame the British forces as well because they knew very well what happened and did nothing. The next time it will be worse because they did nothing this time." And Hazim remains disturbed by the Abu Graib scandal: "Personally when I saw the torture pictures I was very upset." He also disagrees with the British government's optimistic projections for troop withdrawals: "There is not a big problem with them staying at the moment but when there is a strong government they must leave. Maybe in ten years?" The attack on the students in Basra did little to improve the perception of post war Iraq: "We believe that Iraq is considered to be the cradle of civilisation, but because of the bad policies of Saddam the greatest majority of Iraqi people are seen as uneducated now," says Hassan. But both students remain convinced that a corner has been turned. "I am optimistic, but not for the short term. I think my son and my grandson will have a brilliant future in comparison with my present," Hassan says.
|
|
||||
|
................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
|||||||
