Facilities in Baghdad University are worse than in Africa

By Anton La Guardia, The Daily Telegraph, 26 January 2001

THE New Acquisitions stand in the science library of Baghdad University is a forlorn sight—there is a dusty nine-year-old journal on neuroscience and an almost new periodical in Portuguese from 1998. In the reference section, the last indices of scientific citations and dissertations date to before the Gulf war a decade ago. Iraqis once prided themselves on being the Germans of the Arab World, with a standard of higher education approaching Western levels. Iraq is the Arab country that came closest to developing a nuclear bomb. But now, after the war and a decade of sanctions, the facilities at Baghdad University are poorer than those of many African universities. We used to subscribe to 1,100 periodicals and journals, said the head librarian, Dr Maysoon Abdel-Karim.

These days we get nothing, except for the occasional journal donated to us. There is no foreign currency to buy periodicals. As the Iraqi dinar has crashed to a six-thousandth of its pre-war value, academics at the university these days earn pounds 20 a month. They need to take second or third jobs to survive. A growing number despair of any improvement and emigrate in search of a better life.

Nobody knows for sure how many Iraqis have left the country. Estimates are that between one million and three million live abroad, having fled political oppression, instability and the pauperisation of entire classes. In Britain, Iraqis form the largest number of asylum seekers, averaging about 1,000 per month. Iraq has tried to stem the flow by imposing steep fees for exit visas and a ban on emigration for certain categories of people, such as doctors and teachers. The rise in oil prices has in recent months revived the economy. But virtually every middle-class Iraqi family has members who have left the country in recent years, using forged papers if necessary. The bus terminal in Baghdad sees an endless procession of well-dressed Iraqis setting out on the long drive through the desert to Amman, the first stop in the emigrant's journey. Those who stay behind often have to sell family possessions to raise funds.

At the Friday book souk in Baghdad, the stalls are piled high with medical and scientific reference books of impoverished academics. Departments at Baghdad University's college of science have lost between a fifth and half of their teaching staff in the past decade, said Prof Yousif Zora Yousif, assistant dean of the faculty. The best have built new lives in the West and rarely return. The less famous have gone to Jordan or the Gulf, and the utterly desperate have accepted temporary contracts in places such as Yemen and Libya before returning home with foreign currency savings. We have had to put in an extra effort to maintain the standard, said Prof Yousif.

The departure of qualified staff slows things down considerably. The quality of the lectures has been affected.

He complained bitterly that the world had cut off Iraq. Academics had to beg for periodicals from colleagues abroad and found it almost impossible to have their work published in foreign journals. United Nations sanctions have particularly affected scientific disciplines as dual-use materials and equipment that could be used for making weapons of mass destruction cannot be legally sold to Iraq. Laboratories are grinding to a halt. The information revolution has entirely bypassed Iraq. There are seven internet terminals for the whole Baghdad campus and access is restricted to post-gradutate students. Even non-scientific departments are hard hit. One recent English graduate said he had planned to write his dissertation on trends in modern English literature. But faced with an utter lack of up-to-date books, he opted for a study of Charles Dickens instead.