Students escape war zone

The Scotsman – United Kingdom
May 14, 2005

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.