Kidnapping may cause researchers to flee Iraq

– One result of the operation we have seen here, may be that the academic community flee Iraq to work from outside of the borders to an even greater extent than what we have seen in the past, said consultant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (UD), Anita Krokand, who is responsible for Iraq at the department’s Middle-East section.

Tuesday, the security situation for Iraqi academics reached another low as masked men kidnapped between 30 and 150 people from an education ministry office in Baghdad. According to the British newspaper the Guardian, a university dean and a prominent Sunni geologist have been killed during the past few weeks, bringing the death toll among education professionals to at least 155 since the war began in 2003.

– This is clearly a setback. The security situation is rapidly deteriorating, especially in Baghdad, said Krokand.

Life before research

Krokand thinks that the attack seems like a very extensive and thoroughly planned operation, since so many people were kidnapped at the same time.

– If the academic community moves out of the country, the consequences will be huge. Without a comprehensive research community, the university will become less sought after, said Awais Mushtaq, spokesperson for the Muslim Student society.

He fears that Iraqi researchers will go underground if they get the impression that they are wanted by the kidnappers:

– A lot of academics will want to save their lives instead of doing research.

According to Krokand, an emigration of the academic community may mean that it becomes even more difficult to get information of the actual conditions in Iraq, as it will become harder to cooperate with the authorities.

– Attacks freedom of speech

– Seeing that an attack like this is an attack on academics, it symbolises an attack against freedom of speech, and on people who matter when it comes to rebuilding the country and educating new generations, said Kari Kjenndalen, Secretary General of The Norwegian Association of Researchers.

She emphasises that the situation is very serious.

Anita Krokand thinks that it difficult to say if the attack is directed against freedom of speech and academic freedom, and that it might as well have been directed against another ministry. Nevertheless, she calls attention to the fact that employees in academia and the educational sector is a vulnerable group:

– The freedom of speech is relatively new in Iraq. It is not an easy task to turn such an evidently dictatorial regime as Saddam Hussein’s into a democracy where freedom of speech is a natural part of everyday life.

She believes that it is not very likely that we will see a rapid improvement of the security situation in Iraq, and that this also applies to the academic community.

Mushtaq is not surprised by the kidnapping:

– This doesn’t come as a shock to me. If freedom of speech was lacking before, it is now close to minimum due to the occupation. Clearly, the rules of the game change in times of war.