800,000 Iraqi Children Not Attending School

by Karen Button

Schools in Iraq will soon resume, but thousands of worried families will be keeping their children at home for fears of kidnapping or worse.

Girls are at particular risk. A joint Ministry of Interior (MoE) and UNICEF study found that of those who do not attend school, 74 percent are female children.

A recent report by the UK-based organisation Save the Children, entitled “Rewrite the Future: Education for children in conflict-affected countries,” documents the effects of armed conflict on primary education in 30 countries. Some 115 million primary-aged children do not attend school for various reasons, the report says, yet by far the biggest contributor is conflict, which deprives one in three, or 43 million, from attending.

In Iraq that translates to 818,000 primary-aged children, or 22.2 percent of Iraq’s student population, who are not attending school.

Since 2003, violence has dramatically increased in a country that once enjoyed relative security. Attacks on schools by US and Iraqi government forces and civilian militias, kidnappings by organised crime, and the ever-present threat of car bombs, sniper’s bullets and random shootings all contribute to the violence.

Iraq’s education ministry reported that in the first half of the 2005 academic year alone, 64 children were killed and 57 injured in attacks on schools. Another 47 were kidnapped. Yet these numbers don’t include the children who were killed or injured on their way to or from school.

Besides violence, displacement is a contributing factor to student nonattendance. Thousands of children are from families who’ve fled US-led sieges on their communities or sectarian violence and therefore don’t have access to education.

In a June report, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission on Refugees) put the number of refugees inside Iraq at 1.8 million, an increase of 800,000 people from last year. Not included are the estimated 100,000-150,000 who were displaced as a result of US military operations in Ramadi this summer.

Professors have also been a target of Iraq’s violence, causing a severe shortage in teachers. In the first four months of 2005, 311 teachers and employees with the education ministry were killed and another 158 injured.

During that same time, 417 schools, including universities, had been attacked, resulting in the closure of several. According to the Ministry of Higher Education, close to 180 professors have been killed between February and August; another 3,250 have fled the country.

While there are no accurate figures for how many teachers have left Iraq since the US-led invasion, statistical records kept by the University Professors Union of Iraq show that over 10,000 professionals, including physicians, have fled the country since 2003.

Two more left just last month. Earlier this spring, I met with Saleh Mohammed and his wife Eman Hussain* in Amman. Both taught at Baghdad universities. They told me their concern was mostly for their son, who they had moved to Amman where about 500,000 other Iraqis now live. They planned, however, to stay in Baghdad, despite the danger. Now, six months later, they have left their beloved country due to the dire security situation, unsure when they might return.

“The number of teachers leaving the country this year is huge and almost double those who left in 2005,” Professor Salah Aliwi, director general of studies planning in the Ministry of Higher Education reported to IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks). “Every day, we are losing more experienced people, which is causing a serious problem in the education system.”

This month the MoE announced it is raising salaries by 20-50 percent in attempts to entice teachers to stay. It remains to be seen if that will make any difference. Even with the more than 13 thousand guards hired by the MoE to protect educational institutions in Iraq, it has not been sufficient to calm the violence or quell the exodus.

Once the model of education in the Middle East, twelve years of grueling sanctions and three years of bloody occupation have left Iraq’s system in shambles, a generation of children both traumatised and, it seems, deprived of education.

*Not their real names.

Target: The Media

by Karen Button

On September 13 two more journalists were murdered in Iraq.

Freelance photographer Safa Isma’il Enad was in a Baghdad print shop when armed men entered and asked for him by name. When he answered, the 31 year-old was gunned down and taken away by car. According to the Iraq-based Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, his body was later found east of Baghdad.

In a separate incident, 56 year-old Hadi Anawi al-Jabouri’s car was riddled with bullets as he was driving in the governate of Diyala. In addition to being a journalist, al-Jabouri was also the representative of the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate.

And on September 11 Abdel Karim al-Rubai, editor of the government daily Al-Sabah was gunned down while on his way to work. Al-Rubai had received death threats two weeks prior from a militia when he wrote an editorial that the group resented.

Together, their deaths bring the total number of journalists and media workers killed in Iraq since the Anglo-American invasion of 2003 to 107. Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world for a journalist to work. Especially if that journalist is an Iraqi. Sixty-five of the 107 dead are Iraqi. The US occupation of Iraq is also the deadliest conflict on record.

The US-based non-partisan organizations Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Freedom Forum (FF) both maintain lists of past conflicts. The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan also kept track of journalist’s deaths during the Vietnam war. Following is a breakdown of the heaviest tolls and some comparative conflicts:
• Afghanistan: 2001-2006 / CPJ lists 10 journalists killed.
• Kosovo: 1999-2001 / CPJ lists 7 killed.
• Algeria: 1993-1996 / CPJ lists 58 killed.
• First Iraq war: 1991 / CPJ lists 4 killed. (All were killed after the official end of the war but died in the conflict in the immediate aftermath.)
• Balkans:1991-1995 / CPJ lists 36 killed.
• Central American conflicts: 1979-1989 / FF lists 89 killed.
• Argentina: 1976-1983 / FF lists 98 killed.
• Vietnam: 1955-1975 / FF lists 66 killed. 1962-1975 / The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan lists 71 killed.
• Korean War: FF lists 17 killed.
• World War II: FF lists 68 killed.

Kidnapping is also an ever present worry; since 2003, 41 journalists have been kidnapped in Iraq. Of those, 32 have been released and seven killed. Two are still being held.

Besides the constant threat of violence against individuals, Iraq’s media is under ever more tightening restrictions.

It was under Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority that the first free speech restrictions were imposed. Those regulations were used when US-led occupation forces shut down cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr’s popular paper, al-Hawza, in March 2004. The paper was charged with inciting violence against US and other coalition forces.

Continuing the restrictions, this past July the US-backed Iraqi government announced it would impose emergency laws on the media should they criticize Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s official security plans or “offend Iraqi sensibilities.” Rather, al-Maliki urged the media to be “positive and cooperative with the state.”

Just a week ago he followed through on that threat when he ordered police to shut down the satellite channel Al-Arabiya’s Baghdad offices for one month. Though no evidence was produced, al-Maliki charged the station with inciting “sectarian violence and war in Iraq” through its news reports. The Allawi government’s July 2004 decision to ban satellite news station Al-Jazeera from Baghdad remains in place to this day. Instead, the station must broadcast out of Kurdistan in northern Iraq.

In another crackdown on free press, both the managing editor and editor-in-chief of the now defunct Sada Wasit will face at least10 years in prison and heavy fines if convicted of defamation from three articles written in 2005, in which local police and judicial officials were criticized. Notably, the editor, Ahmed Mutair Abbas, was on his way to the trial when he and his car disappeared on September 10.

Media in Iraq are the target of ever-increasing government suppression; their reporters the target of unbelievable violence.

Freedom of speech, long-touted in the U.S. as a litmus for democracy, has never been allowed in Iraq under U.S. occupation. Instead continues the long pattern of media suppression that also existed under Saddam Hussein. The difference? The violence. Now, 107 journalists are dead.