Anne Alexander reports on a new organisation bringing together academic activists in support of Iraq A new organisation of Iraqi specialists aims to break down the barriers between academics, journalists, policy-makers and activists. The International Association of Contemporary Iraq Studies, (IACIS) held its founding conference at the University of East London this month, attracting participants from around the world. The new forum's organisers are open about their desire to reach an audience beyond the campuses. Eric Herring of Bristol University rejects the idea that academics should shy away from politics: academics cannot be politically neutral in that what they choose to study reflects their values and has political consequences. Academic activists acknowledge this rather than pretending that they have a purely objective approach, a view from nowhere. For Tareq Ismail from Calgary University in Canada, frustration with existing academic forums is a powerful driver for his role as a founding member of IACIS. Since the 1980s there seems to have been a surprising silence on Iraq (some might call it a conspiracy of silence) at the major academic conferences on the Middle East. International gatherings of scholars ignored controversial topics such as the US's relations with Saddam Hussein's government during the 1980s or the impact of sanctions during the 1990s, he says. Now it's important that scholars who have been working on Iraq should not be pushed out by the sudden plethora of instant experts. IACIS is also a bridge between Iraqi academics and their colleagues around the world, Ismail argues. Iraqi scholars have been cut off from the international academic community since the rise of the Saddam regime. This international isolation was reinforced by the international political community under sanctions. At the same time, scholars in the west were cut off from communication with their Iraqi counterparts and from the empirical reality unfolding on the ground in Iraq. The resulting vacuum was filled by political spin doctors on both sides. The gap between the promises made by the occupying powers and the reality of Iraqi life was the focus of much of the conference. Kamil Mahdi of Exeter University argued that far from helping Iraq's economy revive, the occupation is preventing recovery. The absence of sovereignty in Iraq entails an absence of a programme for a regeneration of the economy. Policy constraints applied to addressing international debt, the imposition of a conservative macro- economic policy, the rejection of industrial policy, the failure to offer policy coordination and the subjection of policy to alleged security needs all undermine national recovery and leave the prospect of a poor, unstable rentier economy. Writer and activist Haifa Zangana contrasted the rhetoric of women's rights employed by US-funded and -controlled NGOs with the reality of Iraqi women's lives. While cabinet ministers and the US-UK embassies are cocooned inside the fortified Green Zone, Iraqis are denied the basic right of walking safely in their own streets. Iraqi women's daily lives are marked by this violent turmoil. Lack of security and a fear of kidnapping make them prisoners in their homes, effectively preventing them from participating in public life. They witness the looting of their country by Halliburton, Bechtel, mercenaries, contractors, and local subcontractors while they are denied clean water and electricity. In a land coveted for its oil, they have to queue nine hours daily to get kerosene, gas or petrol. Independent journalist Dahr Jamail presented a report on the crisis in Iraq's hospitals. Throughout Baghdad there are ongoing shortages of medicine, of even the most basic items such as analgesics, antibiotics, anaesthetics and insulin. Surgical items are running out, as well as basic supplies like rubber gloves, gauze and medical tape. Doctors told him of patients dying on the operating table because of power cuts, filthy wards and raids by US troops. While the health service barely functions for lack of power, water and equipment, US forces have access to the latest technology designed to control the Iraqi population, John Measor from the University of Exeter told the conference. The so-called �biometric automated toolkit or BAT has become an integral part of the US authorities' arsenal. During the assault on Falluja in November 2004, US troops took retina scans of fleeing residents, hoping to monitor their movements. In this kind of warfare, technology is just another way to dehumanise the enemy: there is no need to go through the expensive and subjective business of learning another language or culture if you can reduce the occupied people to data. For Eric Herring, the assumptions made by US strategists make disturbing reading. The US counter-insurgency manual is particularly sinister in including the following as intelligence indicators of "enemy activity": Increase in the number of entertainers with a political message, Increase of political themes in religious services, circulation of petitions advocating opposition or dissident demands, attempts to discredit or ridicule national or public officials, distribution of clothing to underprivileged or minority classes by organisations of recent or suspect origin. Branding such practices as subversive sits uneasily with US claims to be advancing democracy, he argues. There is no recognition in the manual that any of these activities could equally be regarded as entirely legitimate activities in a free society. Rebuilding Iraq's education system after years of sanctions, war and occupation faces huge obstacles, Raymond Baker of Trinity College, Connecticut, told the conference. As a member of the International University of Iraq (IUI) project, he is one of a group of non-Iraqi academics promoting the idea of creating a private university to complement the work existing Iraqi institutions. "We see this project as an instance of grassroots globalism. Our networks are strictly non- governmental, academic linkages and alliances of associations inspired by anti-war, anti-globalisation, human rights and environmental movements. Work on acquiring land for a Baghdad campus has been halted because of security concerns, but the group hopes to launch the IUI in Irbil in the near future. While many of the participants were critical of US and UK policy towards Iraq, there were also heated discussions. Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday, former UN Humanitarian Coordinators for Iraq, and well-known critics of the sanctions regime, debated with Carne Ross, former British representative on the UN's 661 sanctions committee and Alistair Millar of the Fourth Freedom Foundation. For Von Sponeck, the session provided a valuable opportunity to hammer out disagreements over UN policy in public. "Since 2000 I have participated in just under 300 Iraq conferences, debates and hearings. The vast majority were organised by those related to international or national peace movements, a few by governments and councils of foreign relations and universities. Very few indeed brought together people with opposing positions to allow a genuine debate on Iraq. This is not what most of the organisers wanted but those representing policies of the US and UK governments or those who supported these declined to participate. With calls for reform of the UN gathering pace, he believes the lessons of the sanctions era will be crucial for the future. Glen Rangwala from Cambridge University also believes that open debate is a crucial aspect of IACIS work. "Activism" for IACIS doesn't mean that it becomes a pressure group. The conference showed how broad the range of opinions within the academic community was on Western policy towards Iraq, and so there is no political "line" that the association has. But academics must understand that their research has political consequences, he argues. When dealing with a subject so intensely controversial as modern Iraq, what we write on Iraq can have a significant effect on how policies are formulated in the West and in Iraq itself.
