Entering the University of Baghdad campus, one feels as though you are entering a military camp. The guards, armed with guns, received me by searching me, checking my ID, and asking me if I had a camera or a phone with a digital camera, neither of which is allowed at the university.
The guards put the students into two lines, one for girls, the other for boys. Huge numbers of students wait their turn to be searched, and sometimes they are not allowed onto the campus if they forgot their IDs. They need to go through this process every morning before their first lecture.
Thaar, a 25-year-old higher studies student in psychology said, “Students’ personalities have changed since the war.There is no motivation to study; college has become a waste of time.�
He was willing to tell me more about the students’ feelings than the current security situation. He avoided answering many of my questions; most likely he thought that I was trying to get information from him that might cause him trouble.
But he couldn't continue hiding the information that he felt important to be mentioned: “We have such a terrible security situation in here. Many professors were assassinated, the most intelligent ones.
Nobody knows who the killers are. We have crazy people, beggars, vendors, getting onto the campus. We can hear the explosions very close to us.�
Just as I was talking to Thaar, we heard such an incredible explosion, followed by two helicopters flying at a very low altitude over the campus. We saw the soldiers and their M16s pointing at us from the helicopter doors. Students were looking at them with disgust. “I wish I had an RPG to drop [the helicopter]� a student in the Arabic department said. “You can do so with a Kalashnikov. [The helicopter] is so low, you can reach it with a stick,� his friend replied.
I thought that it would be better to have a look at the College of Languages, the one that young people used to dream about joining because it was such a beautiful college with its lovely club and nice gardens. I went there to remember the most beautiful times in my life when I studied in the College of Education. In our spare time, we used to go relax in the College of Languages. However, this time the college was not as it was before the war. There was a huge mass of rubbish beside the college's gate. In that stack, there were pieces of old trees, canes, cardboard, bricks, papers, and an army of flies swarming over it. I stopped there and started writing in my notebooks. My writing made the students feel strange, as I was writing about something that had became natural to their university life.old trees, canes, cardboard, bricks, papers, and an army of flies swarming over it. I stopped there and started writing in my notebooks. My writing made the students feel strange, as I was writing about something that had became natural to their university life.
“Faces were changed. The College of Languages has been changed as the whole government has changed,� said Ayat, a female student in College of Languages. She made this statement with deep sorrow and a long sigh, showing her feelings of defeat and exhaustion. "What is going on here is just the fault of the government. They are not looking [out] for our interests. Their main concern is to make the Americans feel [as though they] agree with them. They are tools in the hands of the Americans, and the Americans like this situation. They want us to live in chaotic conditions and fight each other.�
Some parts of the main street of the campus were filled with sewage; in other parts there were uncompleted reconstruction projects. In one part, they dug the ground to fix a pipe and just left the big hole.
When all the students left, the campus became a big empty yard for the evening’s visitors - dogs. “Going to the dogs�: this is the picture I received of higher education in Iraq after the so-called liberation of the new conquerors.
Salaam Al Jubourie is an independent Iraqi journalist. This article is one of a series of reports from www.occupationwatch.org. The names of the correspondent and the people whom he/she interviews are pseudonyms.
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