Iraqi Student's Killing Deepens a Divide

Taher K. Al Bakaa, who served as minister of higher education in the interim administration of the former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, and who is now a member of parliament, said in an interview that 1,630 faculty members nationwide had to resign because of their Baathist pasts. But 1,380 were reinstated with the concurrence of the De-Baathification Commission.

"Not even one was brought back outside [its] guidelines," said Bakaa, a secular-oriented Shiite. "They had to reinstate them because they had to work according to their own regulations."

Those rules allow onetime Baathists to return to their place of employment -- though not necessarily to the same position -- if they renounce the party, their professional colleagues do not object to their return and they are "not war criminals," Bakaa said.

Bakaa, a former president of Baghdad's Mustansiriya University, said that in an attempt to create a peaceful, nonsectarian atmosphere on campuses, Iraqi university presidents agreed at a national conference in March 2004 to ban religious and political activities on school grounds.

"Unfortunately, many presidents and deans did not respect this declaration," he said. "So when I became minister of higher education, I relieved many university presidents."

Bakaa said he fired one president because he had asked Christian students to wear head scarves during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan; another was fired because he had turned the university into a center for a Sunni Arab political party; a third was let go because he had urged university staff members to support Moqtada Sadr, a Shiite cleric, at a time when Sadr's militia was fighting U.S. troops.

Sarhan's slaying also underscores the general lawlessness that has contributed to the killing of more than 65 Iraqi university professors in the past two years, according to Bakaa. The victims were from across the political spectrum; some were not politically active at all. All were slain off-campus.

Most recently, Moussa Salum, a deputy dean at Mustansiriya University, was killed last Thursday along with three of his bodyguards, the Reuters news agency reported.

Bakaa said some educators were killed by U.S. military forces "by mistake." As for the rest of the slayings, "not a single one has been solved and no one has been charged," he said. "The state is not able to protect deans physically and legally."

The former minister said he believed that Sarhan's death was "exploited for political ends" by "some parties" who "blew this event out of proportion and blamed it on the Baathists."

Three days after Sarhan's killing, the president of Baghdad University, Musa Jawad Musawi, said in an interview that "there was incitement and I believe even sabotage" at the campus demonstration that turned violent. "The whole event started with a celebration for the formation of Jafari's government inside the campus. Some weren't happy with that. That is all."

For Iraqi educators striving to make their campuses into venues of tolerant, democratic debate, Sarhan's death was a setback.

Hiti said he was extremely upset by the killing of Sarhan, whom he said he had treated "like my son." Sarhan's childhood friend, Danny Ghalib, confirmed that the Sunni dean and his Shiite student had been close.

Asmaa Abdulla, 23, a student who attended the celebration for Jafari, recalled Sarhan as "very involved in Shiite politics. He always wanted to promote Shiite religious occasions. But we are not all Shiites, so why should anyone promote sectarianism? This is not right.

"But I still don't approve of violence and killing," Abdulla added. "We are all Iraqis and should learn to live together."