WELCOME PLAYERS: A NEW DRIVE TO HELP REFUGEE SCHOLARS WILL BENEFIT NOT ONLY THEM BUT ALSO THE CAUSE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM
Donald Macleod
The Guardian – United Kingdom
Mar 21, 2006
A long, painful journey brought Nahro Zagros from classically trained
violinist and lecturer in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to playing gigs in
Hull with a band called Yorkshire Kurd.
Soon he is off on another journey to Armenia to study the music and
culture of the semi-nomadic Yezidis. For, with help from the Council
for Assisting Refugee Academics (Cara), Zagros is doing a masters
degree in ethnomusicology at York University, researching how music
can display cultural identity.
The young Kurdish musician is one of about 60 currently being helped
by Cara, an organisation that originated in 1933 to help academic
refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Over the decades the countries of
origin have changed – South Africa in the 1960s, Iraq and Iran in
the 1980s and 1990s – but the need has remained.
Indeed, only a tiny fraction of refugee academics receive help. Last
week the president of New York University, John Sexton, was in London
to launch the UK network of Scholars at Risk, set up in collaboration
with Cara to try and reach more of them.
He told a meeting at the British Academy that by helping academics
under extreme threat, they were protecting their own academic freedom
against less dramatic, but real encroachments.
“There is a vital connection between the aggressive struggle against
the most extreme cases of denial of academic freedom – cases that
take the form of threats and harassment, loss of jobs, and even
imprisonment and physical harm – and the less dramatic, but constant,
struggle against gradual encroachments on our own academic vocations,”
said Sexton, whose university is home to Scholars at Risk.
Zagros found himself among the extreme cases when he was a music
lecturer at Iraq’s Institute of Fine Arts and conductor of an orchestra
that toured in the Middle East and Europe. He worked for a television
station owned by Uday Hussein and was pressured into becoming involved
in events run by Uday.
Following a short visit to Kurdistan to see his relatives, he was
imprisoned for nearly six months in 2000. He fled Iraq shortly
afterwards.
Dispersed to Hull, he sought out other musicians and formed Yorkshire
Kurd, playing gigs to raise money for refugees and giving workshops
and performances in local schools to promote diversity. They have
also performed at festivals in Britain and abroad, playing a fusion
of Middle Eastern music, swing jazz, eastern European Gypsy music and
Jewish klezmer. “We like to combine all these great tunes and show
people we can work together and promote integration through music.”
Without Cara, he says, he could not have resumed study at York and
researched the Yezidis, a group of Kurds from Turkey who took refuge
in Armenia in the 1880s. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union,
a combination of unemployment and resurgent Armenian nationalism is
threatening their culture, says Zagros.
There are plenty of other stories to tell – the Iranian professor
of paediatrics, the Iraqi medical lecturer, both now establishing
themselves in this country, for instance. Applications for refugee
status in the UK are falling, but pleas for help from academics
continue to increase, says John Akker, executive secretary of Cara. He
estimates that of the 10,000 refugees in Glasgow, nearly 1,000 have
a substantial academic background.
Cara has recently been given pounds 500,000 over five years from the
Lisbet Rausing charitable fund to help with grants to scholars. With
the Scholars at Risk network, Cara is planning how universities
could use their services in such areas as HR, student services,
language centres, accommodation, welfare, childcare and international
activities, to help.
So far 15 UK universities have joined. Birkbeck College London,
Cambridge, Leeds Metropolitan, London South Bank University, York,
Glasgow Caledonian, London University, Wolverhampton, Kent and
Universities UK are represented on the board. The Open University,
Luton, School of Oriental and African Studies, Sunderland, Ulster and
Lincoln are members, and University College London, London School of
Economics, Keele, Manchester, King’s College London, and Oxford are
expected to join soon.
The payoff to Britain for sheltering academic refugees has been
spectacular. Of Cara’s former grantees, who included names like
Karl Popper and Max Perutz, 18 became Nobel laureates, 16 received
knighthoods, 71 were made fellows or foreign members of the Royal
Society, and 50 fellows of the British Academy.
But Sexton made a rather different case for the work of Cara and
Scholars at Risk -helping defend academic freedom against more
subtle pressures from outside the university, or even from political
correctness within academe.
“The race of our century will be a race between the university and
the madrasa; and it is important from the outset that we understand
the differences between the two,” he said.
“Xenophobes and ideologues seek to influence the research we undertake,
the books we write or the classes we teach. Thus, for example, in the
United States, research universities are pressurised to forgo stem
cell research, and pressed to meet externally defined ideological
quotas for faculty. And every university president at some point faces
enormous external pressure because a speaker deemed ‘controversial’
is coming to campus . . .
“For if not anchored in the causes and consequences of extreme threats,
our claims on behalf of academic freedom can too easily be construed
as petty disputes by a privileged elite demanding special rights
without corresponding responsibilities. Being able to locate the
complaints and warnings of those who fear government encroachment,
or attempts to quell disturbing speech or provocative research, along
the same spectrum that stretches to the more extreme and violent
forms of intellectual repression, forces a discussion of the central
importance of the principle of academic freedom. By seeing what happens
in societies where universities and scholars are put at extreme risk,
we come to better appreciate why we defend what we do and better
recognise the warning signs of the erosion of those freedoms.”
Cara, London South Bank University Technopark, 90 London Road,
London SE1 6LN Email: [email protected]
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Iraqi musician Nahro Zagros fled his homeland after he was put under
pressure and imprisoned there Photograph: John Jones.