Chicago Sun Times
January 25, 2007 Thursday
Final Edition
Death of Iraq’s middle class: The country’s best and brightest have
fled, demolishing hope for the country’s future
by Keith David Watenpaugh, History News Network
On a blistering June afternoon in 2003, I sat in the Baghdad office
of the president of al-Mustansiriyya University, the historian Taher
al-Bakaa.
I was there as part of group of Middle East scholars to assess the
condition of Baghdad’s universities and libraries in the wake of the
war. Outside, students were celebrating graduation. Inside, huddled
around a fan, we talked about past dictators and tyrants, and about
how al-Bakaa would now revitalize his campus, which had been looted
and burned just after the fall of the city two months before.
There was an infectious confidence in al-Bakaa and others whom I met
that Iraq’s universities would play a positive role in the rebuilding
of the country and re-establishing links with the West.
But today, Al-Bakaa lives in Boston as one of more than 1.5 million
refugees who have fled the war. In Baghdad this week his campus was
bombed, and more than 60 students waiting for buses to take them home
were killed.
The new refugees
This new refugee crisis dwarfs earlier ones in the Middle East,
including that of the Armenians in 1915 and the Palestinians in 1948
and 1967. Beyond the basic numbers, what makes this crisis such a
challenge is that a large portion of the refugees are from Iraq’s
middle class.
And just as those earlier refugee crises sent shock waves throughout
the Arab world, this crisis will have an impact on the stability and
viability of Iraq and the surrounding countries for decades to come.
Our normal image of the refugee — malnourished, languishing in dusty
camps — doesn’t apply here. Iraq’s middle-class refugees are its
teachers, doctors, college professors, scientists, bureaucrats,
technicians and entrepreneurs, the very people upon whom the future
of that country depends.
They are leaving for multiple reasons, but chiefly because of the
violence, which the UN estimates claimed more than 34,000 lives last
year, and the rational fear that the new Iraq will be run by
religious demagogues intent on turning back the clock on issues of
religious equality, their daughters’ access to education and
professional lives, and freedom of thought and expression.
In the old Iraq, mixed middle-class marriages of Sunnis and Shia were
common; now these are deadly. The sectarian designation of one’s
co-workers at the office was rarely a topic of polite conversation or
had much relevance, and now has become the touchstone for most forms
of social interaction.
Iraq’s middle class is fleeing at such a rapid rate that over 40
percent has left since 2003. Add this to this torrent a slow trickle
of Iraq’s educated classes from the 1970s forward, and we’ve reached
a point where virtually everyone who could leave has left or fled to
Kurdistan. For all intents and purposes, Iraq’s middle class is near
death, and what is left is just a pale shadow of its former self. It
has ceased to be a relevant feature of Iraqi society.
In Iraq, the loss of this class means the loss of the basis of civil
society and the disappearance of those Iraqis who would be committed
to non-sectarian politics.
Welcomed . . . for now
In the greater Middle East, at least for the moment, these new
middle-class refugees have been welcomed. A good example is the
recently established Syrian International University for Sciences and
Technology, which has filled its teaching staff with Iraqi scientists
and professors. These refugees have also pumped the equivalent of
billions of dollars into the moribund economies of their neighbors as
they buy homes and businesses. But every course taught in Syria by an
Iraqi professor means little to an Iraqi student sitting in an empty
classroom; every dinar spent in one of Amman’s upscale shopping malls
is one less to pay for goods or services in Baghdad.
On the other side of the equation, these refugees constitute a
volatile addition to already unstable societies. Iraqi refugees are
treated either as tourists or illegal aliens in their neighboring
host countries. It is assumed that their residence is temporary. But
past refugee crisises suggest that most refugees, especially those
from the middle class, never go home. Disenfranchised and stateless,
they will be increasingly resented by their hosts as competitors for
resources, jobs and political power. Iraq’s middle class refugees
will then become the raw material for a new generation of extremists,
angry and intent on violence directed not just against enemies in
Iraq and the Middle East, but also against those of us in the West
whose actions made them refugees in the first place.
U.S. responsibility?
The U.S. government has a moral and legal responsibility for Iraq’s
refugees. This is already recognized in special programs established
to help certain Iraqis — primarily interpreters and others whose
service to the U.S. would endanger their lives — come to America.
However, only a tiny fraction of those needing refugee status have
been admitted to the U.S. While publicly officials cite concerns
about national security, another explanation for this resistance is
that expanding this program would be interpreted as an admission of
failure in Iraq.
Nevertheless, key to any solution is creating conditions that will
allow Iraqis safety, but not preclude return. In the near term, the
U.S. should offer unlimited extensions of temporary visas to Iraqis.
In the long term, the U.S. should be prepared to absorb a large
portion of this refugee population.
The central irony of the middle class refugee applies here as well.
They make their homelands poorer by leaving, but make our societies
richer in coming.