Rage fresh, 16 years on
Teacher recalls helplessness, fear, as students massacred
Friday, August 24, 2007
He did nothing to stop Saddam's soldiers from marching into the school and dragging students from the classroom, binding their hands, pushing them into the courtyard and executing them one by one.
Momel Salim Salarh, a 54-year-old teacher, still remembers trembling, as did the entire staff at Suleimaniya Industrial Preparatory School for Boys. The teachers and students feared for their lives. They knew it would incite yet more deaths. They knew it would mean their own deaths. They already knew other students from the school had been tracked down in their homes, and were never seen again.
Still more were driven, bound and gagged, all the way to Baghdad and, once there, had their throats slit.
Still more were beaten and tortured before being left to die in remote areas.
Fifty-one in all perished at the school on that day in 1991 during the war that Saddam waged against the Kurds. Their deaths are now remembered in a mural that dominates the wall just inside the entrance. The mural shows a fallen adolescent, his throat cut, a book fallen at his hands and a tree blossoming in his chest.
The tree, says Salarh, is "the freedom that grows from the blood of the fallen."
Surrounding the mural are the names of 23 of the 51 who died, and their ages, when Saddam's armies executed them.
But in stepping into the quiet corridors of this school now and pausing in the classrooms with the neat rows of wooden desks and watching the morning sun pouring through the windows, the picture here is not one of death, but of serenity and peace.
Salarh can't forget the day the soldiers descended upon the school in Suleimaniya.
"They tied up the hands of these kids and took them away and murdered them," he said. "We were all afraid. We could do nothing. We were helpless."
Saddam's henchmen had already decided their fate.
Their crime?
"They were Kurds! That's it!" said Salarh, still full of rage over that "black day" 16 years ago when he stepped outside of his classroom at the sudden echo of the soldiers' boots on the tiled corridors of this school.
The crime was more than being Kurdish. These students had been assisting the Peshmarga, or Kurdish fighters who battled Saddam. These guerrillas were living outside the cities in the mountains. Those same Kurdish fighters today, under the training of American soldiers, are keeping the peace in Kurdistan.
Salarh takes a seat in the empty classroom. He has taught here for 34 years. For him, this is home. This is where he always believed he could make a difference in the lives of the youths of Kurdistan. He had almost lost all hope until the Americans invaded and overthrew Saddam.
Salarh said the school for the past few years has been clawing its way back to turn is facilities into a first-class technical college training adolescents in all levels of industrial design and work.
Some 400 are expected in these classrooms in September. Some 100 teachers will be involved in their training.
It's part of the efforts being made in Kurdistan to widen the educational opportunities for youths and, to that end, the regional government is pouring more resources into the programs. Meanwhile, trouble plagues Baghdad, where the schools operate in fear and behind closed doors.
In Kurdistan, since the fall of Saddam, there has been a push to introduce more English courses in the curriculum so that students from primary school to university will have functional use of the language. The Suleimaniya education department is the only one in Iraq that provides lessons in English for all students from the third year of primary schools.
But also a distinct part of the education program now in Kurdistan is a blending of studies in "technology and human rights."
The other development in education in Kurdistan is the permission given by the regional government for students to complete their teaching degrees. These were denied under Saddam's rule. Many of these students had completed course work, but were never given the chance to write their finals that would grant them the credentials to teach.
But for professionals -- such as professors, but also doctors, pharmacists and other university-trained individuals -- staying in Iraq is a pessimistic choice to say the least. According to the Brookings Institution in Washington, nearly half of the professionals in Iraq have fled the country.
Security is still an issue, but the future is never certain in Iraq, said Salarh, and that is why so many professionals are reluctant to return. The country is also still plagued by war and terrorism. It has been like that since he was a young man. That is why there is no guarantee of a brighter future, he pointed out.
Aram Eissa in an article in the Iraqi-Kurdist Digest, an English publication in Slemani, Iraq, agreed things might appear to be calm and secure in Kurdistan, but that not everyone feels this. He said they are "haunted by images of brutality on national television.... All must learn to live with the nagging fear of one day finding themselves a little too close to a car bomb or suicide attack -- in spite of assurances of local authorities that Kurdistan is secure."
Salarh said the mural is there to remind teachers and students of that, but also that freedom is "fleeting and hard won, and people die for it every day."
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