FT Magazine, 29 June 2018 'I Kind of Gave Up': How Academics in Danger

FT Magazine, 29 June 2018 ‘I kind of gave up’: how academics in danger rebuild their lives in exile Scholars in war-torn and authoritarian countries are finding a lifeline in British universities Tim Judah A few minutes after meeting Zaher al-Bakour in a Caffè Nero on Aberdeen’s Union Street, his phone rings and he swipes to decline the call. It is just his sister, he says. Mortified that he should do this to someone WhatsApp-calling him from rebel-held territory in Syria while we chat over croissants and cappuccinos, I suggest that he call her back. She thinks her nine-year-old daughter has typhoid and, since there are no doctors there, wants al-Bakour, an academic who specialises in pharmacology, to analyse the case. He can’t. Though he spends his days in a white lab coat tinkering with test tubes and microscopes, “I’m not a doctor,” he says. It’s a cruel twist to a modern war. Imagine that, in 1943, you could have called Aberdeen from the Warsaw ghetto. Indeed, in a way al-Bakour, a 27-year-old from conflict-torn Aleppo, has ended up in the granite “grey city” because of the Nazis. He is an exiled academic who has been brought to Britain by the Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara), a British organisation founded in 1933 to help German-Jewish scholars who were fired when Hitler came to power. That same year, Albert Einstein made a powerful speech in London’s Albert Hall to raise funds for the organisation. Of Einstein’s generation, 16 of those who were helped by Cara went on to win Nobel Prizes. Then, like geological layers of war and terror, came Hungarians in 1956, junta-fleeing South Americans, South Africans in flight from the apartheid regime and, now, those from the Middle East. Aleppo, August 2016 © Getty There are tens of millions of refugees in the world but al-Bakour is part of a tiny and exclusive group plucked to safety by fate and talent. There are currently just 280 Cara fellows. Its mission has remained strikingly simple over its 85-year existence. If you are an academic who has taught, and is in danger, you are eligible to apply for help. “It might be because they’re caught up in conflict, or maybe their university has physically been attacked, or maybe there were militias interfering with the work of universities,” says Stephen Wordsworth, Cara’s executive director. “Or it may be something they’ve written or said. Essentially, it’s still about helping people who need to get away.” The fellowship gave al-Bakour the means to escape from Aleppo and, ultimately, to pursue a PhD at Aberdeen University. Up until then, his university experience had mostly been lived under siege. First, as war broke out in 2011, there were demonstrations at Aleppo University against President Bashar al-Assad. The security forces intervened and people disappeared. Did he know what had happened to them? No, he says, he was simply too terrified to ask. Then fighting began. Rebels seized his street and no one in the family dared go out for a month. When they were pushed back, he returned to the university, which was shelled three times. Once, when he and 125 others were taking an exam, shells hit nearby buildings. They ducked under their desks and came out again when they heard the ambulances arrive. Then they were granted 10 minutes’ extra time. When he arrived in Scotland in late 2016, al-Bakour’s biggest shock was the weather. “It was cold. But even now, after one and a half years, if you ask me, ‘Do you believe you are in Aberdeen?’ I say, ‘No.’ I live with my memories from back home in Syria, and I always have that sustained pressure of thinking and praying and worrying about everyone in my family.” ------ Over the past couple of months, I have met a number of academics who have been offered similar routes out of their troubled homelands. Yet their stories are strikingly different. For Mohin Rahman (not his real name), death seemed imminent in Bangladesh. In August 2015, an Islamist group called on Rahman, an electronic and telecoms engineering teacher at a university in Dhaka, and 18 others “to prepare for being killed and to have repentance for what [they had] done against religion and their prophet”. Living under virtual house arrest, he slept with a knife under his pillow. “I knew that even if I was to be killed I could protect myself at least for a tiny bit,” he says. Leila Alieva © Eva Vermandel Leila Alieva, 56, is a political scientist from Azerbaijan. She reminds me that she once briefed me on the situation there when I visited the country as a reporter. Today, she has finished her fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. She now has a rare “exceptional talent” visa allowing her to stay in the UK but has yet to find work. “You don’t start looking for a job at my age,” she says. It was never easy being an independent thinker in Azerbaijan, a notoriously authoritarian state with a history of human rights abuses. However, says Alieva, two things in particular made the government paranoid — the 2014 uprising in Ukraine and the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey. Activists and journalists began to be arrested, with some charged with espionage for Armenia, Azerbaijan’s old enemy. Alieva was accused of being a western “fifth columnist” and, more prosaically, of tax evasion. Her friends told her to flee but she did not want to, not least because her mother was ill and needed caring for. “You are making a big mistake,” they said. “They intend to arrest everyone.” Rioting in Baku, Azerbaijan, after the presidential election victory of llham Aliyev, October 2003 © Getty My friends told me to flee She began to study prison conditions and thought: “I might not but I did not want to. survive.” Her sick mother was in bed. Alieva told her they were ‘You are making a big going to Georgia to see doctors, bundled her into the car and that mistake,’ they said. ‘They is how her exile began. I don’t need to ask what the darkest moment intend to arrest was for her. It seems too cruel, but it is also obvious. Cara arranged everyone’ the fellowship in Oxford but she had no money or visa for her mother, who went home to Azerbaijan. They skyped twice a day Leila Alieva, political scientist until one day her mother died of a heart attack as they chatted. ------ Naif Bezwan © Eva Vermandel Naif Bezwan, 56, is the first of the academic exiles I meet. The Kurdish political scientist has been a fellow at University College London since June last year, following his expulsion from Turkey after the failed coup in 2016. Exile has energised him, he says. He and colleagues are working to help other academics from Turkey who have been fired or are in prison. Bezwan is an old hand at this. As an undergraduate in Turkey in the 1980s, he was arrested twice for political activism. Deciding that as a young and ambitious Kurd he had no future in Turkey, he fled to Germany, where he eventually became an academic. “You had this sense of doing something new and inventing a new world,” he says. By 2014, a peace process of sorts in Turkey had brought a halt to fighting with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and a relaxation of the draconian treatment of Turkey’s Kurds by the government. Bezwan was invited to go back to open a political science department at a university in Mardin in south-eastern Turkey. He recalls his joy at being part of this changed atmosphere. He opened his first lecture with the words “good morning”, not in Turkish (“Günaydın”), the language he was lecturing in, but with the Kurdish “Rojbas”. There were some 50 students in the lecture hall, he says, and for a moment there was utter silence. Then they chorused “Rojbas” back to him. “I explained why it was important, after years of not being in my native country, and being at a university speaking to Kurdish students, to say one word in Kurdish.” He recalls how, during this brief period of Kurdish renaissance, he “did something meaningful for me and for wider society and for my students”. Then, in January 2016, when fighting had begun again, he signed a peace petition and was immediately suspended for “supporting a terrorist organisation”. The authorities employed a divide and rule strategy. Some faculty members were called upon to take part in investigations of others. The atmosphere turned poisonous. Then came the failed coup attempt in July and in August Turkish troops entered the Syrian fray. Bezwan gave a newspaper interview arguing that Kurds needed unity. He was instantly fired, but other academics were being arrested. Fearing he would be next, he gave a final defiant and unofficial lecture to his students and fled to London, where Cara organised his UCL fellowship. Turkish tanks in the Kurdish town of Cizre, March 2003 © Getty Wordsworth says applications reached a peak in late 2016, due to a combination of events in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey after the coup. “At that time, we were getting 15-20 inquiries per week.” He explains that Cara is able to carry out its work because it has support from more than 100 universities, who provide places and funding. Despite this generosity, he says, not all of the universities can afford to fund multiple postings, so the challenge is generating extra funds.

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