Professor Lalzad, reunited with his family in London. |
Since
the 1930s, an organization in the UK has assisted refugee scholars in pursuing their
academic careers. Abdul Lalzad, a professor from Kabul, is among those who have managed
to continue their research
Thermal engineering
is not usually seen as politically dangerous and in normal circumstances, a scientist
working on solar powered desalination would be welcome in an arid land like Afghanistan.
But circumstances have not been normal in that unhappy country for a long time.
At Kabul University, Professor Abdul Lalzad and his colleagues struggled with shortages
due to the long civil war and declining numbers of staff and students (a majority
of them women in the early 1990s), but they were able to pursue research and teaching.
The holder of a Russian masters degree, Lalzad held senior positions at the university
and had five textbooks and more than 30 published articles to his credit. Kabul University
was badly damaged during the factional fighting between mujahedin groups after the
fall of the Russian-backed Najibullah government, but it was not until the victory
of the Taliban that it was closed completely in 1996.
Uphill
struggle
Lalzad’s
academic work came to an abrupt halt and his wife, Pashtoon, lost her job as a teacher
when women were forbidden to work. For his children, especially his four daughters,
educational prospects were bleak. He worked for the Red Cross, in charge of distributing
food to 40,000 widows and disabled people. But he was arrested, beaten with Kalashnikovs
and thrown in prison on suspicion of giving information to anti-Taliban forces. Contacts
in the Red Cross got him released, but knowing his life was in danger he fled to
Pakistan, where his wife and children followed later.
He arrived in Britain in December 1998, where resuming his academic research proved
an uphill struggle. After a frustrating 18-month wait while his application for asylum
was approved, he eventually secured a place at South Bank University in London to
pursue his research. He was helped financially by the Council for Assisting Refugee
Academics, a body founded in 1933 to assist Jewish academics and other victims of
the Nazi purges of universities. CARA also helped to secure visas for his family,
whose last members arrived a week before the American bombing of Afghanistan started.
Speaking at the launch of the the Network for Education and Academic Rights last
June in Paris (see p. 30), Lalzad warned that Afghanistan had become a “roundabout
of anti-civilization…. Vying to be the world’s biggest supplier of opium, a safe-haven
for terrorists and religious extremists, a place with massive destruction of human
rights, particularly women’s rights, Afghanistan poses threats to regional and international
peace and stability.”
Against this sombre backdrop, his research into desalination techniques has been
progressing at South Bank, where he is building an experimental model of a small
solar-powered plant. In September, he presented his results to an international conference
and has been approached by companies to patent his ideas. “If I get the results that
I obtained from mathematical modelling, it will be the most cost effective and most
efficient desalination technology in the world,” he said.
CARA points out that the payback Britain has enjoyed from helping refugee academics
is out of all proportion to the tiny investment: since the 1930s, refugee scholars
have included 18 Nobel prizewinners. While the locations of persecution have changed,
the problem remains. CARA is now helping more than 30 refugee academics, including
an Iraqi paediatrician who helped the Kurdish population, a parasitologist from Somalia
and an Ethiopian pathologist who arrived in London with five bullets still in his
body.
But the thirst for education is powerful. On her second day in Britain, Lalzad’s
daughter Shogofa was enrolling in college: she intends to become a doctor.
For more information on CARA, see: www.academic-refugees.org |
