© Tudor Banus
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A
global watchdog
Launched in
June 2001 with seed money from UNESCO, the Network on Education and Academic Rights
(NEAR) serves as a clearing-house for information regarding attacks on academic freedom
worldwide and also strives to increase contact between groups monitoring such attacks.
The network is developing links with civil society at large to marshal opinion against
violations of academic freedom. Reports of abuses are posted at www.nearinternational.org.
NEAR will alert those able to take action to protest to governments and international
agencies.
|
The
characteristics that mark scholars and students for persecution also allow them to
defend each other. |
In
the name of ethnic purity, religious conviction or even secularism, scholars and
their students are targets of oppression in a large swathe of countries. Academics
are stepping up efforts to marshal public opinion
Academic freedom is
a highly sensitive barometer of respect for human rights within a society. Respect
for academic freedom indicates acceptance of open debate and protection of differing
ideas and groups; its absence fosters a climate of ignorance and intolerance—a perfect
breeding ground for extremism. Strong evidence for this proposition comes from Afghanistan,
where the Taliban’s first actions were to shut down most higher education centres
and ban women and girls from attending school. But in less extreme forms, governments
around the world justify violations of human rights by casting all critical thought
as an attack on public morality, national security, or cultural purity. Naturally,
some of the first victims are academics whose job it is to question all aspects of
their own civilization, from its scientific theories to cultural constructs.
Attacks on academic freedom are not limited to the Taliban or to the Islamic world.
For instance, academics have recently come under official or public pressure in the
United States and Canada for questioning various aspects of their governments’ past
or projected policies. In the current climate, the right to speak out is of utmost
importance, lest American universities return to the dark days of anti-Communist
hysteria.
During the Cold War, attacks on academic freedom had an apparent ideological rationale.
Each side attacked those thinkers who questioned their society’s reigning dogma:
dissidents were subjected to witch hunts and intellectual (and physical) exile. In
many countries, the response was more violent, though no less predictable. Activist
teachers and students were killed, maimed, jailed and silenced in Latin America,
Africa, and the Middle East, in China and Korea (North and South), by governments
aligning themselves with one of the dominant superpowers.
Rising
pressure
With
the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was expected that human rights—and academic freedom
in particular—would improve. The belief was that there would be no need to punish
academics in a world seemingly focused on economic development, especially where
they were instrumental in creating and fostering the newly emerging notions of financial,
intellectual and cultural globalization.
But the end of the Cold War and the advent of easier global communications have placed
academics even more directly in the line of fire. Their relatively high level of
interaction across borders enables them to judge their societies in comparison with
others, and to point out their governments’ shortcomings to their students and the
public. With another international conflict simmering, the pressure to curb academic
freedom is sure to grow.
A variety of new, troubling excuses are now invoked to justify oppression of educators
and their students. The politics of ethnic and religious identity are chief among
them, as governments define themselves as protectors of a particular orthodoxy—be
it ethnic purity, religious conviction or even secularism—and persecute those who
question it.
Academics in predominantly Muslim countries have borne the heaviest burden of this
new type of oppression. From Indonesia and Malaysia to Pakistan, throughout Central
Asia and the Middle East and all the way to North Africa, scholars and their students
face tremendous pressure. These countries fall under three broad categories.
First are those countries where religion is an official part of the governing ideology.
In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, governments justify attacks against
their academic critics on the basis of ostensibly protecting the faith. In Pakistan
this year, a professor of hygiene was sentenced to die for questioning whether the
Prophet of Islam would have been able to observe proper religious demands before
his divine ordination. In Iran, where academics and students have been debating the
concordance of their ancient religion and the modern world, scores of scholars (including
several clerics and theologians) have been jailed for supposedly insulting religious
sensitivities. In these countries, harsh repression is often excused by the supposed
threat posed by foreign ideas.
Second, where the governments have officially embraced a “secular,” non-religious
ideology, like Turkey and many of the Central Asian republics, even exhibiting piety
can lead to official harassment. Invoking a nebulous Islamic threat to their orders,
authoritarian governments have maintained their rule by restricting all scholars
who criticize it.
Third, in the majority of predominantly Muslim countries, governments have used the
supposed tension between Islam and the West to justify years of administrative mismanagement,
fiscal corruption, and political repression. Tunisia and Egypt, two countries cast
as stalwart allies of the West, tolerate neither religious nor liberal criticism
of their governments. Instead, pious scholars are silenced based on the supposed
threat they pose to the political order; the officially sanctioned religious establishment
is then mollified by government attacks on academics who criticize injustice using
the language of liberal democracy.
The politics of ethnic identity have also fuelled attacks on academics. In Yugoslavia,
social scientists and historians were called upon to justify the excesses of ethnic
rivalry. When this attempt invariably failed, the Milosevic government initiated
a purge of Serbian universities. In Indonesia, academics in areas with ethnically
distinct populations—such as the restive Aceh province—came under pressure from the
government to squelch any discussion of greater local autonomy. In Turkmenistan,
the teaching of all foreign languages has been banned in the name of fostering Turkmen
science.
A troubling new dimension of the limits imposed on scholarship has been the “privatization”
of assaults on academic freedom. Militant opposition groups are increasingly willing
and able to attack academics who call for reason. In Spain, academics in favour of
a peaceful resolution of Basque demands suffer intimidation at the hands of the separatist
movement. And in Colombia, both pro-government paramilitary groups and the guerrillas
they fight have taken to attacking universities in order to silence their critics.
But there is a significant countervailing trend. In the past few years, academics
have been increasingly willing and able to work on behalf of their oppressed colleagues.
All the characteristics that mark scholars and students for persecution—their critical
minds, their access to information from inside and outside their own borders—also
allow them to defend each other.
The response of the academic community worldwide to China’s arrest earlier this year
of several scholars on espionage charges is instructive. Over 400 China specialists
from some 15 countries signed a petition in support of the scholars, calling on the
Chinese government to substantiate its charges and to adhere to domestic and international
standards of judicial process. The petition was released to the media with the cooperation
of several prominent academic groups. The U.S. government interceded with China on
behalf of those academics who were American citizens or residents. Three were released
soon after they had been convicted by tribunals widely described as falling short
of proper judicial standards. While international academic support played a pivotal
role, several scholars—the exact number is unknown—languish in detention on vague
and unsubstantiated charges.
The international community of scholars can lobby effectively on behalf of persecuted
colleagues, but this requires cooperation over time—precisely the support offered
by the Human Rights Watch academic freedom programme, and more broadly, the Network
on Education and Academic Rights. |
