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UK: Nahro Zagros and 'Yorkshire Kurd' Band
21.3.2006
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March
21, 2006, A new drive to help refugee scholars will
benefit not only them but also the cause of academic
freedom, writes Donald MacLeod
A long, painful journey brought Nahro Zagros from
classically trained violinist and lecturer in Saddam
Hussein's Iraq to playing gigs in Hull with a band
called Yorkshire Kurd.
Soon he is off on another journey to Armenia to
study the music and culture of the semi-nomadic
Yezidis. For, with help from the Council for
Assisting Refugee Academics (Cara), Zagros is doing
a masters degree in ethnomusicology at York
University, researching how music can display
cultural identity.
The young Kurdish musician is one of about 60
currently being helped by Cara, an organisation that
originated in 1933 to help academic refugees from
Hitler's Germany. Over the decades the countries of
origin have changed - South Africa in the 1960s,
Iraq and Iran in the 1980s and 1990s - but the need
has remained.
Indeed, only a tiny fraction of refugee academics
receive help. Last week the president of New York
University, John Sexton, was in London to launch the
UK network of Scholars at Risk, set up in
collaboration with Cara to try and reach more of
them.
He told a meeting at the British Academy that by
helping academics under extreme threat, they were
protecting their own academic freedom against less
dramatic, but real encroachments.
"There is a vital connection between the aggressive
struggle against the most extreme cases of denial of
academic freedom - cases that take the form of
threats and harassment, loss of jobs, and even
imprisonment and physical harm - and the less
dramatic, but constant, struggle against gradual
encroachments on our own academic vocations," said
Sexton, whose university is home to Scholars at
Risk.
Zagros found himself among the extreme cases when he
was a music lecturer at Iraq's Institute of Fine
Arts and conductor of an orchestra that toured in
the Middle East and Europe. He worked for a
television station owned by Uday Hussein and was
pressured into becoming involved in events run by
Uday.
Following a short visit to Kurdistan to see his
relatives, he was imprisoned for nearly six months
in 2000. He fled Iraq shortly afterwards.
Dispersed to Hull, he sought out other musicians and
formed Yorkshire Kurd, playing gigs to raise money
for refugees and giving workshops and performances
in local schools to promote diversity.
They have also performed at festivals in Britain and
abroad, playing a fusion of Middle Eastern music,
swing jazz, eastern European Gypsy music and Jewish
klezmer. "We like to combine all these great tunes
and show people we can work together and promote
integration through music."
Without Cara, he says, he could not have resumed
study at York and researched the Yezidis, a group of
Kurds from Turkey who took refuge in Armenia in the
1880s. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a
combination of unemployment and resurgent Armenian
nationalism is threatening their culture, says
Zagros.
There are plenty of other stories to tell - the
Iranian professor of paediatrics, the Iraqi medical
lecturer, both now establishing themselves in this
country, for instance.
Applications for refugee status in the UK are
falling, but pleas for help from academics continue
to increase, says John Akker, executive secretary of
Cara. He estimates that of the 10,000 refugees in
Glasgow, nearly 1,000 have a substantial academic
background.
Cara has recently been given £500,000 over five
years from the Lisbet Rausing charitable fund to
help with grants to scholars. With the Scholars at
Risk network, Cara is planning how universities
could use their services in such areas as HR,
student services, language centres, accommodation,
welfare, childcare and international activities, to
help.
So far 15 UK universities have joined. Birkbeck
College London, Cambridge, Leeds Metropolitan,
London South Bank University, York, Glasgow
Caledonian, London University, Wolverhampton, Kent
and Universities UK are represented on the board.
The Open University, Luton, School of Oriental and
African Studies, Sunderland, Ulster and Lincoln are
members, and University College London, London
School of Economics, Keele, Manchester, King's
College London, and Oxford are expected to join
soon.
The payoff to Britain for sheltering academic
refugees has been spectacular. Of Cara's former
grantees, who included names like Karl Popper and
Max Perutz, 18 became Nobel laureates, 16 received
knighthoods, 71 were made fellows or foreign members
of the Royal Society, and 50 fellows of the British
Academy.
But Sexton made a rather different case for the work
of Cara and Scholars at Risk -helping defend
academic freedom against more subtle pressures from
outside the university, or even from political
correctness within academe.
"The race of our century will be a race between the
university and the madrasa; and it is important from
the outset that we understand the differences
between the two," he said.
"Xenophobes and ideologues seek to influence the
research we undertake, the books we write or the
classes we teach. Thus, for example, in the United
States, research universities are pressurised to
forgo stem cell research, and pressed to meet
externally defined ideological quotas for faculty.
And every university president at some point faces
enormous external pressure because a speaker deemed
'controversial' is coming to campus ...
"For if not anchored in the causes and consequences
of extreme threats, our claims on behalf of academic
freedom can too easily be construed as petty
disputes by a privileged elite demanding special
rights without corresponding responsibilities. Being
able to locate the complaints and warnings of those
who fear government encroachment, or attempts to
quell disturbing speech or provocative research,
along the same spectrum that stretches to the more
extreme and violent forms of intellectual
repression, forces a discussion of the central
importance of the principle of academic freedom.
By seeing what happens in societies where
universities and scholars are put at extreme risk,
we come to better appreciate why we defend what we
do and better recognise the warning signs of the
erosion of those freedoms."
· Cara, London South Bank University Technopark, 90
London Road, London SE1 6LN
www.guardian.co.uk
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