Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

By Louis Yako

'A vivid, inspiring and sometimes poetic history of modern Iraq' - miriam cooke

Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, many Iraqi academics were assassinated. Countless others received bullets in envelopes and instructions to leave their institutions (and in many cases the country) or get killed. Many heeded the warning and fled into exile.

Having played such a pivotal role in shaping post-independence Iraqi society, the exile and internal displacement of its academics has had a profound impact. Tracing the academic, political and social lives of 63 academics, Bullets in Envelopes offers a 'genealogy of loss', and a groundbreaking appraisal of the dismantling and restructuring of Iraqi institutions, culture and society.

Through extensive fieldwork in the UK, Jordan and Iraqi Kurdistan, Louis Yako shows the human side of the destructive 2003 occupation, and asks us to imagine a better future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Jun 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781786807458

Louis Yako

Louis Yako is an independent Iraqi-American anthropologist, writer, poet and journalist. He has written for a range of publications including CounterPunch, openDemocracy, Global Research and The Feminist Wire.

Book preview

Introduction

The Story of This Story

This book is a reflection through the eyes of those who survived, continue to endure the consequences, and insist on living to honor everything that was destroyed and lost in Iraq over the last few decades. Through what I call a genealogy of loss, I trace the relationship between academia and power in contemporary Iraq, as experienced by Iraq’s currently exiled and displaced academics, a group uniquely well-positioned to bear witness to the ways in which academia is entangled in vicious and violent political systems, wars, and occupation. As I learned from many interlocutors, academia cannot be understood separately from politics. This work shows that academics, while vital for society, are also some of the most susceptible groups to political violence. I call the trajectory of their lives a genealogy of loss, because by tracing their stories in Iraq’s contemporary history, it becomes clear that the losses they have incurred have had drastic effects on the entire society.

Iraqi academics moved from a centralized, secular state into occupied death zones marked by foreign occupation and sectarian violence, which in turn pushed many of those who had fallen out of grace with the post-occupation political regimes into exile to face yet other sophisticated, degrading, and inhumane forms of power and methods of governance just to stay alive. This book examines these stages with ethnographic data captured through the voices of those who were there before 2003, who were there after the occupation, and who are now in exile insisting on living to tell the story. It is a work ultimately about people trapped between a past still alive in their memories, a present that is unbearable, and a future that is not born yet.

QUESTIONS AND CONTRIBUTIONS

The two central questions driving this work can be summarized as follows: what does the trajectory of the lives of academics from contemporary Iraq (including the Baʿath era, the occupation, exile, and displacement) teach us about the complex relationship between academics, as key engineers of society, and the states under which they live or find themselves forced into living? And, how should we understand the post-occupation assassinations, liquidation, forced internal displacements, and external exiles of these academics as part of dismantling the Iraqi state (or any state), its institutions, and society? In other words, what do the stories of these academics reveal about new forms of governance, and consequently, about the reconfiguration of key terms in this work: state, academics, and exile?

After I examine these academics’ lives during the Baʿath era, I look at their lives during the post-2003 occupation, focusing on the death threats they received. Most threats were sent in the form of bullets inside envelopes, along with threatening notes to leave or be killed. Many academics were assassinated, liquidated, silenced, displaced, and exiled. Many were forced to put their lives and skills on sale, which turned them from respected and relatively stable actors in Iraqi higher education and society into what I call lives under contract. My research shows that what happened to these academics in the post-2003 occupation of Iraq was not the result of circumstance or a unique case limited to the Iraqi context. The destiny of these academics, though intense and extreme, is part and parcel of a worldwide trend to reconfigure the role of academics and the terms of the contract between academics and the powers under which they live and think in the neoliberal age.

In capturing these testimonies, I take seriously what the decolonial thinker, Walter Mignolo, notes regarding scholars who have for too long assumed that the knowing subject in the disciplines is transparent, disincorporated from the known and untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world in which people are racially ranked and regions are racially configured (Mignolo 2009: 160). As such, one way to decolonize knowledge produced about other people is by bringing to the fore the epistemic silences of Western scholarship (Mignolo 2009: 162). The silenced voices of these Iraqi academics can change how we see Iraq and the Middle East to rethink some of the most challenging questions about the region and the world today. These stories also change the terms of the conversation, if there is a genuine desire to allow the subaltern to speak and to pay attention to what they have to say (Spivak 1988). Doing so can create, using anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod’s words, new zones of theorizing on the Middle East, a call that dates to 1989, but remains as timely and urgent today (Abu-Lughod 1989). This work answers the call by diversifying the voices and testimonies that tell the story of what is happening in the region.

The book seeks to make three key contributions. First, it exposes the multifaceted and complex sides of the relationship between academics and different regimes of power. It expands our knowledge about the many complex faces of the state, the various methods of governance that emerge as a result of changing power relations, as well as how academics are entangled in these political and violent changes. Turning Iraq from a united, secular state ruled by a single-party, into divided sectarian, ethno-nationalist zones ruled by multiple sectarian and ultra-nationalist regimes and militias, has changed the definition, role, and place of academics and academia altogether. The new academic in post-occupation Iraq must fit with the new political realities on the ground. Therefore, unsurprisingly, anyone related to the old political order (or to any undesirable political order) was marginalized, killed, or displaced. This work shows that the three main cleansing methods used in post-invasion Iraq that best capture the reconfiguration of power included: assassinations and death threats, sectarian violence, and the application of de-Baʿathification policies. Consequently, those academics who either did not fit into this new political mold or who refused to play by the rules of the new game had no choice but to pay the price with death or exile.

Second, this work contributes to our understanding on how exile and displacement start at home through violent political changes. It suggests that we trace the problems—and the solutions—for refugees, exiled and displaced populations all the way back home rather than the current locations where these populations struggle or reside.

Third, academics are also citizens and, therefore, the political upheavals and violence they witnessed as a result of their positionality in post-invasion Iraq raise questions, as some scholars and analysts have previously suggested, about how sectarianism and ethno-nationalism are not simply chaotic consequences of the war, but perhaps the desired outcomes of it.1 The new forms of governance that mushroomed in post-invasion Iraq have been determining who is worthy of living or who is left to die, or what the Cameroonian philosopher, Achille Mbembe, calls necropolitics (Mbembe 2003). Governance through sectarian militias (as in the case of Shiʿa versus Sunnis) or ethno-nationalism (as in the case of Iraqi Kurdistan) determine who lives and who dies, who stays and under what conditions, and who leaves. In exile and internal displacement, the new conditions under which these academics live are anything but apolitical. They are determined by other forms of politics, citizenship, economics, identity, as well as new academic and social conditions that are primarily governed by the spread of Western neoliberal practices of higher education worldwide.

The second part of the book examines the conditions of Iraq’s exiled academics to show that far from being unique to the Iraqi context, these conditions, though extreme and violent in many ways, are nevertheless part and parcel of the shifting realities of higher education worldwide, which are marked by corporatization, commercialization, precarity, and the suppression of resistance. Part II of the book shows that exiled Iraqi academics have been turned from actors who were formerly vital and relatively stable in their academic positions before the invasion, into lives under contract, as is the case in Jordan and Iraqi Kurdistan. This move into contingent academic existence, which also determines their residency status, raises serious questions about the role of academics in society in the neoliberal age.

Ultimately, these conditions combined create a culture of fear and instability for academics, who are constantly frightened about losing their contracts and residency status. They are constantly looking for short-term plans to survive. They are hardly able to think, write, and teach without any sense of safety or stability. Under such conditions, these actors with a pivotal role in any nation, become unable to fully contribute to society because they always live in what I call a plan B mode of existence to secure their next step in a cruel and precarious environment.

FIELDWORK AND RESEARCH

This work was born of extensive socializing as well as interviews (both structured and semi-structured), discussions, engagements, living experiences, social media interactions, and lengthy Skype conversations with a total of 63 exiled and internally displaced Iraqi academics in the UK, Jordan, and Iraqi Kurdistan respectively. Lengthy Skype interviews over multiple sessions were conducted with 7 of the 63 where a personal meeting was not possible. The fieldwork included two summer research trips: to London in 2013, and to Amman in 2014. Additionally, I conducted further fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan from September 2015 until April 2016. In each of these sites, I am deeply grateful for the generous help and support of many academics, intellectuals, family members, friends, and professors at Duke University, Baghdad University, Duhok University, Salahaddin University, University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and the Middle East University in Jordan. I am also grateful to the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA) in London and Academics at Risk for connecting me with other Iraqi academics. I am also indebted to several individuals at the Iraqi Cultural Centre in London for connecting me with other academics and for allowing me to attend some of their events.

In 2013, I worked with 13 Iraqi academics (seven females, six males) from diverse academic backgrounds and disciplines residing in London and its surrounding areas. In summer 2014, I worked closely with 18 Iraqi academics (nine males, nine females) living and working in or near Amman. In 2015–2016, I was able, with the generous support of a fellowship from Duke University’s Graduate School, to go back to Iraqi Kurdistan after ten years living in exile. There, I divided my time between the cities of Duhok and Erbil and worked closely with 16 academics (nine males, seven females) in Duhok and nine academics (six males, three females) in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi