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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
IRAQ: Modernising textbooks to continue despite assassination
BAGHDAD, 17 June 2004 (IRIN) - By many accounts, Kamal Jerah’s work purging textbooks with references to the former ruling Ba’ath Party and creating a new curriculum for schools had nothing to do with his assassination on Sunday.
His colleagues are still coming to terms with what happened. He was dedicated to his high profile job at the Ministry of Education as the deputy, as well as being well-educated, popular and did not belong to any political party, Fadhal Tala, a ministry of education spokesman told IRIN. Jerah was active in working on a new curriculum for the country to ensure a more secular style of education.
Police are investigating the death, according to Tala. “Criminals are criminals - they don’t differentiate between workers for the ministry of oil and workers for the ministry of education,” Tala said. “Why criminals are interested in one person and not another, I don’t know,” he added.
No one has been named to be Jerah’s replacement during a three-day mourning period, Tala said. His office at the ministry is locked and colleagues look nervous when asked about him.
After numerous religious and political figures showed up at the ministry demanding that the curriculum be changed to suit them, Jerah organised conferences to get their input, he told IRIN in April. Education officials at the conferences tried to convince representatives from conservative political parties such as the Dawa Islamic Party and the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq that education should be unbiased.
Tala said that a mood of secularism still prevailed at the ministry. Jerah said previously that if religious officials were elected and wanted to put more conservative educational policies in place, he would abide by their wishes.
“I agree, there shouldn’t be any influence of religious groups,” Tala said. “My aim is to serve my country and keep unity of all people no matter what different religions they represent.”
A UN official who worked with Jerah said the assassination may just have been against a high-ranking government official who was easy to kill. “It‘s like he was a high-profile target,” the UN worker said, declining to be named. “It seems to be randomly targeting senior people to make the news. I would not relate it to the textbooks.”
Several Iraqi officials have been killed in the last month, including the acting head of the former Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), a Baghdad University official and the deputy foreign minister.
Where Jerah had announced that all new textbooks would be ready for the new school year in September, Tala now said it would take at least two years to finish the textbooks and design a new curriculum. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) charged with reprinting some Some 6.2 million new books without references to Saddam Hussein and the former Ba’ath regime, have called for them to be completed by September. UNESCO has already reprinted all maths and science textbooks.
Books on history and social studies are more complicated to rewrite, Abdul Zahar al-Shaibani, ministry of education official in charge of textbooks and technical equipment, told IRIN. Instead of Saddam Hussein exhorting students to greatness, there are now codes of conduct and behaviour, he said. Any opinionated language is being rewritten after consultation with a committee named to deal with the issue, he said.
“For example, anything that said ‘the Persian enemy’ now says the country of Iran,” al-Shaibani said. “Instead of the ‘Kuwaiti regime,’ we write the state of Kuwait. This is to avoid praising or criticising our neighbours. We must just give the facts as they appear.”
The World Bank has pledged $100 million for education in Iraq, much of it for the reprinting of textbooks. Al-Shaibani expects to spend $40 million to print the remaining textbooks. Now that there is another interim government, plans are afoot to hold another curriculum seminar, al-Shaibani said. Iraq’s curriculum needs to be modernised, he said, especially in science subjects and in English studies.
Themes: (IRIN) Children, (IRIN) Conflict, (IRIN) Governance
[ENDS]
This material comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. All materials copyright © UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2004
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