printable versionFour Iraqi students visit university for 10 days as part of exchange initiative
They live in dormitories, attend classes and visit state capital during student effort to improve mutual understanding
BY BARBARA PALMER
Clockwise from left: President John Hennessy meets with Shava Ibrahim, Stanford student Nikhil Sachdev, Ala Mohammed and Sasan Hasan.
Shayan Shahir and Ala Mohammed have lunch at the Bechtel International Center.
Seven days into a 10-day visit to campus as part of the Stanford-Iraq Student Exchange (SISE), an initiative to build mutual understanding of cultural and political values, Sasan Hasan, a civil engineering student from Salahaddin University in Irbil, Iraq, was asked what experiences had impressed him the most so far.
"This," Hasan answered, looking down the table where he and two other Iraqi undergraduates were seated alongside Hoover Institution Fellows Larry Diamond and Bill Evers for a community forum on Iraqi-U.S. relations May 23. In the United States, "every student can express his thoughts and ideas freely," Hasan said. "See, we have professors sitting with us. That is hard to find in Iraq."
"We don't have such conferences and dialogues," agreed Shayan Shahir, a soft-spoken female undergraduate who is studying business and construction management, also at Salahaddin University. "It is so important for us to practice."
From May 17 to 26, four undergraduates, all from northern Iraq, lived in campus dormitory rooms with Stanford student hosts, attended classes, ate in dining halls and met with faculty, students and student groups. The Iraqi students also made trips to Sacramento, where they met with California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, and to San Francisco.
The purpose of the exchange was "student-to-student diplomacy" to build relationships and a greater appreciation of Iraqi and U.S. values and institutions, said SISE director J. P. Schnapper-Casteras, who is studying political science and sociology.
Schnapper-Casteras founded the exchange last year, and designed and sent application forms to numerous Iraqi universities. The group received about 100 completed applications, mostly from the Kurdish-populated northern region of the country, said Stanford student Isabel Shelton-Mottsmith, an SISE member. Although the group had hoped that students from a wider geographic area would have been able to participate, "this is a good start," she said.
Iraqi students told of traveling through dangerous conditions in central Iraq to the American Embassy in Jordan, where they waited for days to secure visas. A fifth student who had applied and been selected for the exchange program, a male Arab student from north of Baghdad, was unable to get a visa.
"The story of the Stanford-Iraq exchange is a story about visas," said Schnapper-Casteras. "Just getting the four students here was the biggest victory of all."
The urgent need for security in Iraq, the nation's educational system and future economic prospects were primary topics of conversation as the Iraqi students moved through a gauntlet of television reporters at noon on May 23 and later that evening during the 90-minute-long community forum at Bechtel International Center.
Some Iraqi students expressed appreciation for the presence of American troops and pointed to positive change in Iraq since 2003. "I can't generalize for the Iraqi people—the Kurds like Americans," said Ala Mohammed, who is studying English and diplomacy at Keele University in the United Kingdom and has studied at Sulaimany University in Iraq. Mohammad's father—a writer and leading member of a Kurdish political organization—was executed by Saddam Hussein's regime when she was 3 years old.
The end of Saddam's regime has freed Iraqis from 35 years of cultural isolation, Mohammed said before the forum. Income has grown and non-governmental organizations are now playing roles in reconstructing Iraq, she said. "We need support from the U.S.—temporarily, not permanently."
Opinions about the American presence in Iraq differ widely in different regions, Hasan told reporters. In Baghdad, where "a father kisses his kids goodbye in the morning and doesn't know if he will see them again," most people don't like to see U.S. Humvees, he said. Of the continued American presence, "I can't say leave, I can't say stay," he said. "There are different kinds of staying," he added.
Three of the four Iraqi students are studying in fields related to construction, including architecture, construction management and civil engineering. All four students expressed optimism about the future.
"You have seen Saddam, but there are many people who work to try to do what is right for Iraq, to improve Iraq," Hasan said. "Saddam used to always kill those people, but now those people have an opportunity to work."
Things are getting "better and better," he said. "We have oil, you know? This oil can get us everything, whatever we want. We just need to have the right person in the right location to do the right thing."
Evers, who served as a senior adviser on education for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, cautioned Hasan against relying on revenues from oil as "some kind of miracle" that can solve all of Iraq's problems. In the United States, the political struggle over levying and spending taxes is part of what "makes for the experience of democracy," he said. Just extracting oil and getting a cut of it doesn't do that, he said.
Evers also warned against pinning all hope on finding one person—even a more wise, just person—to lead the way. What's going on now in Iraq is frustrating and slow, but it is healthier than entrusting too much power to a single person who could become a tyrant, he said.
"I think we failed you, to some extent, " Diamond, a former adviser on governance issues to the Coalition Provisional Authority, told the students. "We did not put enough troops on the ground and we failed to seal the borders."
Diamond said he did not support going to war and still considers that there are many respects in which it was a serious mistake. "We will only know from the distance of a much longer historical perspective than we can possibly summon now, on balance, what we gained and what we lost by going to war," he said. "The one thing I can say flatly: You simply cannot travel around the country and talk to ordinary Iraqis, see the evidence of, or hear the evidence of, the mass graves … and not think that something good was done by toppling this tyrant."
The exchange program was funded by the President's Office and co-sponsored by the Stanford Institute for International Studies and the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.