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Iraq
Iranian Acedemic Killed after being caught between a rock and a hard place
2004-01-22
EFL from LA times
They buried Abdul Latif Mayah on Tuesday, and with him, many academics’ hopes for intellectual freedom in the new Iraq. Gunned down only 12 hours after advocating direct elections on an Arab television talk show, Mayah was the fourth professor from Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University to be killed in the last eight months, his death the latest in a series of academic slayings in post-Hussein Iraq. "His assassination is part of a plan in this country, targeting any intellectual in this country, any free voice," said Salam Rais, one of Mayah’s students. "He is the martyr of the free world."
Snip - many details about the man that are quite interesting. They ought to fill a couple of the newly vacated pedestals with statues of this guy.
Mayah, whose friends said he was 54, was a longtime pro-democracy activist who had been jailed by Hussein after calling for elections in 1996. He had received anonymous death threats for several weeks, friends and family said, and began traveling with a bodyguard. As he drove to work Monday, his Mitsubishi sedan was stopped by unidentified men. Mayah, the bodyguard and a colleague were ordered out of the vehicle. The gunmen opened fire only on Mayah, and he died at the scene. One local media report said he was shot 32 times.
It'll be interesting to see who bumped him off. I'd be interested in knowing who bumped off the other three academics...
The night before he was slain, Mayah was a guest on a talk show on the Al Jazeera channel, where he supported a call by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s leading Shiite Muslim cleric, for free elections by June 30, when the U.S. is scheduled to return sovereignty to Iraq. In calling for quick elections, Mayah was opposing the United States, which has proposed a caucus system to choose the country’s new leaders.
The US respects dissent, but I guess somebody else was less tolerant.
Mayah, a Shiite and a former low-level member of Hussein’s Baath Party, "was supporting Sistani," said Jabber Habib, a political scientist at Baghdad University. "Had he not supported Sistani, he would have been killed by the other side."
I'm not sure about that. If it had been Moqtada he wasn't supporting, I'd believe it...
Habib, a prominent commentator, said Mayah’s slaying has made him reconsider his own regular television appearances. The killings of the three other Mustansiriya professors came amid anonymous notes left on campus warning members of the outlawed Baath Party that they faced execution. In the northern city of Mosul this month, the dean of a local university’s political science department was slain, an attack seen as the work of Baathists against someone they viewed as a collaborator in the U.S.-led occupation. Some Iraqis say there was no obvious motive behind the killing of another academic, an engineering professor, in Basra last year. Iraq’s insurgents — largely Sunni Muslims and Hussein loyalists — are among the suspects in Mayah’s slaying. The Sunnis feel threatened by the majority Shiites’ call for direct elections.
And they're in the habit of sending opponents to the boneyard, a habit Sistani doesn't seem to possess...
Mayah’s mourners suggested there was a foreign element to his killing but offered no details. A banner carried at the head of the funeral procession blamed "America and the Zionists."
For some reason or other. My guess is that they had the banner left over from early last year, before Sammy departed...
Other students and professors at Mustansiriya University say they were at a loss to imagine who might have killed Mayah. "Why such fear of an idea?" asked Kasim Fellahi, a colleague. Rais, Mayah’s student, said his professor saw good things ahead for Iraq. "He was optimistic," Rais said. "Always optimistic."
I guess his glass is now permanently half-full.
In a semi-related article Common Dreams asks Why Do Iowans Like To Caucus But Iraqis Don’t? Due to the article’s high percentage of drivel to facts, I won’t post it, but the few details of the CPA’s caucus format do sound FUBAR’d.
Posted by:Super Hose

#1  The title should have been Iraqi not Iranian.
Posted by: Super Hose   2004-1-22 9:16:37 PM  

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