IRAQ: NGO efforts boost democracy and civil society in north

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

ARBIL/DAHUK, 10 Aug 2004 (IRIN) - In an effort to help democracy and civil society grow, a local NGO is organising discussion groups in the northern half of Iraqi Kurdistan, aiming to reach out to some 10,000 people.

With funds supplied by international donors, Concordia's full-time staff of eight is targetting ministers, association heads, teachers and students - in Iraq's Dahuk and Arbil governorates.

In June alone, the organisation's two-man Dahuk sub-office organised eight courses, four in Dahuk city, and four in other towns around the province.

"We hope there will be a multiplier effect," Concordia manager Barbara Dridi, a specialist in conflict resolution who has worked in Sierra Leone and Liberia, told IRIN in Arbil. "For every hundred people we get talking about how society should be run, hundreds of others will benefit."

In Iraq's far north, Concordia's latest project is a six-day course on peace building and trauma counselling in Sharia, a collective town south of Dahuk built in 1987 to house the inhabitants of seven nearby villages destroyed by Saddam Hussein's regime.

"Under Saddam, political dictatorship was transferred to the world of teaching," explained Concordia's Dahuk manager Segvan Murad. Iraqi schools are still authoritarian places, with children obliged to stand when spoken to by the teacher. Above all, despite a 1997 ban on the corporal punishment by the Kurdish authorities that have controlled the north since 1991, beating is still widespread.

"It is not enough to ban a practice," Perjan Akreyi, a Dahuk-based child trauma specialist who has worked on several of Concordia's discussion groups, told IRIN. "You have to present people with an alternative."

That is what he and his colleagues are trying to do today. Children flourish, they tell their audience, when they are offered incentives for success, not punishment for failure. Weak pupils should not be banished en masse to the back of the class, but integrated. Dr Akreyi also gives tips on how to distinguish abnormal behaviour from ordinary childhood high-spirits.

But in Sharia it is not just the experts who do the talking. After an hour's question, answer and discussion session on relationships between adults and children, the participants are divided into 10 groups. Each group is given a subject - ranging from intermarriage to the problems of humans and animals living cheek by jowl - and told to discuss it. After 30 minutes, they present their conclusions to the others.

Above all, the exercise is aimed to be a simplified form of group therapy: men and women, old and young, are encouraged to listen respectfully to each other's opinions. But the discussion afterwards also gives the organisers an opportunity to correct factual mistakes: one group discussing the dangers of intermarriage suggests cousins planning to marry should be tested for syphilis and tuberculosis.

"These have nothing to do with intermarriage," cautioned Dr Arif Hito, director of Dahuk's trauma therapy centre. "The kinds of things that risk being transmitted are diseases like thalassaemia," a blood disorder common in the Middle East.

"We're not just learning new stuff," Karwan Fatah, a primary school teacher, told IRIN. "The course has provided us with a sort of neutral space where we can talk to each other across the usual divisions."

"I just wish they were doing the same things for our ministers and senior officials," added secondary school teacher Eydo Waysi. "We now know how we can change ourselves, and we will, but it's up to them to change the structures we're working in."

"It is impossible to change society in one week," said Dr Akreyi. "Courses like this are the first step: not attempts to create a social revolution, but to plant ideas which we believe will then grow."

He has one convert in Derin Allo, a 17-year old girl hoping to go to university next year. "Five days ago, I would have been too shy to talk to a foreign journalist", she told IRIN. "Now, I don't see why I shouldn't."

[ENDS]