US Taxpayer Financing in the New Iraq: The Story of the Suleymania Law Library
Given all the talk about who should finance Iraqi reconstruction, Iraq or the United States, I thought I'd provide this true and personal story of the ultimate result of some US taxpayer financing in Iraq. I do think this narrative represents a metaphor for so much that is wrong in Iraq on the Iraqi end, but I don't claim it to be entirely representative of all of the problems associated with reconstruction (particularly on the American end). It's just one story, after all. For more stories of this sort of my adventures in the new Iraq, read my memoir, located on the sidebar.
I worked on a US AID funded project from 2003-2005 relating to the rehabilitation of Iraqi law schools throughout Iraq. One aspect of the project involved the reconstruction of the law libraries, though I was less involved with this. The esteemed Kim Morris, now at Penn State, piloted that particular program. Nevertheless, while in Suleymania, this was the only aspect of our former program which I could gauge most easily three years after our departure. The remainder (trainings, conferences and the like) were less tangible.
In theory, I should have been able to gauge another aspect of the program, the construction of a moot court, but it never got constructed in Suleymania, as opposed to Basra and Baghdad. This was because I offered to build one, but the Dean said there was no room in the College. I then offered to build an entire mock courthouse, and the Vice President of the University accepted, conditional on my also constructing a series of rooms for the President and high officers of the University to relax in. I refused, and he lowered his demand to a single lounge. I refused again, and he asked why I was so unwilling to negotiate and be flexible, as was, in his words, the Iraqi way. I explained there was no "negotiation", I was giving (US taxpayer money, through USAID), he was accepting, I saw no need to pay a bribe to give a gift. He became offended by the word "bribe" (it was a bribe, but it is not the Iraqi way to say that) and the courtroom project thereby ended. To this day, I am asked whenever I approach the law school why it is that I have built a courtroom in Baghdad and Basra and not Suleymania. The favored explanation tends to be that as an Arab, I must harbor some animosity towards Kurds. My own explanations, as outlined above, never seem adequate enough to the faculty, staff or students. It was just a single lounge, after all. It would have been less than 10% of a $110,000 initiative.
In any event, there was no courthouse, and so the library would have to do. As I descended, I noted a disorderly pile of hundreds of books on the floor of a large room, assembled as if for some sort of bonfire. Fortunately, however, this was not the law library but the humanities library. "It's all temporary," the workers assured me, "we are rebuilding the library and needed to move the books while we did that."
"There was no better way to move them then toss them into the middle of the floor?" I asked. "How are you going to know where they belong when you are ready to put them back? It will take forever the way you've done it."
He only smiled in reply, and tried to get my wife not to snap a photograph. She did, and he warned darkly, "I know who you are if you try to publish that."
We went to the Dean of the Humanities College later on, but he seemed oblivious. He knew, he told us, that there was a renovation project going on all summer, but he hadn't heard about the state of the books. He didn't seem particularly enthused to intervene, however, and we left matters where they were.
As we descended further, to the law library, matters improved somewhat, by which I mean books were on their shelves. Moveable shelves, which our project had provided, but which no longer worked very well. Nobody in Iraq had seen these types of shelves before, and nobody seemed to know how to fix them, so they remained rather stuck and difficult to move. In addition, the now three year old carpeting was filthy, most of the new furniture broken, an entire set of new books that the former Dean had insisted we buy for them, because we had bought them for Baghdad and Basra lay unopened in the boxes they had been sent in years earlier. No shelf space, it was argued. I looked at the shelves.
"What are you talking about, none of these shelves is fully utilized, look, move some of these books from the bottom shelf to the one just above it, so that that shelf is full. Then take the books from the top shelf in the next column, and use them to fill in the empty space, so that each shelf is full, and then once you do that, you'll have an empty top shelf. Space!"
"We can't do that, because then how will we know where the books are," said one librarian. She and her colleague were sitting at the computers fanning themselves. A judge who lectured at the law school (and whom I knew well) often sat on a table nearby. Nobody was actually doing anything so far as I could tell.
"Umm, the catalog number." I answered. "Aren't they on the computer, didn't we bring you software and technology for that? As long as they remain in order according to the cataloging system, it doesn't matter what shelf they are on."
"But we don't know how to use that system," she said.
"We sent two people to Amman specifically to learn for a week. We trained you and everything, you said you wanted it computerized, and it is. We spent a fortune in training and software, it looked so good when we left and you were running it. How can you not know how to use it now?"
"One of the trained workers quit, and the other had a baby and is on leave," the other librarian said.
"Besides, one week is not enough," chimed in the judge. "This was a deficiency on your part, really they needed at least a few months in America, with a faculty supervisor."
"Plus," added the first, "there is no electricity, and I think we blanked out the CD's by accident."
"CD's have backups, you must know that. We aren't sending people to the US for 9 months with a faculty member to learn a cataloging system, and finally, we bought you a generator. Why isn't it on right now?" I said, exasperated. Iraqis reminded me of my fourth grade years, when excuses for not doing work grew so elaborate and creative that I almost spent as much time inventing them as I would have doing the work. But then, I did spend third grade in Iraq mostly.
"The generator? You know how hot it is outside? Who has the energy to go flip it on?" asked one librarian.
"It's less than two minutes walk. It's currently 39C (102F) in here. How is it easier to sit here like this than walk 200 God damned meters and turn a key that will bring you both computers and air conditioning?"
Nobody answered. Finally, one of the librarians replied, "it's not part of our job duties. Nobody paid us extra for this additional job, if the project wanted to offer us additional money . . . " she started to say.
I cut her off. "Project is over, no more money. It's been over for years. Fine, forget the computer system, what about the card catalogs, we brought that as well as a backup." I remember discussing with Kim precisely this point, that we should have something manual, in case the technology proved too difficult. She had already planned for this. We were thinking perhaps over years the system would not prove as easy for subsequent users, I certainly didn't think it would be abandoned totally so swiftly because nobody wanted to walk 200 meters without being paid to do it.
"Oh, we never did put those things in," one of the librarians cheerfully replied, "we just use this." She handed me a velobound set of white papers. Inside were photocopies of handwritten pages containing in columns containing names of authors, titles, and on what shelf the work might be found. Additions appeared written in the margins. This worked just fine for them, they said. Except of course that under this system they couldn't even open a carton of books purchased two years earlier.
I put the paper down, smiled and changed the subject to the dust storms in Baghdad. There was no point to continuing this and making enemies, I had done what I could. Of Iraqi law schools, Suleymania was actually among the better places. The students were eager, classes were conducted with far more regularity than elsewhere, some professors had advanced degrees from abroad, and they were more receptive to new ideas than others. If I was going to maintian relationships with Iraqi law schools, this place, and Basra, had to be at the top of the list. I was dealing with the cream of the crop.
HAH
I worked on a US AID funded project from 2003-2005 relating to the rehabilitation of Iraqi law schools throughout Iraq. One aspect of the project involved the reconstruction of the law libraries, though I was less involved with this. The esteemed Kim Morris, now at Penn State, piloted that particular program. Nevertheless, while in Suleymania, this was the only aspect of our former program which I could gauge most easily three years after our departure. The remainder (trainings, conferences and the like) were less tangible.
In theory, I should have been able to gauge another aspect of the program, the construction of a moot court, but it never got constructed in Suleymania, as opposed to Basra and Baghdad. This was because I offered to build one, but the Dean said there was no room in the College. I then offered to build an entire mock courthouse, and the Vice President of the University accepted, conditional on my also constructing a series of rooms for the President and high officers of the University to relax in. I refused, and he lowered his demand to a single lounge. I refused again, and he asked why I was so unwilling to negotiate and be flexible, as was, in his words, the Iraqi way. I explained there was no "negotiation", I was giving (US taxpayer money, through USAID), he was accepting, I saw no need to pay a bribe to give a gift. He became offended by the word "bribe" (it was a bribe, but it is not the Iraqi way to say that) and the courtroom project thereby ended. To this day, I am asked whenever I approach the law school why it is that I have built a courtroom in Baghdad and Basra and not Suleymania. The favored explanation tends to be that as an Arab, I must harbor some animosity towards Kurds. My own explanations, as outlined above, never seem adequate enough to the faculty, staff or students. It was just a single lounge, after all. It would have been less than 10% of a $110,000 initiative.
In any event, there was no courthouse, and so the library would have to do. As I descended, I noted a disorderly pile of hundreds of books on the floor of a large room, assembled as if for some sort of bonfire. Fortunately, however, this was not the law library but the humanities library. "It's all temporary," the workers assured me, "we are rebuilding the library and needed to move the books while we did that."
"There was no better way to move them then toss them into the middle of the floor?" I asked. "How are you going to know where they belong when you are ready to put them back? It will take forever the way you've done it."
He only smiled in reply, and tried to get my wife not to snap a photograph. She did, and he warned darkly, "I know who you are if you try to publish that."
We went to the Dean of the Humanities College later on, but he seemed oblivious. He knew, he told us, that there was a renovation project going on all summer, but he hadn't heard about the state of the books. He didn't seem particularly enthused to intervene, however, and we left matters where they were.
As we descended further, to the law library, matters improved somewhat, by which I mean books were on their shelves. Moveable shelves, which our project had provided, but which no longer worked very well. Nobody in Iraq had seen these types of shelves before, and nobody seemed to know how to fix them, so they remained rather stuck and difficult to move. In addition, the now three year old carpeting was filthy, most of the new furniture broken, an entire set of new books that the former Dean had insisted we buy for them, because we had bought them for Baghdad and Basra lay unopened in the boxes they had been sent in years earlier. No shelf space, it was argued. I looked at the shelves.
"What are you talking about, none of these shelves is fully utilized, look, move some of these books from the bottom shelf to the one just above it, so that that shelf is full. Then take the books from the top shelf in the next column, and use them to fill in the empty space, so that each shelf is full, and then once you do that, you'll have an empty top shelf. Space!"
"We can't do that, because then how will we know where the books are," said one librarian. She and her colleague were sitting at the computers fanning themselves. A judge who lectured at the law school (and whom I knew well) often sat on a table nearby. Nobody was actually doing anything so far as I could tell.
"Umm, the catalog number." I answered. "Aren't they on the computer, didn't we bring you software and technology for that? As long as they remain in order according to the cataloging system, it doesn't matter what shelf they are on."
"But we don't know how to use that system," she said.
"We sent two people to Amman specifically to learn for a week. We trained you and everything, you said you wanted it computerized, and it is. We spent a fortune in training and software, it looked so good when we left and you were running it. How can you not know how to use it now?"
"One of the trained workers quit, and the other had a baby and is on leave," the other librarian said.
"Besides, one week is not enough," chimed in the judge. "This was a deficiency on your part, really they needed at least a few months in America, with a faculty supervisor."
"Plus," added the first, "there is no electricity, and I think we blanked out the CD's by accident."
"CD's have backups, you must know that. We aren't sending people to the US for 9 months with a faculty member to learn a cataloging system, and finally, we bought you a generator. Why isn't it on right now?" I said, exasperated. Iraqis reminded me of my fourth grade years, when excuses for not doing work grew so elaborate and creative that I almost spent as much time inventing them as I would have doing the work. But then, I did spend third grade in Iraq mostly.
"The generator? You know how hot it is outside? Who has the energy to go flip it on?" asked one librarian.
"It's less than two minutes walk. It's currently 39C (102F) in here. How is it easier to sit here like this than walk 200 God damned meters and turn a key that will bring you both computers and air conditioning?"
Nobody answered. Finally, one of the librarians replied, "it's not part of our job duties. Nobody paid us extra for this additional job, if the project wanted to offer us additional money . . . " she started to say.
I cut her off. "Project is over, no more money. It's been over for years. Fine, forget the computer system, what about the card catalogs, we brought that as well as a backup." I remember discussing with Kim precisely this point, that we should have something manual, in case the technology proved too difficult. She had already planned for this. We were thinking perhaps over years the system would not prove as easy for subsequent users, I certainly didn't think it would be abandoned totally so swiftly because nobody wanted to walk 200 meters without being paid to do it.
"Oh, we never did put those things in," one of the librarians cheerfully replied, "we just use this." She handed me a velobound set of white papers. Inside were photocopies of handwritten pages containing in columns containing names of authors, titles, and on what shelf the work might be found. Additions appeared written in the margins. This worked just fine for them, they said. Except of course that under this system they couldn't even open a carton of books purchased two years earlier.
I put the paper down, smiled and changed the subject to the dust storms in Baghdad. There was no point to continuing this and making enemies, I had done what I could. Of Iraqi law schools, Suleymania was actually among the better places. The students were eager, classes were conducted with far more regularity than elsewhere, some professors had advanced degrees from abroad, and they were more receptive to new ideas than others. If I was going to maintian relationships with Iraqi law schools, this place, and Basra, had to be at the top of the list. I was dealing with the cream of the crop.
HAH
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