The General Union of
Students in the Iraqi Republic (GUSIR) issued a statement condemning an
operation carried out on Thursday morning, 18 Sept. 2008, on the campus of
Baghdad University in Jaderiyah, "by units of the Iraqi army accompanied by
International Coalition forces", to evacuate a building used for the
residence of students from the provinces. The building, in the Second
Engineering College (Al-Khawarezmi College), was stormed, resulting in
clashes between the army units and students, during which firearms were used
to terrorize the students.
GUSIR's statement denounced this move by
the college administration, especially that students were sitting their
exams. It called for an immediate halt to all such measures, stressing the
need for official bodies to respect the inviolability of the university
campus, and to ban the use of violence, arms, force and attempts to
terrorize students. "Dialogue and negotiations, based on the internal rules
regulating university life, must be employed in order to achieve fair,
logical and practical solutions."
The students organisation also called for
conducting a just investigation "to identify those who were responsible for
what happened in Al-Khawarezmi College," and demanded assurances to prevent
the recurrence of such violations, as well as seeking proper solutions to
the problems that university students in residential buildings have endured.
Source: statement issued
by GUSIR spokesperson, 18 September 2008
