An academy writes about violence and the future of Yemen: My students left the university to the battlefronts
English - Wednesday 07 April 2021 الساعة 03:23 pm
NewsYemen, written by / Dr. Balqis Abu Asbaa:
Yemeni youth dream of an end to the war and a return to their normal lives, universities and education, in order to repair what the war has destroyed.
But the question is when will they have it and will they live until those moments?
A dedication to the souls of my students at Sana'a University, who were swept away by the war in Yemen and left this world early.
As our Yemeni hearts grieve over the hundreds of dead, hundreds of thousands of displaced people, and the entire Yemeni people who have been swallowed up by the raging war for six years, the alarm has been ringing loudly in my mind a while ago due to something else.
As an educator specializing in higher education in the field of political science in particular, I know about another epidemic, other than the "Corona" virus - that is spreading faster in my community, and unfortunately this epidemic does not only harm the living that it infects, but rather it is transmitted to the new generations, even those that have not yet been born.
Some of my students from the Department of Political Science at Sana'a University are communicating with me from the battle fronts, telling me what do you think of us and what Ibn Khaldun would have said about us now after we left our seats in the ranks of science and joined the ranks of the war and on the front lines of the battle fronts?
They tell me this out of trepidation, and maybe a luck.
I try to comfort them and advise them as much as I can, but within me I know perfectly well that they will never return to my educated students seeking knowledge, hoping for modern civilization, after their experience in armed violence, if they return.
Every year, more than 390,000 young men and women graduate from university studies, finding the only market open to them is the economy of war and death.
The involvement of many civilians, especially university students, in the battles is caused by the severe economic deterioration that was mainly suffering even before the war, as the unemployment rate in 2011 reached 35 percent, and the latest statistics in 2017 indicate that it reached 70 percent, according to the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Yemenia.
The public debt ratio increased from 37 percent in 2010 to 81 percent in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund.
While the percentage of Yemenis living below the poverty line, i.e. less than two dollars a day, increased from 48 in 2014 to more than 62 percent in 2017, according to the World Bank.
All these factors push university youth to prefer dying on the front lines over starving to death in an unstable environment.
My students complain of exclusion from jobs and the closure of the establishments in which they worked, so they were forced to leave their cities to search for another source of livelihood.
For the battlefronts to be their last resort, justifying this by joining the battlefield being the easiest option to make money - forgetting or forgetting that the difference between their presence in a civilian life and the life they chose is the difference between life and death itself.
While the economic situation may be the main driver, the consequences of violence go beyond this justification in stages to include the rupture of the social fabric and the psychological consequences that will remain with the war generation for years, perhaps until the end of their lives.
I have doubts, to what extent my students realize that they are standing in front of each other on the battlefronts ... they kill themselves and their colleagues with whom they shared classrooms in their university and discussed issues of their future and the future of their country.
They say that they have their justifications to go to the fronts, and these justifications differ on the different fronts.
Some say that their going to the battlefront is "fighting the dynastic and sectarian project that was brought about to differentiate between the people of the same country and through which we killed our hopes, goals and aspirations, which we were trying to reach in building a civil state based on equality and justice among all members of society."
On the other hand, the fighters' motive is an intellectual and ideological connection, and the idea that death on the battlefield is better than death in the home.
Thus, the students ’willingness to join these or that armed groups stems from a deep sense of despair and the absence of any foreseeable alternatives, especially since the leaders of the parties to the conflict provide these young people with a sense of belonging and a source of earnings ... which becomes tempting in light of a bad economic and educational situation.
The truth is that this war had many repercussions on the students and the entire educational process.
Dozens of university buildings were destroyed or turned into military barracks.
Consequently, a large number of students were denied the opportunity to learn now and in the future, even if the war stopped, due to the destruction of the infrastructure in higher education institutions.
But the biggest catastrophe is not what happens today, but rather what will happen in the medium and long future in the society’s culture regarding education and comparing this with the rootedness of a culture of violence as an alternative to civility and science.
Currently, the Yemeni youth generation is being drawn to the battlefield, and students who join the ranks of these or that groups and are absorbed by their ideology, face a devastating future.
Inevitably, they will further fuel the ongoing war.
This raises my grave concern about the future of the next generation in Yemen and about the future of Yemen as a whole.
Even those who somehow or another were able to complete their university education arbitrarily during the war period, I assert, as a specialist in this field, that the political and cultural conditions and the methodology of education that unfortunately surrounded their educational attainment make their degrees professionally unacceptable and practically invalid.
I know that the focus and rehabilitation of basic education in particular are at the forefront of development organizations and those interested in social development policies, but I want to draw attention to the fact that higher education should find such attention, if not more, because it is these young men and women who will undertake the reforms in the educational system. And developmental workers in general, they are teachers, engineers and doctors.
Therefore, intensive strategies must be worked out for their rehabilitation, especially the reintegration of returnees from the fighting fronts into society, so that they can participate in building their societies and their future.
Yemeni youth dream of an end to the war and a return to their normal lives, universities and education, in order to repair what the war has destroyed.
But the question is when will they have it and will they live until those moments?
Even in the event of reaching a peace agreement, that is only part of the solution, but real sustainability comes through the rehabilitation of education in all its stages and attention to the psychological and psychological consequences of the children of the war generation, because they are the ones who will rebuild the state, and losing something does not give it.
* Yemeni researcher and lecturer, member of the Women’s Solidarity Network, and holder of the Peace Path Initiative fellowship for women leadership
* Quoting from the "Daraj" website
