Johann Hari – The Iraqi Homecoming describes how exiled Iraqis, in the Iraqi Prospect Organisation (IPO), have tried to spread liberal thinking in their former country:
The IPO people went to Iraq with clear goals. First, they wanted to establish debating societies and newsletters in the Baghdad universities. ‘These are going to be the seeds of democracy,’ Yasser explains. ‘Once you learn to argue against people instead of killing them as Saddam did, you’re on your way. We explained to the university students that they could have different newspapers – and even have different opinions in the same newspapers – and it seemed totally surreal to them. They just couldn’t understand it. But when they realised that it really was possible and nobody was going to punish them, they were so excited that they were just obsessed.
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Third, Sama explains: “We took a group of university students to a workshop arranged by a Washington-based organisation about how to set up NGOs [non-governmental organisations]. To you or me it would seem incredibly basic, but to them it was a revelation. They hadn’t understood that you could set up your own organisation, without any orders or permission from anyone. They thought societies and charities were something the state did to you, something secretive and conspiratorial, not something people create for themselves. It was beautiful to see this happening.”
It sounds like the Kurds have flourished without Saddam:
Yet hope was restored by their trip to Northern Iraq. “It was like going into a different world,” Sama says, her eyes welling up. “It’s beautiful. It looks like part of Europe. It’s totally free and efficient and secure and democratic. It was so encouraging, because at the end of [the first] Gulf War it was just like the rest of Iraq. We could make progress like that in the next decade. We brought one of my cousins with us, and he cried and said: `Is this my country? Is this really part of Iraq?’”