Associate Professor of Criminology Dusan Bjelic left the United States Saturday for Baghdad with a group of 31 other academicians from across the country on a “Humanitarian Mission in the Interest of Peace.”
Professors and graduate students from schools across the country including Rutgers, Wesleyan, NYU, Florida State, and UC Berkeley will be meeting with Iraqi academicians at Baghdad University; touring hospitals, religious buildings, bomb shelters, schools, and orphanages; and meeting with U.N. and humanitarian organizations.
“We will be learning first-hand about the conditions of life,” Bjelic said.
Bjelic said the main purpose of the mission is to represent the peace movement and bring back information to the United States that is “balanced to the corporate news information.”
“This is to support the peace movement on campus,” he said. “When we return we will speak to students, faculty and media and inform people what we’ve seen and learned.” Bjelic will be speaking at the University’s “Teach-in For Peace” Jan. 24 in the Woodbury Campus Center as well as in classes and to local media.
“The president’s main preoccupation is how to make war. For educators, war is not a priority. It is peace. What can we do about this catastrophic event? Educators can take a stand and do what we can do.”
Bjelic was in Serbia during the 1990s and so knows what it is like be in a country under an embargo.
“Preventing the flow and exchange of food, medicine, and ideas is unacceptable,” he said. “Intellectuals must break this embargo.”
Over half of Bjelic’s $1500 airfare to Amman, Jordan, then to Baghdad was covered by donations from USM faculty, and Bjelic and others are interested in setting up a fund for students and faculty interested in participating in peace missions.
The organizing group of this mission is US Academicians Against the War, led by James Jennings, Ph.D., who has coordinated the trips of several Americans to Iraq, notably including actor Sean Penn.
Bjelic will return to the United States on Jan. 18 and will be taking back his classes in the Criminology Department and Honors Program from a substitute professor. Donations toward his costs can still be made through the Criminology Department.