Ambassador of Hope |
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Man With a Mission
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| "Uncle Joe" sits beside Mohammed Al-Najim (former president of Basra and Suleimaniyah Universities) in a Black Hawk military helicopter |
The reputation he built reached the highest levels of government, and last year the retired Ghougassian received a call from Jim O'Beirne, special assistant to Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
"I was given a mission," he says. "Our job was go to Kirkuk, look into the property disputes between the Turks, the Kurds, the Arabs and the Christians, and to calm down the situation."
Given the long and difficult history of the northern Iraqi city - one of the centers of Kurdish identity and the hub of the Iraqi oil industry - the task was daunting, but Ghougassian was up to the challenge. He was expected to come up with recommendations about handling Kurdish property confiscated by Saddam Hussein and given to Arabs as part of Hussein's ethnic cleansing policies. Once Hussein's regime was toppled, Kurds and Turks began returning to reclaim their property, which was not always a peaceful proposition. Despite scattered violence, the mission ultimately succeeded, in large part because of Ghougassian's background.
"We at CPA have instituted a property claims court," Ghougassian says. "My ability to speak fluent Arabic was a great tool that won me the Arab tribal sheiks' confidence; my Armenian ethnicity won me the friendship and confidence of the Kurds and my Christian religion put the people at ease, because Christians in Iraq are viewed as fair-minded and honest people."
Although O'Beirne originally tapped Ghougassian to work with the Iraqi Ministry of Religious Affairs, Coalition Provisional Authority leaders eventually decided not to staff that ministry, and instead appointed him to work with the Ministry of Education and completely reorganize the Iraqi university system. After years of neglect and fear under Hussein, the system is a mess - obsolete textbooks, unprepared professors, crumbling facilities and little to no concept of free academic discourse.
Ghougassian started from scratch. He first recruited American professors to bring their Iraqi counterparts up to speed on the past 15 years of research and development, and set up three-week faculty development seminars for Iraqi college professors slotted for this July. As many as 450 Iraqi professors will attend the courses, designed to break the cycle of educational obsolescence. Planning for the seminars started months ago.
"I went to every single campus in Iraq, from the University of Basra in the south all the way up north, and I met with the deans, the heads of departments and the faculty," Ghougassian says. "I asked them to identify the one discipline they felt their faculties needed most, and within this discipline to identify only one course."
The resultant curriculum is custom-made to best serve the Iraqi attendees.
"In agriculture, the course that was requested was agribusiness," explains Ghougassian. "In biology, the course that was requested was molecular biology. In nursing, it was the study of clinical teaching of nursing. In archaeology, it was forensic archaeology."
Ghougassian had to remain sensitive to cultural issues when selecting teachers, and he insisted on finding qualified Iraqi-American university professors to run the seminars. His reasoning was simple.
"I wanted to use this project not only for educational purposes, but for political and public diplomacy. I wanted those Iraqis - 90 percent of whom haven't traveled for the last 15 to 20 years - to see how their brothers, sisters and cousins were making it big in the United States, and how they were now coming back, bringing both cultures with them."
The courses will take place at the Kurdish University of Suleimaniyah, where security is better than in most other places. But there's another component to the location that Ghougassian found equally useful.
"I wanted to have it in the Kurdish area so Iraqi Arabs would get involved with the Kurds, their brothers, and start the reconciliation process," he says. "Under Saddam Hussein the Kurds were oppressed, were gassed. And I thought, if I could, I would use (the location) as another avenue of reconciliation."
Iraqi Ministry of Education leaders enthusiastically supported the idea. By the time the next academic year begins in September 2004, the Iraqi professors should be up to speed with 21st century scientific information, and able to transmit this new knowledge to their students.
The way Ghougassian sees it, it's all about bringing people together. His ability to see how small gestures add up to great good will is one of those indefinable qualities that makes him so successful as a diplomat and education advocate.
"The last time I talked to him, he had a teacher training program organized in Kurdistan," says reporter Christina Asquith, who covers the United States' post-war efforts in Iraq for The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times and other publications. "This is a real feat. While others were making plans to get out of Baghdad, Joe had his knuckles to the ground creating a real program that would give real training to the people in the classroom - and done in an affordable way that could be a model for the future."
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