Abdelatif Al Mayah

From the news reports:

"he had an excellent reputation and the students liked him," said Rawi.

AFP 29 Jan 2004

He spent years ducking the secret police under Saddam Hussein. As a member of the Shiite underground, the professor pushed for the overthrow of the government, his family recounted.

During the 1990's, he formed a secret society called United Iraq Is Our Home. He drove around at night in his blue Volkswagen, other activists said, slipping flyers out the window detailing the government's abuses.

"He was an old-fashioned activist, completely committed to the cause," said Sami Mahmoud al-Baydhani, a historian at Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad, where the professor served as director of Arab studies.

After the war, Mayah turned down an invitation to meet with Jay Garner, the former general who was first U.S. administrator for Iraq. He told his friends that it was wrong that a military man should control the country. ...

the professor concentrated on human rights. , going to a conference in Jordan and holding symposiums. Then the threats started.

Last summer, the police said, a man came to his office and told him to close the human rights center at Mustansiriyah University. The professor told him to go away. ...

That last night, the professor sat down with his wife and daughter for a dinner of lamb and yogurt. Then he went into town to do an interview with Al Jazeera, the Arab television network, in which he criticized the occupation and called for prompt elections.

NYT 09 Feb 2004

Al-Mayah was not a victim of the struggle between "occupying forces" and the "resistance". He was crushed as a liberal force that stood between those positions. ...

Born in Basra, al-Mayah had spent most of his life as a poorly paid academic, teaching the politics of the Arab region. He became director of the university's Arab Homeland Studies Centre. "He had no money at all," said one of his brothers. "He had no house that he owned. In his martyrdom, he leaves behind just a pen and his writing." Al-Mayah had once been a member of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, though at a very junior level. According to Dr Talal Nathan al-Zuhary, director of the university library, al-Mayah quit the party in 1991 after seeing the reality of Saddam's regime. He was jailed in 1996 when he called for elections. He managed to escape the secret police because one of his former students was an interrogator.

"He believed in the original Ba'ath ideal of Arab unity," said al-Zuhary, "but he saw how hypocritical the regimes were, and so he wanted no connection to the party any more. After the recent American invasion, he was against both occupation and against dictatorship. He used to tell me that one day he would be bumped off by the Mossad or the CIA, although I never took that very seriously. More recently, he was more worried about the looters who came after the regime fell and stole so much. He was always telling me to watch out for my safety."

New Statesman 15 Mar 2004