‘Very marked increase’ in academics fleeing persecution abroad, charity warns

Organisation says it is seeing more applications than any other point in its 87-year history

A Syrian man stands in the debris following an explosion outside Aleppo University in January 2013 (AFP via Getty Images)

There has been a “very marked increase” in the number of academics requiring help fleeing danger, persecution and intolerance, a UK rescue charity has warned.

The Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara) – a discreet organisation set up to rescue scholars from Nazi Germany in the 1930s – said that in the past five years it has received more requests for help than at any other point in its 87-year history.

The charity has gone from helping 160 academics and their families in 2015, to aiding some 350 scholars in 2020, deputy director Zeid Al-Bayaty told The Independent – with an average of five new requests every week.

Mr Al-Bayaty attributed the “heavy increase, starting in 2016” mainly to conflict and turbulence in the Middle East – notably in Syria, Turkey, Yemen and Iraq – but said that the charity was also helping individuals in more than 20 countries across Central Asia, North Africa and South America.

“Equally, there are people who are not in conflict situations who are living in societies that are outwardly peaceful but highly intolerant and where they write or say something that upsets somebody or are just seen as a threat, either by regimes or by extremist groups who don’t want them to challenge their very simplistic view of the world,” executive director Stephen Wordsworth said.

As well as a wave of recent enquiries from Hong Kong, Mr Al-Bayaty expressed his “shock” that the charity had also received enquiries from within the EU – in Hungary and Poland. But no rescues from these countries have yet had to be made.

“We have recently seen a sharp rise in support for authoritarian governments and extremist leaders which, historically signals a strict and often brutal clampdown on free-thinking scientists and academics who pose a threat to their ambitions,” Mr Wordsworth said.

The organisation works in partnerships with universities, and supports re-located academics and their families while they continue their work in the UK.

“We support them throughout their placement until they return back home if possible,” said Mr Al-Bayaty. “That’s the intention, that they return back home to transfer all that knowledge and learning skills to their own countries. 

“If that’s not possible, they either move onto other placements or secure jobs, or continue their studies. We have a combination of early career academics, or very experienced senior academics, so there is quite a broad range.”

Mr Wordsworth added: “It’s about saving both individuals and saving the knowledge they have, and knowing how useful that can be for the world, and ensuring they can go on using those skills.

“Sixteen people we’ve saved went on to get Nobel prizes, aside from other distinctions.”

While it’s typically the academics themselves who plan their own route out of a situation or country, Cara facilitates their departure, whether that be in the form of information, contacts or emergency funding, in addition to helping them secure visas and academic placements on its fellowship programme in the UK.

But the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic forced the organisation to pause many of its rescue operations.

“It was stressful because we knew that people were stuck in places we knew they didn’t want to be anymore but we couldn’t actually physically do anything about getting them away because there weren’t any flights and most land borders were shut,” Mr Wordsworth said.

And while restrictions placed an “extra hurdle in the way” for academics looking to reach safety, the pandemic’s financial impact on universities and resulting uncertainty has created “additional difficulties to secure the necessary funding to support their placements”, Mr Al-Bayaty said, adding that “Brexit hasn’t helped”.

Cara has enjoyed multiple visa success rates of 100 per cent in recent years, and Mr Al-Bayaty said that “the direction the UK’s heading at the moment, with emphasis on wanting to attract highly skilled people”, looks to be in the charity’s favour.

But, he added, “it is an increasingly complex immigration system, and in my nine years with Cara it is clearly getting more and more complex”.

“I hope that even the UK authorities and government see the value of having highly skilled people coming and enriching higher education here in the UK,” he said.

Mr Wordsworth added: “With the Covid pandemic, we’re seeing just how important it is that scientists can work freely, because there’s a tremendous need for well-trained minds to help solve the many very serious problems we face.

“And for that to happen, to have a healthy university system, you need to have academic freedom and to have people who are able to work without looking over their shoulders all the time, or without being actively suppressed.

“It’s really important there is that ability to cooperate internationally and for academics in particular to work globally with colleagues around the world. You see it now with the vaccines.”

Indeed, one of Cara’s fellows, Parham Haidar – an academic physician who worked at Damascus University Hospitals until he was rescued by Cara in 2013, after he and his colleagues began receiving threats during the escalation of the Syrian civil war – is now part of a team at a British university pioneering a method of diagnosing Covid-19 using innovative face mask technology.

Professor Mike Barer and Cara fellow Parham Haidar testing how efficiently masks can capture targets, especially Covid-19, by using microscopy to check the integrity of the capture system after exposure (Irina Elliott via Cara)

In addition to their aim of providing a less-invasive test, Mr Haidar’s team also hopes to study the captured coronavirus samples, with the aim of determining whether there are microbial factors necessary for the virus to establish and maintain its infectivity – which could ultimately help to control its spread.

“Since I have been in the UK, I have been proudly serving its TB patients, patients with respiratory diseases including Covid-19, kidney diseases and cancers,” Mr Haidar said. “I feel extremely proud that I have had the privilege of serving patients inside and outside Syria.”

“I would never have been able to leave [Syria] or to stay alive without Cara’s support,” Mr Haidar added.

While he said that dreams of returning to Syria “every day” and regards eventually returning to help rebuild his country as his “duty”, Mr Haidar described life there as having turned from “paradise” to “hell”.

“People were working at universities in places like Aleppo and Homs where the towns themselves became centres of fighting and conflict and they just couldn’t carry on – there was no power, no water,” said Mr Wordsworth. “There was no way you could do regular academic research in a laboratory with nothing functioning. 

And as “dividing lines manned by militias who knew who they were” sprang up, some of Cara’s fellows would find their typical 10 minute journey to work suddenly took two hours so as “to avoid going through checkpoints where they could get beaten up, robbed, shot, raped if they were women possibly”, he said, adding: “Each day they didn’t know what was going to happen.”

With the emergence of Isis, who by mid-2014 had declared the formation of a brutal caliphate stretching from Aleppo in northwestern Syria to Diyala in eastern Iraq, some people had to flee “overnight”, Mr Al-Bayaty said.

While Isis has been declared defeated both in Syria and Iraq, with many of its fighters jailed and scattered, Mr Al-Bayaty said that “after a period of some kind of stability”, academics are again applying from Mosul due to rising tensions and risks linked to various militias, “but also [to] what remains of Isis and extremist groups”.

“Obviously, yes they have been defeated, but [while] some of them were from neighbouring countries or other countries, many of them were attributed from the local population. So they have not totally disappeared, they probably just kind of melted into society.”

There has been considerable unrest in Iraq since October 2019, with protests calling for reform of the ailing post-2003 political system, among other deep dissatisfactions, amounting to the largest display of civil unrest since the fall of Saddam Hussein. 

The demonstrations evoked a bloody, often deadly, response from pro-government forces, with prime minister Adel Abdul Mahdi eventually offering his resignation following pressure from the country’s top Shia cleric. 

But the UN warns Iraqi authorities continue to operate “in the eye of multiple storms” – amid ongoing economic, social and political crises.

“We have seen again a large activity of militias in Iraq assassinating people, including academics and researchers and prominent activists,” said Mr Al-Bayaty, who is from Iraq. “But it’s difficult to say at the moment – is it the legacy of Isis or is it just the polarisation Isis brought? 

“Because of course they based it on sectarian lines, Sunni against Shia. It was already there before, [with] al-Qaida of course, so those kinds of divisions are still there and unfortunately it’s not heading in the right direction.”

Speaking of the demand for Cara’s services, Mr Wordsworth said: “It’s very hard to predict where the next peak will be – it may take us by surprise.”

“Right now we’re looking at the situation in Hong Kong,” he said. “So far there’s not a big demand from there, but there’s certainly a lot of people worried obviously. That could be a future source – I hope not.”

The UK has accused Beijing’s increasingly heavy-handed approach in Hong Kong as threatening the “one country, two systems”, moving to offer a path to British citizenship for up to three million residents.

But Mr Wordsworth said he has been told by observers and academics that there “haven’t been many takers yet, mainly because people are still waiting to see what happens”. 

“It’s a very big decision, if you’re going to suddenly leave your home country with your family and relocate, even if you think it’s only temporary,” he said. “It’s natural that people wait until the situation is pretty much desperate before they make the move.”

Similarly in Poland and Hungary – where “the mood of intolerance got so high” that Budapest’s Central European University could “no longer operate”, shifting classes instead to Vienna in 2019 – Mr Wordsworth suggested “it’s at the stage where … people want to know there’s a safety net there”, and begin making preliminary enquiries.

The “questioning of academics, the questioning of scientists” is “quite a powerful movement now around the world”, Mr Al-Bayaty said, citing the United States under Donald Trump’s presidency and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil as examples, in addition to Hungary and Poland. 

“You have those countries where we see academic freedom is under threat,” he said. "And it’s not the obvious places, which is worrying because if it can happen in those countries, then we need to be extra careful [in the UK]. 

“If it can happen in established democracies then, yes. I think nobody should be complacent.”

And he suggested the trend among supposedly stable democracies, while not having a direct effect, “might embolden” authoritarian-minded leaders in dictatorships and failed states.

“It’s not going to help,” Mr Al-Bayaty said. “In the areas where we deal with a high [number of] requests, if the leading countries were heading in the other direction, where they would promote tolerance and support academic science and experts, that would certainly help. 

“It wouldn’t necessarily stop conflict going on, but it would be a better climate for sure.”