Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Response by Lindsey Hilsum
Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you very much
indeed.
Journalists are often criticised for being selective with the facts. I have
to say, I think that if Frances had been a journalist she would have been that
kind of journalist. She only said the good things. For that I am grateful. I
also have to - as a journalist who values accuracy - correct one thing. I did
not tell the children not to eat meat, I told them not to eat rice pudding. It
wasn’t a matter of principle, simply of taste.
It is a great honour to be here. This is the first time that I have ever been
to a Graduation Ceremony, that is because when I was a student at Exeter
University, of course, I was much to much of a rebel and an anarchist to come to
the Degree Conferment Ceremony - which means that my father, like many of the
parents in this audience, is watching his child graduate for the first time. I
think that the lady up there who was so proud could understand that maybe it is
worth waiting for - even if you have to wait twenty-five years, which he has
done.
As some of you know, I have spent much of the last two years in Iraq, a
country which under the years of sanctions and the brutality of Saddam Hussein
was thirsty for ideas. Under sanctions, you couldn’t even post a book from
Britain to Iraq so people who needed books or wanted books had to get them
through circuitous routes via Lebanon or Jordan. I know an academic who had an
account at Hatchards and he had a £100 in the account but they still wouldn’t
let him have books because he didn’t have a credit card and he couldn’t get a
credit card because Iraq was cut off. About three years before the war, they
started to get Internet. Only some people were allowed to use it, and there was
one terminal in the Ministry of Information and by using it people began to get
a bit of a glimpse of the world out there beyond the time warp world in which
they lived, and I remember one day, one of the Ministry of Information officials
coming to me, after he had been on the Internet, and he said: "Lindsey, can I
ask you a question?". I said "Sure, Yasser, what?" He said, "Where are the Tiger
Woods and what is their relationship to golf?"
So they were beginning to glimpse the world out there, and in the weeks
leading up to the war, when I was in Baghdad, I used to frequently go up to one
of the University Campuses at Mustanseriya University. The reason I went there
was because people were frightened to talk, but there at the University people
were so desperate to talk. They wanted to practise their English, many of the
students were studying translation. They just wanted to talk to somebody from
the outside world but, of course, people were fearful so often it ended up with
people crowding round and asking me questions about rock stars and films and
things which I just couldn’t answer. I was a complete disappointment in that
way. But they just wanted any kind of contact that they could have, and I
remember just a few days before the war a young man pulled me on one side and he
said "We want this war, we have to have change, anything for change," and then
he said "Don’t tell anybody that I told you that".
Now I don’t know if there is a Chinese curse: may you get what you wish for.
I don’t go to the University anymore in Baghdad because it is too dangerous.
Several of the professors have been murdered, a young British freelance
journalist, Richard Wild who was a recent graduate from Cambridge University -
he was only 24 - he was killed up there. We don’t know why, we don’t know by
whom, he was just killed with a pistol.
Universities are always the proving ground for ideas and one of the ideas
that is being tested now is on the role of women; and whereas when I used to go
there before the war, some women would wear a head scarf, while others wouldn’t,
now there are vigilante groups out, and woe betide any girl who goes without her
head covered. Many of the women aren’t going at all, because either they or
their parents deem it is too dangerous to travel.
I realise, thinking about that and the idea of imposing democracy by war,
which that young man craved and wanted so much, that as a journalist I dwell in
that space where ideas and reality collide. It can be a very dangerous and
volatile and violent place, and that is what is happening in Iraq now. Iraq is a
place where people have had not enough of ideas and too much of reality, and
many of you graduating today, I know, come from countries which have been
turbulent or may become turbulent in the future. So I hope as you celebrate your
achievements - which must be many for you to have got this far - that the ideas
that you have learnt at this University will be useful when you get back and you
have to confront reality. And for all of you, wherever you have come from, as
you celebrate today think a little bit of those Iraqi students and what they are
going through. I hope that at some point in the future that many of them will be
able to come here, and also that there will be a day when I can go to a
graduation ceremony in Baghdad, and where the students who have been thinking of
ideas, know that they will be able to apply those ideas for a peaceful and
prosperous future.
Thank you.
Lindsey Hilsum
14 July 2004