Hassan, Alharith Abdulhameed (1951-2006)

Mennonite Weekly Review obituary: 2007 Feb 5 p. 3

Birth date: 1951

text of obituary:

Iraqi peace advocate with ties to EMU killed

Baghdad professor attended peace training in 2004

Bonnie Price Lofton

Eastern Mennonite University

HARRISONBURG, Va. — An Iraqi Muslim peace advocate who had attended trainings at Eastern Mennonite University ws shot to death in Baghdad Dec. 6, according to a recent e-mail from his widow to friends at EMU.

Alharith Abdulhameed Hassan, 56, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Baghdad, was shot while traveling to work, according to the e-mail from Maysa Hussam Jaber, his widow.

Both Hassan and Jaber had attended trainings at EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding in the summer of 2004. They were sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee, with additional support from Church World Service.

Jan Jenner, a member of CJP's leadership team who knew the couple, said Hassan "was a man who cared passionately about the people of Iraq. His death among thousands and thousands in this tragic war, is a great loss to Iraq and to the human community as a whole."

Jaber requested that her husband be remembered, "especially in EMU, the university he loved most" and suggested "Putting his photo and a short bio in one of the halls or near the tree we planted."

The couple and four other Iraqis at EMU's 2004 Summer Peacebuilding Institute planted a magnolia tree in front of a dormitory to mark the friendship between the Iraqi and American people.

In a written evaluation of his experiences at EMU, Hassan said he liked "knowing the reality and truthfulness of the American people."

Hassan was director-general of the psychological research center at the University of Baghdad. He was a professor at Al-Mustansiriya University, the Baghdad campus where at least 70 peoplle died in a suicide attack Jan. 16.

In recent years, his research and practice interests were post-traumatic stress disorder, the rights of women and children and interfaith education.

Jaber wrote that she did not know who her husband's killers were or why they targeted him.

He was a moderate, "working for the good of Iraq with no ethnic or religious bias," she said.

EMU professor Peter Dula, who represented MCC in Iraq until mid-2006, and Iraqi intellectuals are in extreme danger, especially professors, physicians and lawyers. "Hundreds have been killed," he said.