Forgery mounts in Damascus University, Bachelors degree for sale: (Translation by Dani Murad) (Zaman Alwasl)- While Assad’s regime is preoccupied in bombing civilians and fighting rebels to lay the foundations of its rule and setting things in his favor, and as its security services are arresting whoever has the slightest relation to the revolution, many Syrian officials have found that a good opportunity for a further corruption, theft and embezzlement by all illegal means, however, this time the clutches of corruption have targeted the educational Syrian system, when fake degrees have appeared recently in the capital Damascus. In order to investigate the matter further, Zaman Alwasl’s correspondent met “Eiad”, one of the brokers, pretending to be interested in buying one, however, the meeting unfold more things, because the broker said that the price of one certificate is 250,000 with the exception of medicine, engineering, informatics, where the price is up to 300,000 Syrian pounds, or approximately $ 2000. Eiad added that all the certificates bear regime’s seals and signatures, in addition to the seals of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for authentication, and the customer receives a certificate stamped and certified with an average no less than 80%, which is an excellent one according to the internal regulations of Damascus University. However, Eiad confirmed that these certificates are not valid in Syria, but intended to be used in countries other than Syria, which according to him are very beneficial to Syrians in diaspora, but for those inside Syria, these certificates are just ink on papers with no official records in the Syrian universities, they are only valuable abroad since it’s difficult to know whether they are real or fake, especially with the seal of Ministry of Foreign Affairs existing on the translated version. And the broker pointed out that the matter is not limited to undergraduate degrees, but there is also a market for secondary, vocational, and even primary certificates, at prices not exceeding 100,000 Syrian pounds. For these brokers, asylum seekers are the most common customers, as Mohammed, a young man in his thirties who dropped out of high school in the first grade, today he holds a fake bachelor degree in computer engineering, and says to Zaman Alwasl : “I want to travel to a European country to escape the war in my country, and I’ve got an admission from one of the universities there to complete post-graduate studies ,and all needed is this certificate to obtain the approval”, and adds Once I reach that country, I will seek a humanitarian asylum and will not come back here. As for Hani, who currently resides illegally in Germany, he wants to obtain such certificate to present it to the German authorities in order to facilities and quicken getting the approval on his asylum, adding that Western countries prefer to give asylum to holders of university degrees before those who have lower ones. Khaled, who graduated from university last year says: “it’s sad to see illiterate people obtaining better degrees than the ones we spend more than 20 years to have, and they caused us a lot of damage, because Syrian degrees are now greatly doubted abroad, and I will not be surprised if the foreign countries decided to consider any certificates issued during the crisis by Damascus’s university as invalid. The administrative chaos and lack of morals taking place in Damascus are due to regime’s officials and employees who work under the cover of shabiha and heads of intelligence. Thus, Assads son not only destroyed the country, sabotaged its infrastructure and bombed its historical monuments, but also gave its Shabiha the free hand to destroy educational institutions, under the slogan, “Assad or we burn the country, and with their ignorance, they damaged one of the most important universities in the Arab world, and that was obvious in the Spanish site Web Matrix which has shown a severe decline in Damascus ranking among other universities from 3400 mid- 2012 to 5070 in 2014. It’s noteworthy that the Minister of Education in the interim government formed by the Syrian opposition, revealed in April about the ministry’s intention to establish two universities, one in Syria, in FSA-held areas, and the other in the Turkish territories near the borders, so that they have enough capacity for the largest number of students, who left their studies because of the spiral of violence in Syria.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 23:13:37 +0000
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