Iraqi Women Have Little to Celebrate
by Medea
Benjamin
On March 8, 2003,
international women’s day, Iraqi women had little to celebrate. They were
living under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, the weight of onerous UN
sanctions and living in fear of impending war. This year, Saddam Hussein is gone
and sanctions have been lifted. But Iraqi women face a brand new set of
burdens.
Iraqi women, like Iraqi men, wage a
day-to-day struggle just to survive: they face a devastating 60 percent
unemployment rate, constant shortages of electricity and clean drinking water, a
crumbling transportation network, and a crumbling health care system. But Iraqi
women also have to cope with an unanticipated consequence of Hussein’s
ouster: the breakdown of the rule of law that has led to an unprecedented spate
of rapes and kidnappings. Add to that the daily bombings and the travails of
living under an occupying force, and it is no surprise that many Iraqi women are
afraid to even venture out of their homes. “The situation for women is
worse now than before the war,” said Eman Ahmed Khammas who directs the
Occupation Watch Center in Baghdad. “Because of the security situation,
it’s really very difficult to move around and very dangerous. Families are
afraid for their daughters and don’t allow them to be outside on their
own.”
Worse yet, in the long
view, is a fear that Iraqi women’s rights, won over a century of
struggles, are now being eroded by the rising power of conservative Muslim
clerics. Many Iraqi women fault the U.S. for shoring up the clerics, while
failing to promote women to decision-making
positions.
In December 2003, a
coalition of Iraqi women’s groups, most of whom had supported the US
invasion, delivered a scathing letter to the U.S. Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) denouncing a litany of discriminatory political appointments.
The letter noted that there are only 3 women out of 25 on the Interim Governing
Council; no women governors have been appointed in any of the 18 provinces, not
one woman on the 9-person committee that wrote the just-completed Fundamental
Law. There is only 1 woman in charge in one of the 25 government ministries; and
there has been no woman appointed governor in any of the country’s 18
provinces.
And remember that one of the
few noteworthy achievements of the Iraqi government prior to the invasion was
that there were more professional women in positions of power than in almost any
other Middle Eastern nation.
The
relatively low key struggle between conservative clerics and women activists
recently exploded within the US-appointed Governing Council over a Code 137, a
reactionary resolution passed by Council but not approved by the US authorities.
The resolution would have scrapped Iraq’s 1959 family affairs code
(considered among the most progressive in the Middle East) and placed family law
under Muslim religious
jurisdiction.
Zakia Ismael Hakki, a
retired woman judge, said that the new law would “send Iraqi families back
to the Middle Ages” by stripping women of equal rights around marriage,
divorce, children, inheritance, and property rights. Iraqi women promptly
mobilized against the Code, with street protests and petitions that elicited
international support. The women garnered a temporary victory when the substance
of the code was dropped from the interim constitution approved on March 1. But
conservative clerics and political parties like the Supreme Council of the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq vow to try again once political control is turned
over the Iraqis on June 30.
Iraqi women
are fully cognizant of the danger and are preemptively organizing to defend
their rights in the post-June 30 Iraqi government. They spearheaded a national
drive to have at least 40 percent representation in public administration,
legislative bodies and the judiciary. The interim constitution, however, calls
for a more modest 25 percent representation for women. Moreover, this is only a
target, not a compulsory quota, and it only applies to the interim assembly and
not appointed positions.
Yanar Mohamed,
leader of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq who has received
death threats because of her battles for women’s rights, sees this as a
critical juncture for Iraqi women. “Either we organize and demand our
social and political freedoms or we give way to a theocracy and the
institutionalized, legalized oppression of women in Iraq.” It would be a
sad irony indeed if an invasion that is now being sold as a war of liberation
for Iraqis - now that no WMDs can be found - leads to a government that erodes
the gains of Iraqi
women.
Medea Benjamin is
co-founder of the women’s peace group CodePink and the human rights group
Global Exchange.
Posted: Mon - March 1, 2004 at 05:39 PM