http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2082705,00.htmlLife was supposed to get better for women in Iraq after the ousting of Saddam. The reality has been rocketing rates of rape, murder, domestic violence and infant mortality, reports leading US writer Katha Pollitt
Friday May 18, 2007
The Guardian
The video, originally posted on jebar.info, a Kurdish website, was soon plastered all over the internet: a young girl in a red tracksuit jacket and black pants was being beaten, kicked and stoned to death by a mob of excited, shouting men. It is a gruesome marriage of 21st-century technology and medieval barbarity. At one point, bloody and dazed, the girl tries to protect herself, whereupon a man drops a big rock or lump of concrete on her face, killing her. Her crime? Doaa Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old member of the Kurdish Yazidi religious minority, a non-Muslim sect, had fallen in love with a Sunni boy and possibly converted to Islam. For this "crime" against family and community, Doaa was murdered in the village of Beshika, near Mosul, in a collective act of woman hatred, led by her brothers and uncles. In the video you can see local policemen watching and one man recording the killing on his mobile phone.
This is the new Iraq, where women were going to be free and equal - no more "rape rooms", no more psychopathic Uday Hussein summoning young virgins to the palace for his pleasure. In the early days of the occupation, we heard a lot about building schools, starting women's health programmes and funding women's micro-enterprises. At the 2005 State of the Union address, Laura Bush sat with Safia Taleb al-Suhai, leader of the Iraqi Women's Political Council, telegraphing the message that women's rights and democracy went together and that both were part of the big plan for Iraq. Well, scratch that.
The status of women was never as high under Saddam as opponents of the war sometimes asserted, and it was already declining throughout the 1990s, as Saddam embraced Islam to distract the populace from the effects of the Gulf war, UN sanctions, and his own depredations. But Iraq today is even worse for women: more repressive, more violent, more lawless. As if car bombs and suicide bombers weren't horrific enough, criminal gangs, religious militias and death squads kidnap, rape and kill with impunity, with special attention to women professionals, students and rights activists. According to the United Nations' most recent quarterly report on human rights in Iraq, domestic violence and "honour" killings are on the rise - Kurdistan, often described as comparatively peaceful and orderly, saw more than 40 such killings between January and March this year; in the province of Erbil, rapes quadrupled between 2003 and 2006. Women who had worn western clothes and moved about freely all their lives have been terrorised into wearing the abaya and staying inside unless accompanied by male relatives. In Sadr City and elsewhere, sharia courts mete out misogynist "justice".
"The political climate in Iraq is such that anyone can carry out crimes against women.You can come upon women's bodies anywhere," Kurdish feminist and labour activist Houzan Mahmoud told me in London, where she serves as the UK representative of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI). Far from promoting women's rights and security, "the occupation has strengthened the tribes, political Islam and reactionary bourgeois parties - all of which are anti-women."
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