“Iraq is in the most crucial few months of its history since its formation as a modern state in the 1920s”, the Iraqi activist Isam al-Khafaji told Globolog this week. If he’s right, careful thought, word and action is more important now than ever. And the role of women in Iraq’s future is central.
But first, a couple of examples of speech where care is not apparent. Two weeks before suicide bombers killed at least 169 people in the 2 March attacks on Shi’a Muslims in the Iraqi holy city of Karbala and in Baghdad (see picture), the journalist John Pilger was asked if he thought the global anti-war movement should be supporting Iraq’s anti-occupation resistance. He replied:
“Yes, I do. We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the ‘Bush gang’ will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.” And Robert Fisk, writing on 3 March in The Independent said: “I don’t believe the Americans were behind [the 2 March] carnage.” But he immediately went on to qualify this with: “I think of the French OAS in Algeria in 1962 setting off bombs among France’s Muslim Algerian community.” And, he added, “an occupation authority which should regard civil war as the last prospect it ever wants to contemplate, keeps shouting ‘civil war’ in our ears and I worry about that.”
Globolog would be glad of clarification. What does John Pilger mean by ‘resistance’? Who should it come from and in what form? Does Robert Fisk think that the Americans are associated with the bombs, even if they are not ‘behind’ them? And that they are encouraging civil war?
No one has suffered more in Iraq than women and girls. With the future of the country in the balance, and close to International Women’s Day, it’s worth recalling that nothing predicts the future of a country better than ‘gender development’ (a piece of jargon meaning access to healthcare, education and other factors for females).
As the statistics organisation Nationmaster says:
“gender development is a better predictor [of positive outcomes] than all other variables. Countries that value women’s rights [to healthcare, education and so on] are more different [from those that don’t] than rich countries are from poor countries. Indeed, most variables [correlate] to it, among the strongest being children’s health, all education-related indicators and the absence of corruption.”
The most important person in Iraq today
The rights of women and female children have been an issue of particular concern in recent weeks because of proposed legal changes such as proposition 137, which, as Sami Zubaida explains in openDemocracy, could undermine such gains as were made in the 20th century.
The threat was thought to be compounded by proposals floated in the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) that sharia (Islamic law) be the source of law in the new constitution, and that women be limited or excluded from representative assemblies.
As it’s been reported, the imperialist oppressors intervened to make clear they would never approve a law that compromised women’s rights. Paula J. Dobriansky, the United States under-secretary of state for global affairs, insisted that “empowering women is a top priority in shaping Iraq’s provisional government. Ensuring women’s rights benefits not only individuals . . . it also strengthens democracy.”
Some critics question the substance behind such words. “Our concern is how much the rhetoric will be matched by serious levels of funding for Iraqi reconstruction and for women’s programs in particular,” says Ritu Sharma, director of Women’s Edge, an international aid group.
The need for action can hardly be exaggerated. In theory, Iraqi women have for more than forty years enjoyed some of the most modern legal protections in the Muslim world, thanks to Iraqi civil law concerning the family, defined in Article 159 of the civil code, adopted in 1959 (before the Ba’athists came to power). In practice, oppression of women – including beheading, gang-rape, torture and murder – were common practice in Saddam’s regime. According to Manal Omar, Iraq country director for Women for Women International, 60%-70% of women in Iraq have suffered some form of violence. Women also bore the brunt of the poverty and extreme rates of child mortality consequent on Saddam’s theft of the billions of dollars flowing into the country during the period of UN sanctions during the 1990s. And many have suffered terribly in the confusion and anarchy since the American-led conquest.
(Incidentally, it’s frequently said that women are around 60% of the population – a result, presumably, of the loss of mainly male life in Saddam’s domestic purges, the Iran-Iraq war, and the so-called first and second Gulf wars. But the CIA does not seem to agree. It estimates that males outnumber females in all age groups except the small fraction of Iraqis who are over 65. See here. Globolog would welcome insight on this point).
In addition to getting help from outside, sisters in Iraq will need to do things for themselves. You can catch up on some of their stories in this section on the Occupation Watch website. Outside Iraq, one can join solidarity events on 8 March like this one.
Globolog asked Isam al-Khafaji, a secular democrat who resigned from the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council last summer and now heads Iraqi Revenue Watch, for his thoughts for International Women’s Day. His eyes warmed with memories of the far-off 1960s: “Ah, I remember the flowers we used to give on this special day”. Perhaps one day in Iraq men and women will give those flowers again.
But Iraqi women like Siham Hattab, a 33-year old who had been planning to contest a seat on the Baghdad provincial council, have more than flowers on their minds at present. They do not have John Pilger’s luxury of saying “we have no choice”. Siham Hattab was relieved to see the fall of Saddam but has been deeply disturbed by the US military occupation. “These are two evils, and we have to choose one of them,” she told Guardian reporter Rory McCarthy.
As Karl Marx almost put it, humans make their own history; but not in circumstances of their own choosing.