Iraqi Women Have Little to Celebrate

On International Women’s Day, Iraqi Women Have Little
to Celebrate

by Medea Benjamin

Published on Monday, March 8, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0308-01.htm

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 women’s peace group
CodePink and the San Francisco-based human rights group
Global Exchange.