A Blind Eye on Women
Politicians hoped the Iraq war would see the advance of women’s rights. Instead Iraqi women face violence, sexual abuse and segregation
On International Women’s Day in 2004, nearly a year after the invasion of Iraq, George Bush, the US President, addressed 250 women from around the world who had gathered at the White House. “The advance of women’s rights and the advance of liberty are ultimately inseparable,” he said. Supported by his wife Laura, who herself hailed the administration’s success in achieving greater rights for Afghan women, the president claimed that “the advance of freedom in the greater Middle East has given new rights and new hopes to women there”.
Advance. New rights. New hopes. Stirring stuff, but totally empty claims. In fact, Iraq’s women have become the biggest losers in the post-invasion disaster. While men have borne the brunt in terms of direct armed violence, women have been particularly hard-hit by poverty, malnutrition, lack of health services and a crumbling infrastructure, not least chronic power cuts which in some areas of Iraq see electricity only available for two hours a day.
Over 70% of the four million people forced out of their homes in the past five years in Iraq have been women and children. Many have found temporary shelter with relatives who share their limited space, food and supplies. But this, according to the UN refugee agency, has created “rising tension between families over scarce resources”. Many displaced women and children find themselves in unsanitary and overcrowded public buildings under constant threat of eviction.
Meanwhile, rampant political violence has also engulfed women in Iraq. Islamist militias with links to political parties in government and insurgent groups opposing both the government and the occupation have particularly targeted Iraqi women and girls. A new Islamist puritanism is seeing women and girls being violently pressured to conform to rigid dress codes. Personal movement and social behaviour are being “regulated”, with acid attacks (deliberately designed to disfigure “transgressive” women’s faces), just one of the sanctions of the new moral guardians of post-Saddam Iraq.
Suad F, a former accountant and mother of four children who lives in a previously mixed neighbourhood in Baghdad, was telling me during a visit to Amman in 2006: “I resisted for a long time, but last year also started wearing the hijab, after I was threatened by several Islamist militants in front of my house. They are terrorising the whole neighbourhood, behaving as if they were in charge. And they are actually controlling the area. No one dares to challenge them. A few months ago they distributed leaflets around the area warning people to obey them and demanding that women should stay at home.”
By 2008, the threat posed by Islamist militias and extremist groups has gone far beyond dress codes and calls for gender segregation at universities. Despite - or even partly because of US and UK rhetoric about liberation and women’s rights - women have been pushed back into their homes.
Women who have a public profile - as teachers, doctors, academics, lawyers, NGO activists or politicians - are now systematically threatened, seen as legitimate targets for assassinations. Criminal gangs have joined in. Though rarely reported in Britain, the criminal kidnapping of women for ransom, for trafficking into forced prostitution outside Iraq, and for out and out sexual abuse have all taken root in post-Saddam Iraq.
Killings in Basra in 2007 provide a snapshot. According to a study by the Basra Security Committee, 133 women were killed last year in the UK-controlled city, either by religious vigilantes or as a result of so-called honour killings. Of these, 79 were deemed to have “violated Islamic teachings”, 47 were killed to preserve supposed family honour, and the remaining seven were targeted for their political affiliations. As Amnesty International said last year, “politically active women, those who did not follow a strict dress code, and women [who are] human rights defenders are increasingly at risk of abuses, including by armed groups and religious extremists.”
The invasion and occupation of Iraq has also directly added to suffering of women. While aerial bombings of residential areas have been responsible for thousands of civilian deaths, many Iraqis have lost their lives while being shot at by American or British troops. Whole families have been wiped out as they approached a checkpoint or did not recognise areas marked as prohibited.
In addition to the killing of innocent women, men and children, the occupation forces have also been engaged in other forms of violence against women. There have been numerous documented accounts of physical assaults at checkpoints and during house searches. American and British forces have also arrested wives, sisters and daughters of suspected insurgents in order to pressure them to surrender. Recent figures show that the US and Iraqi forces are currently holding (mostly without charge) many thousands of detainees, and even where women have not been detained as bargaining chips they have spent frantic months or even years trying to discover where their family members were being held and why.
Women in Iraq suffered from discrimination and violence well before 2003. Deep-rooted patriarchy (especially in rural and tribal areas) and the pervasive repression of all women politically resistant to Saddam’s Ba’athist project were hallmarks of life in Iraq in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
But there were subtleties which gave women relative freedom. First, Saddam’s political acuity meant that he was perfectly capable of a policy of “state feminism” that partly shifted patriarchal power away from fathers, husbands and brothers, investing this power in the state itself - Saddam himself becoming the father of the nation. As long as you steered clear of all oppositional politics, this created 20 years (from the late 1960s on) of moderate liberty for at least Iraq’s urban middle-class women.
Then, with the growing militarisation of Iraq after the Iran-Iraq war and the major reverse of the Gulf war of 1991, Saddam switched policy toward cultivating political allegiance through tribal leaders. The upshot for women? A re-assertion of traditional conservative values that saw women’s rights used as bargaining chips and their bodies the repositories of tribal and familial “honour”.
As he stood before his female audience in 2004 did President Bush actually understand any of this? Was it factored at all? Or instead, did the US’s infamous lack of post-invasion planning include a blind spot over women’s rights? Perhaps George and Laura would like to update us.
Nadje Al-Ali is director of the Gender Studies Centre at SOAS, University of London. She is of Iraqi-German origin and has recently published Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (Zed Books, 2007). She is a founding member of Act Together: Women’s Action for Iraq.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
The huge step back for the women of Iraq is one more catastrophe. The destruction going on is occuring at many levels. The brain drain and the oppression of women is pushing Iraq into the past. What a horrendous crime the US has perpetrated.
So it goes in Afghanistan also, after a small reprieve. We must recognize the brave women who are fighting back for their lives. Literally. I see that women are losing their rights in America too: backlash around the world of women. Sometimes I think that wars are fought for not only resources, but also to put women “back in their place.” Militant machismo?
A VOICE APART: I term it “Mars rules.” Every dollar spent on arms, militarism, war-planning, weapons’ design and proliferation is a dollar NOT spent on social engagement, teaching peace, working the tool of diplomacy, sponsoring tolerance, investing in art & culture & education and infrastructure. In a word, every dollar spent on the false glory of destruction, the dark power of decimating “other,” creates a deficit to VENUS.
Interesting how few comment on the subject of the status of women and the disproportionate degree to which families (women & children) pay for war one way or another. Although competition for resources always plays into the equation, and sociopathic “leaders” help to keep the wounded karmic circle turning… it all goes back to patriarchal beliefs which only hold the masculine as valuable, even in defining God as a male being. THIS has devalued half the human race, and by extension, turned the great Mother/nature into a whorehouse where all her rich resources are raped at will by those with a fictitious claim to Divine authority. The result? All things off balance, others coming asunder, the center(s) cannot hold. What is magnetism but the cohesive force of yin for yang? Without equal partnership in all things, the circle of life implodes. Militarism the chief symbol of this misuse of Divine substance and intent.
It’s easy to blame the patriarchy. But so many obvious causes obscure the ‘power behind the throne’, and misplaced female power (I am not necessarily talking about human females, and obviously not about the ones suffering the consequences of militarism) but anyway misplaced female power hides behind the male. As my mother used to say, men can be evil, but it takes a woman to be truly malevolent.
Men are right to fear an out-of-control matriarchy, just as women are to fear out-of-control patriarchy.
I see that in my own life, where my mother-in-law has psychic control of her adult children, which of course affects their spouses too. I think it may be more helpful for men to think of the Earth as the Beloved, rather than than the Mother. A great many men have very deep, conflicted feelings towards the Mother archetype, usually with good reason. But of course they can’t voice those feelings, even to themselves, the figure of the Mother is inviolable.
All political correctness aside, to me the fundamental function of war is that of men subconsciously projecting and acting out deep imprints of being violated. Sexually. As children by adult males.
Really, war is all about men putting on different colored costumes and running around putting holes in each other at the expense of the women and children in their lives. And behind all this activity is the ultimate Mother — the Matrix. The frequency that codes for our reality also rules it.