At last free from the terror created by Saddam Hussein’s regime, Baghdad’s women say they have suffered long enough and deserve a better future.
”Thank God, we survived the Saddam regime,” said Saniya al-Raheem, a 56-year-old housewife.
”Our living conditions remain very difficult, but I accept them because now is better than before. I can freely express my feelings and talk about my problems,” al-Raheem said.
”I can even say the Americans are doing nothing to help us and I am frustrated because two of my grown-up sons are jobless,” she said.
Under the ousted regime, keeping your mouth shut was a matter of survival. Fear of arrest and execution was so pervasive that Iraqis virtually stopped talking in public about politics and problems.
”It was a cruel system. We were living under terror and we all suffered from it,” said Balkis Al-Shamary, a 25-year-old clerk at an optician’s shop.
”It was for our own survival not to talk about politics. We could not even discuss our personal problems openly,” she said.
For Maha Abrahim, a 33-year-old who owns a wedding dress hire shop, the end of the brutal regime allowed her for the first time to exercise freedom of speech.
”I like listening to radio discussions. They talk about small things such as traffic jams, police, electricity and people who guard our neighbourhoods,” Abrahim said.
”I like free discussions. I talk about these issues with my families and friends. This could never happen during the Saddam years,” she said.
Her favourite radio station was Freedom Radio run by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which has controlled part of Iraqi Kurdistan since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
At Al-Alwiya Children’s Hospital in Baghdad, paediatrician Hansam Hassan said she hoped for a peaceful Iraq.
”I want to live like others who are living in peace,” said the 26-year-old doctor.
”My country has been sick for more than 30 years. It needs good and intensive treatment to become healthy again.”
The treatment includes educating more women and creating a democratic government and a new justice system to prosecute Saddam — whose whereabouts remain unknown — and top-ranked officials from his now banned Ba’ath Party, Hassan said.
”During the Saddam years, we did not even have hopes. We were living only to survive. Now I have lots of dreams and hopes,” the doctor said. Her future plans include a trip to Paris to visit the Louvre Museum.
Bushra Jani, a 37-year-old professor of English literature at Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, also believes in a bright future.
”When I see my female students, I see hopes in them. They will have more opportunities to travel and learn and have more control of their lives,” said the professor with a smile.
”Iraq was a closed society, but now borders are open and foreigners and foreign companies are coming. All these things will help us create a better future,” she said, adding that foreign firms in particular should create job opportunities for young Iraqi women.
”My opportunities were denied by the regime, society and religion. The liberation came too late for me,” she said, expressing concern over calls among Muslim religions leaders to create an Islamic state.
The professor said she hoped a new Iraqi president would guarantee freedom and treat people equally but argued that individual Iraqis should first cleanse their minds from ”mob spirits” that ruled the nation under Saddam.
”Iraqis are very passionate people. They follow whatever their top leaders say. In a way, Iraqi people helped create a tyrant like Saddam because they used to accept lies and hypocrisy,” she said.
”We should never let that happen again,” Jani warned.
A 23-year-old mother of three said she wanted nothing but peace in the future.
”I am a survivor. We all survived. We just want to live in peace like any other countries,” said the woman who called herself simply the mother of Ali, her four-year-old son.
For housewife al-Raheem, post-war freedom is a sure sign of a promising future. ”I can feel it inside. All Iraqis are feeling freedom. This is a good start of a new Iraq,” she said. – Sapa-AFP