A prominent group of Iraqi women who backed the United States-British invasion recently met the American ambassador in an effort to pressure the politicians drawing up Iraq’s constitution not to limit women’s rights. Western feminist groups and some Iraqi women activists fear that Islamic law, if enshrined as a main source of legislation, will be used to restrict their rights. The US claims to share this concern. Iraqi women generally do not.
To understand why, we need to remember that this constitution is being written in a war zone. This process is designed not to represent the Iraqi people’s need for a constitution but to comply with an imposed timetable aimed at legitimising the occupation. The drafting process has increasingly proved a dividing, rather than a unifying, process. Under Saddam Hussein, we had a constitution described as ”progressive and secular”. It did not stop him violating human rights. The same is happening now. The militias of the parties heading the interim government are involved in daily violations of Iraqis’ human rights with the US-led occupation’s blessing. Will the new constitution put an end to this violence?
Most Iraqi women try to cope sensitively with the predicament of dealing with the occupation and the rise of reactionary practices affecting their rights and way of life. This applies across the political and class spectrum, to the secular left as much as to moderate Islamists and nationalists. Most also feel that the constitution is not their priority, and that those writing such a crucial document should be able to think clearly, to think of tomorrow. To do that one must be free of today’s fears and able to enjoy basic human rights, such as walking safely in the streets. Iraqi women cannot.
Despite all the rhetoric of ”building a new democracy”, Iraqis are buckling under the burdens and abuse of the US-led occupation and its local Iraqi sub-contractors. Daily life for most Iraqis is still a struggle for survival. Human rights under occupation have proved, like weapons of mass destruction, to be a mirage. Torture and ill-treatment is widespread. Depleted uranium and other banned weapons have been used against Iraqi cities by occupying troops.
Iraqi women were long the most liberated in the Middle East. Occupation has largely confined them to their homes. A typical Iraqi woman’s day begins with the struggle to get the basics: electricity, petrol or a cylinder of gas, water, food and medication. It ends with a sigh of relief at surviving death threats and violent attacks. For most women, simply to venture on to the street is to risk being attacked or kidnapped for profit or revenge. Young girls are sold to neighbouring countries for prostitution.
In a land awash with oil, 16-million Iraqis rely on monthly food rations for survival. None has been received since May. Privatisation threatens free public services. Acute malnutrition among children has doubled. Unemployment, at 70%, has fuelled poverty, prostitution, backstreet abortions and honour killings. Corruption and nepotism are rampant in the interim government.
A quota system imposed by Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, ensures women’s participation in the interim government, the national assembly and the committee appointed to write the constitution. Iraqi women’s historical struggle against colonial domination, and for national unity, social justice and legal equality, has been reduced to bickering among a handful of ”women leaders” over nominal political posts.
Powerless, holed up in guarded areas, venturing out in daylight only with armed escorts, and lacking any credibility among Iraqi women, the failure of these ”leaders” is catastrophic. Like their male colleagues, they have adopted a selective, largely US-oriented approach to human rights.
Documents released in March by the American Civil Liberties Union highlight more than a dozen cases of rape and abuse of female detainees, and reveal that no action was taken against any soldier or civilian official as a result.
The silence of female National Assembly members and interim government and US-financed women’s NGOs is deafening. In Iraq, ”women’s rights” is an absurd discourse chewing on meaningless words. No wonder that the US-funded NGOs, which preach Western-style women’s rights and democracy, are regarded as vehicles for foreign manipulation and are despised and boycotted.
Iraqi women know that the enemy is not Islam. There is a strong antipathy to anyone trying to conscript women’s issues to the racist ”war on terror” targeted against the Muslim world. Most Iraqi women do not regard traditional society, however restrictive, as the enemy. In fact, it has been the protector of women and children. The enemy is the collapse of the state and civil society. And the culprit is the foreign military invasion and occupation.
Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi-born novelist and former prisoner of Hussein’s regime; a version of this article appeared in the Cairo weekly news-paper Al-Ahram
Millions embezzled
British officials are concerned about the level of corruption in the Iraqi Defence Ministry, after the embezzlement of vast amounts of money earmarked for the country’s security forces, write Ed Vulliamy and Richard Norton-Taylor.
A report compiled by the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit has concluded that at least half of $1,27-billion of Iraqi money spent on military procurement has disappeared into a miasma of kickbacks and vanished middlemen. The vanished money came solely from Iraqi funds, not from foreign donations. The report focuses on an eight-month period after the transfer of sovereignty from the United States-led occupation to caretaker Iraqi authorities on June 28 last year.
It found that contracts were awarded to favoured weapons suppliers without bidding or approval from the prime minister’s office. Contracts included a clause stating that the full value of deals was to be paid up front, in cash. All deals were done through middlemen, who have disappeared, leaving the government without recourse when it came to unfulfilled contracts. — Â