[WCUSP] Iraqi women's rights suffer

[yvonne simmons]

Undermined Iraq's Women: Report Aaron Glantz, OneWorld
US 
Sat Mar 10, 1:51 PM ET
 


SAN FRANCISCO, Mar 10 (OneWorld) - The United States'
four-year-old occupation of        Iraq has
considerably worsened the lives of the country's
women, charges a new report from an international
human rights group. 


 
The New York-based group MADRE says Iraqi women are
enduring unprecedented levels of assault, abductions,
public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, honor
killings, domestic abuse, torture in detention,
beheadings, shootings, and public hangings.

MADRE's 40-page report, titled "Promising Democracy,
Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the U.S.
War on Iraq," also argues that the rise of theocratic
militias in Iraq is the result of deliberate plans by
U.S. officials, not an accidental byproduct of a
bungled occupation. 

"Rather than support progressive and democratically
minded Iraqis, including members of the women's
movement," the report reads, "the U.S. threw its
weight behind Iraq's Shiite Islamists, calculating
that these forces, long suppressed by        Saddam
Hussein, would cooperate with the occupation and
deliver the stability needed for the U.S. to implement
its policies in Iraq."

Chief among the groups brought to power by the U.S.
invasion is the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution
in Iraq (SCIRI), a theocratic organization whose
militia, the Badr Brigades, was trained by the Iranian
government.

Immediately after overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the
Bush administration appointed SCIRI leader Abdel-Aziz
al-Hakim to the country's Governing Council. The
United States then recruited members of the Badr
Brigade to join the Iraqi police and military, with
terrible results.

"Mainstream media often report that the Badr and Mahdi
militias have 'infiltrated' Iraq's Ministry of
Interior, which controls the country's police,
intelligence, and paramilitary units. More accurately,
Iraq's Islamist government, boosted to power by the
U.S., placed the ministry in the hands of its
militia," reads the MADRE report. 

"The Americans have empowered the Shi'ite groups who
are now in the so-called Parliament," adds Houzan
Mahmoud of the Organization of Women's Freedom in
Iraq. "Now they feel free to oppress women, to veil
them, [and] to bring about Islamic Sharia law."

Mahmoud, who was born in Iraqi Kurdistan but now lives
in London, received a death threat last week, which
she is taking seriously.

"It said, 'You will be killed by the middle of March,
because you have been campaigning against Islam,'"
Mahmoud told OneWorld, "and it says Ansar al-Islam,
which is a notoriously Islamist jihadist group based
in Kurdistan. They've been infamous, basically, for
killing and beheading people in the villages in
Kurdistan."

Mahmoud says the death threat stems from her support
of feminist reforms in Kurdistan's regional
Constitution, which Ansar al-Islam opposes.

She says she will continue to fight, however. She
spoke to OneWorld while attending an anti-war vigil in
London.

"I will attend many other events," she said. "That
fatwa or any other events will not force me to give up
on my struggle for the rights and freedoms of Iraqi
women or any other women elsewhere who are living the
oppression of the Islamist militias or governments."

Yifat Susskind, who works in MADRE's New York office,
told OneWorld that the actions of women like Houzan
Mahmoud give her hope that if the United States
withdraws its troops from Iraq the situation could
improve.

"Their daily lives are like the worst headlines that
we read," she said, "and they're not giving in to
despair. They're organizing. They're doing what they
can with a very real perspective about what's
possible."

Susskind said in past years Iraqi women had organized
public demonstrations to commemorate International
Women's Day on March 8th, but though the situation in
Iraq was too dangerous for a street demonstration
Thursday, they didn't give up.

"They did this amazing project, which was to bring
together Sunni and Shiite youth," Susskind said. 

She said young men and women from Sadr City and other
places that are hot-beds of the civil war came
together for a music and poetry festival. 

"They held this massive party. They denounced this
civil war. They reaffirmed their commitment to live as
neighbors and as friends and basically refused to be
enemies at a time when, if you're reading the New York
Times, it's impossible to imagine that there's anybody
left in Iraq who'd be doing that," she said. 

"That's what gives me hope," she added.




 
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