[WCUSP] Fw: Who is Killing the Women of Basra?

[Libby or Mort Frank]

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From: <moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG>
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Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 9:13 PM
Subject: Who is Killing the Women of Basra?


> Who is Killing the Women of Basra?
> 
> By Yifat Susskind, MADRE Communications Director
> 
> January 9, 2008, madre.org
> 
> http://www.madre.org/articles/me/womenbasra010908.html
> 
> In Basra, Iraq's second largest city, 2008 was ushered in
> with an announcement of the 2007 death toll of women targeted
> by Islamist militias. City officials reported on December 31
> that 133 women were killed and mutilated last year, their
> bodies dumped in trash bins with notes warning others against
> "violating Islamic teachings..." But ambulance drivers who
> are hired to troll the city streets in the early mornings to
> collect the bodies confirm what most residents believe: the
> actual numbers are much higher.
> 
> The killers' leaflets are not very original. They usually
> accuse the women of being prostitutes or adulterers. But
> those murdered are more likely to be doctors, professors, or
> journalists. We know this because activists from the
> Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) have taken on
> the gruesome task of visiting city morgues to try and
> determine the scale and pattern of the killings. According to
> OWFI, most of the women who have been murdered "are PhD
> holders, professionals, activists, and office workers."
> 
> Their crime is not "promiscuity," but rather opposition to
> the transformation of Iraq into an Islamist state. That
> bloody transition has been the main political trend under US
> occupation. It's no secret who is killing the women of Basra.
> Shiite political forces empowered by the US invasion have
> been terrorizing women there since 2003. Within weeks of the
> invasion, these groups established "Propagation of Virtue and
> Prevention of Vice" squads, which many Iraqis refer to simply
> as "misery gangs." They began by patrolling the streets,
> harassing and sometimes beating women who did not dress or
> behave to their liking. Coalition forces did nothing to stop
> them, and soon the militias escalated their violence to
> torturing and assassinating anyone who they saw as an
> obstacle to turning Iraq into an Islamist state.
> 
> The Culture Card Despite the clearly political nature of
> these killings, US media generally portray violence against
> Iraqi women as an unfortunate part of Arab or Muslim
> "culture." For instance, journalist Kay S. Hymowitz has
> catalogued the "inventory of brutality" committed by men in
> the "Muslim world," railing against "the savage
> fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women." Hymowitz echoes a
> commonly held assumption, namely that gender-based violence,
> when committed in the Middle East, derives from Islam.
> 
> Of course, pinning violence against women on Islam is
> politically useful: it helps to dehumanize Muslims and
> justify US intervention in their countries. It also deflects
> attention from the many ways that US policy has ignored and
> enabled violence against the women of Iraq (like championing
> political leaders with an openly-stated intent to unravel
> women's legal rights). But in fact, culture alone explains
> very little. All human behavior has cultural dimensions, but
> culture is merely a context, not a cause or a useful
> explanation for violence, whether in Iraq or anywhere else.
> 
> It makes much more sense to examine gender -'a system of
> power relations whose number one enforcement mechanism is
> recourse to violence against women. There is nothing "Muslim"
> about that system, except that its Muslim proponents, like
> their Jewish, Christian, and Hindu counterparts, use culture
> and religion to rationalize women's subjugation.
> 
> In fact, shifting the focus from culture to gender reveals a
> system of power that is nearly universal. Yanar Mohammed, the
> founder of OWFI, describes this year's killings of women in
> Basra as a campaign "to restrain women into the domestic
> domain and end all female participation in the social and
> political scene." Compare her comment to Amnesty
> International's conclusion about the ongoing mass killings of
> women in Guatemala. According to Amnesty, that wave of
> violence, "carries with it a perverse message: women should
> abandon the public space they have won at much personal and
> social effort and shut themselves back up in the private
> world, abandoning their essential role in national
> development." This certainly captures the intent of Iraq's
> Islamists, who have little in common with the killers of
> women in Guatemala, other than a rigid adherence to a
> gendered system of power.
> 
> Instead of lamenting the "brutality" of Islam, the US media
> should start connecting the dots between the US occupation
> and the empowerment of people who use violence against women
> as a strategy to pursue their political agenda. We can start
> with the fact that the Pentagon has trained, armed, and
> funded the very militias that are killing the women of Basra.
> 
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