Women in Iraq: Losing ground since 2003

by Karen Button

On March 8th, while much of the world recognized International Women’s Day, the Iraqi government instead celebrated the birth of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter. That wasn’t always the case. The change came about as one of the first acts by the US-installed Interim Governing Council (IGC) and, as many Iraqi women’s groups worried, an indication of things to come from a government dominated by ultra-conservative religious parties.

They had right for concern.

As early as April 2003, concerned Iraqi women appealed to Paul Bremer when they realized they weren’t being equitably represented in the new government and saw rights they benefited from under Saddam Hussein being dismantled. Yet, the US gave only three IGC seats to women and none were included in the nine-member rotating presidential council, nor were they included on the constitutional reform committee. Plus, the US Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs had only a part-time gender point person.

Then came the first law drafted by the US-installed Interim Governing Council (IGC), which would have repealed one in place since 1959 that gave women rights to custody, divorce and equal inheritance.

Fortunately, Iraqi women’s groups were able to defeat the proposal, but not without a price. Death threats and assassinations targeting women’s advocates began early on. Aqila al-Hashimi (one of the IGC members) was one of the first women who dared take a public stance to be killed; she was murdered in front of her house in September 2003.

Iraq's new constitution, enacted under US occupation, ended 85 years of secular governance by proclaiming Islam the state religion (disregarding the country’s minority religions) and the fundamental source for legislation. Suddenly gone were many of the gains made over the previous century.

During the 1920s and '30s middle-class Iraqi women first began entering the work force and advocating for equal rights. In 1952 the first women’s organization, the Iraqi Women’s Federation, was founded. Changes to the constitution in 1970 made women and men nearly equal—the exception being family law, which still favored men.

Though Saddam Hussein’s regime was indisputably brutal, women continued making gains under his rule. Women’s literacy and education improved, restrictions on women outside the home were lifted. Women won the right to vote, to run for political office, and hold jobs traditionally held by men. By the early 1980s they made up 40% of the work force and received generous maternity leave. The Unified Labor Code called for equal pay, benefits, and promotions for men and women both.

Prior to the US-led Gulf War in 1991, female literacy rates in Iraq were the highest in the region and Iraqi women were among the most educated and professional in the Arab world.

This is the Iraq that US-led troops invaded in March 2003 and the one which Mr. Bush’s government portrayed as subjugating women in an atmosphere of terror. “Saddam Hussein's brutal regime silenced the voices of Iraq's women through violence and intimidation,” still reads the US State Department’s Web site.

The US was coming to Iraq, the Bush Administration said, to free women from this purported tyranny and promote their liberation.

However, for women in Iraq, life under US occupation has meant a significant rollback of their freedoms and a frightening increase in violence used against them. One of the first actions taken by US forces upon entering Baghdad was to fire all government employees, 40% of whom were female. This put tens of thousands of women out of work, with little options elsewhere. As early as July 2003 Human Rights Watch reported that at least 400 women and girls (some as young as eight years old) had been raped during or immediately after the invasion-a level of sexualized violence unheard of under Hussein's rule.

Numerous international and Iraqi organizations, which include UNAMI (the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq) and Amnesty International, as well as the Iraqi League, the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq, and the Iraqi NGO Women’s Will have documented increasing violence against women over the past four years, and the use of sexualized torture in prisons by both US and Iraqi forces.

According to a new report by the international women’s human rights organization MADRE, not less than three international and nine Iraqi organizations have documented these abuses.

The report, entitled “Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-based Violence and the US War on Iraq,” identifies Iraq’s US-backed government as being run by “Islamists.” (The report defines Islamists as those “who pursue a reactionary social and political vision in the name of Islam, as distinct from ‘Islamic’ relating to the religion of Islam.”)

By replacing secular governance with theocracy, MADRE charges, the US “has decisively traded women's rights for cooperation from the Islamists whom it boosted to power.” In today’s Iraq, women are being used as a political instrument through the very violence and intimidation the US once charged Hussein with.

A case in point is Prime Minister al-Maliki’s response to a 20-year old woman who, in an unprecedented international television interview, accused Iraqi Special Forces of raping her after she was arrested. After first calling for an immediate investigation, hours later Maliki’s government reversed its position, labeling the woman a liar and wanted criminal and stating it would instead “reward” the officers involved.

Mr. Maliki accused the woman of fabricating the story in order to undermine the so-called new security sweep in Baghdad. Unbelievably, he then released her name, which assuredly identifying her religious sect. In this case the woman is Sunni; Iraq’s police forces are dominated by Shiites. By exposing her, Mr. Maliki not only relinquished the woman’s privacy and endangered her life, he also ensured the case would be turned into a political sideshow rather than dealing with the real issue—abuse at the hands of those charged with protecting the public.

Accusations of police abuse, however, are anything but sectarian. In the month of February alone, three women risked their lives by coming forward and charging Iraqi security forces with rape. The first was a Sunni Arab, the second a Sunni Turkomen, and the third a Christian. The Christian woman reported to the UN news agency she was impregnated during the incident.

Neither are these new charges.

Last July the LA Times, citing a US State Department assessment conducted during 2005 and 2006, reported that brutality was “rampant in Iraq's police force, with abuses including the rape of female prisoners."Further, it found that "female detainees are often sexually assaulted. According to the documents, the commander of a detention center in the Karkh neighborhood of the capital raped a woman who was an alleged insurgent in August. That same month, two lieutenants tortured and raped two other female detainees.”

The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) released findings of their own last summer. Their Women’s Prison Watch project found that “torture and rape are common procedure of investigation in police stations run by the militias affiliated with the government, mostly the Mahdi and Badr militias.”

“The Islamist militias, who are part of the US-supported government and police forces, are deciding what is right and wrong ... and who lives and dies,” writes OWFI’s Yanar Mohammed. "It is heartbreaking to me to see the return of extreme, anti-women practices that we had not seen for many decades. When I grew up in Iraq, women went to school. Educated, professional workingwomen were a part of our society. Today, a woman risks her life simply by going to the grocery store.”

Though militias are part and parcel of Iraqi security forces, they also operate outside the purview of government, often enforcing “moral code” on the streets.

The OWFI estimates at least 30 women are exectuted in greater Baghdad each month. “In the first ten days of November 2006, more than 150 unclaimed bodies of women, many of which were beheaded, disfigured, or bore signs of extreme torture, moved through the Baghdad morgue,” reports Mohammed.

These are frightening statistics. The US, as an occupying force, is responsible under the Hague and Geneva Conventions to protect Iraqi’s human rights. Instead, they are actually fomenting the violence. US backing of Iraq’s militias became public knowledge when a 2005 issue of Newsweek reported the “Salvador Option,” a plan used by the US in Central America during the 1980s used militias to bolster right-wing governments, had been resuscitated in Iraq. The US financially backed Shiite militias when fears that the Sunni-dominated resistance was growing too strong. Human rights became expendable for political expediency.

In civil society women are faring no better. Last June, after conducting an extensive survey, the Iraqi Women’s Rights Association warned of rising incidents of sexual abuses. While less than five cases of rape per year were reported during Saddam Hussein’s era, they found close to 60 women reported being raped between February and May 2006; an additional 80 reported other forms of abuse.

Now, with a conservative religious government installed in Iraq, women are less likely to have any protections, and much more likely to be blamed.

Though perhaps well meaning, statements like this one from a conservative Baghdadi sheikh illustrate women’s double bind. Rather than hold the police accountable in the case of the Sunni women’s sexual assault, the sheikh commented, “These incidents of abuse just prove what we have been saying for so long. That it is the Islamic duty of women to stay in their homes, looking after their children and husbands rather than searching for work-especially in light of the current security situation.” What he also fails to observe is that the woman was arrested in her house.

The MADRE report draws an important parallel between Iraq’s theocratic gender inequity and the generalized violence raging in Iraq.

“Violence against women is not incidental to Iraq's mounting civilian death toll and civil war—it is a key to understanding the wider crisis. Indeed, the twin crises plaguing Iraqi civilians—gender based violence and civil war—are deeply intertwined. For example, in the legal arena, the same provisions of the US-brokered constitution that codify gender discrimination (Articles 39 and 41) also lay the groundwork for sectarian violence: these articles establish separate laws on the basis of sex and religious affiliation.”

“Contrary to its rhetoric and its legal obligations, the Bush Administration has refused to protect women's human rights in Iraq. In fact,” concludes the MADRE report, “ it has decisively traded women’s rights for cooperation from the Islamists it has helped boost to power.”