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Occupied Territory
Occupation has added new dangers to the already harsh burdens women endured under the Baathist regime. With rape and abduction on the rise, many women are hiding at home. A few are risking all for their rights.
By Lauren Sandler
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Back in the 1960s, Amal Al-Khaderi and a delegation of other short-skirted, outspoken Iraqi women boarded a plane in Baghdad bound for Libya. They had been selected to represent the Iraqi Red Crescent Society at a conference. When they stepped onto the shimmering-hot tarmac in Tripoli, the incredulous man who met them took one look and barked, "Where is the Iraqi delegation?"
Three wars, two ruling forces, and more than a decade of sanctions later, Al-Khaderi, a petite, handsome woman waves toward the Baghdad street outside the restaurant where we are having lunch. "See this?" she asks. "Do you think this is the real Iraq?" Shaking her uncovered head, she answers her own question: "No, this is Iraq since the wars. This is Iraq where women are covered, stay inside, do not speak their mind. This is not Iraq, not the real Iraq. The real Iraq was us on that plane going to Libya," she says, clucking her tongue in resigned anger.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, Iraq's cities formed a first-world society within the third world. They were vibrant, secular centers of student organizing and dissent. In these urban areas, women had thrown off the black body-and-head-covering abbayas and enrolled en masse in doctoral programs. Today they reminisce about working for equal pay and heading ministries — and not just within the usual gender-acceptable fields such as education and health care.
One Iraqi woman remembers when her brother who had been living in the U.S. came home for a visit in the 1960s and exclaimed, "I've had enough of this feminist mumbo jumbo! A woman heading the farming ministry? Engineering? I'm going back to the States, where women know their place!"
The once vigorous public role of Iraqi women is utterly foreign to the new generation — born under Saddam Hussein — that pushes its mothers to cover up and pipe down. This generation has faced religious, tribal, legal, and psychological upheavals in a landscape scarred by mourning, poverty, war, the loss of political options, human rights, and now occupation.
In addition to the generational divide, another chasm gapes between the exiles and those who stayed behind. Many women who remember Al-Khaderi's "true Iraq" left years ago, and are now returning to a country that seems the stuff of dystopian science fiction. In the days before the first Gulf War, "We talked about equality, not just advancement, and we really got somewhere," says Hanaa Edwards, a tiny graying activist who recently returned to her hometown, Baghdad, to implement women's rights education programs she developed to great success in Kurdistan. "Now there's no talk of equality at all."
Most women stayed in Iraq and witnessed the transformation of their country, and often of themselves. Dr. Imam Majid, director of women's medicine at Baghdad Teaching Hospital, was one of millions of women who turned to the mosque as hardships mounted. Open-faced but unsmiling, she sits in her pink office off one of the hospital's endless, chaotic corridors, and points to an old photograph of 13 women. "How many are wearing the hijab?" she asks, referring to the Islamic headscarf. (Not one.) "Today we all do. I began in 1999. When you have a problem, you need to go nearer to God. Many of us have had many problems now and lost someone to death. We have changed [because of] these wars."
It's hard to tell how deep Majid's religious conservatism runs, but she still speaks clinically about women's health issues, even scrawling a picture of genitalia on a piece of notebook paper to explain hymen-tearing as we discuss rape. But these days she talks in a lowered voice and under the cover of a white cotton hijab.
As Majid and many Iraqi women will tell you, not all interpretations of Islam are antithetical to women's rights. While strict sharia (Islamic law) as promulgated by some fundamentalist clerics obliterates basic rights of women, other interpretations find Koranic support for many of those same rights. But increasingly in today's Iraq, it is fundamentalist Islamic law, as well as ancient traditions of tribal rule and the sanctity of the family, that offer roots and stability in an uprooted and unstable era. But at the same time, the legacy of a far more forward-thinking, pre-Saddam Iraq endures. The result is a cauldron of contradiction that is much more complex than the image of an outspoken woman in a headscarf.
Take for example Zakkia Hakki, one of Iraq's first female judges, who worked for women's rights in the country's more liberal north before moving to Washington for work and scholarship. With her kohl-lined eyes and easy smile, she sits wrapped head to toe in black behind a desk in the temporary Ministry of Justice office in one of Saddam's former Baghdad palaces. Her job includes reforming the laws Saddam delivered in 1990, as he sought to consolidate power and appease demoralized men in the wake of the disastrous Iran-Iraq war. These changes blended tribal law and sharia to codify women's oppression, and to obliterate the Baathists' secular and fairly liberal legacy of gender parity.
Under Saddam's 1990 "reforms," a rapist's crime is erased if he marries his victim. A male relative is not guilty of murdering his female relative if she had sexual intercourse — including rape — that could dishonor the family. And a man is allowed to take up to four wives.
The contradictions inherent in Hakki's current role become apparent as she discusses the legal changes she is now recommending. "Take polygamy," she says. "We need to change the law. If a man is going to take another wife, it can only be because the first wife is mentally ill, or sexually dysfunctional, or can't have a child, or has AIDS. You know, things like that. We can't just let men do whatever they want just because they want it. We need rules." Her explanation for her present course is simple: All laws protecting women must protect the family unit as it exists. It's all they have, she says, and it's the only way she can hope for change in a relatively anarchic land that lacks solid institutions or a culture of open discourse.
And just as education and high position do not predict feminism, or abbayas invariably indicate strict conservatism, so tight jeans and free-flowing hair don't mean that a woman is free from the paradoxes of her deeply complex culture. Take Sulafa (last name withheld): The chic redhead lawyer, who represents women in crisis, stayed for many years in a marriage with a shockingly violent sadist. Why? Because her father asked her to, even after her husband hung her body from the ceiling on hooks to beat her nearly to death. Sulafa passionately supports more rights for women — in fact, she was one of very few Iraqi women who attended a protest against the rampant abduction and rape of women and girls in occupied Iraq. Yet Sulafa's impulse in her own crisis was to honor her family's name rather than to preserve her rights.
The years of humiliation that Iraqi men and women have endured have only increased the importance of honor. Failed war upon failed war, psychologically and financially devastating international sanctions, and the experience of cowing to a ruthless dictator have eroded men's sense of masculinity. As one Iraqi man told me, "Men needed to control something, and since they had no control in their political lives," they sought to control women.
Trying to understand a powerful dictator's need to control women is another matter. "Saddam was a small-town thug from Tikrit. He knew nothing about women, except that they needed to be controlled and protected," said Aquila Al-Hashimi, a Governing Council member who represented the body's greatest hope for women before she was assassinated two days after we spoke; "It was humiliating for all of us," she said. As a member of Saddam's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Al-Hashimi had watched her country and her gender forced into lockdown. World travel and open discourse used to be part of her job, but in post-Saddam Iraq, even as a high official, she could not leave the country without a male relative. Underpinning it all, she said, peering through oval-rimmed glasses, is the central concept of honor. And it was the notion of protecting the family and its honor — just as Zakkia Hakki says — that made the system palatable for women. "Take honor killings," said Al-Hashimi. "They only exist to protect the family. That may sound crazy, but it is simply a question of culture."
Elements of that culture have sent one daughter on the run from her family's wrath for eight years. When Hadil — let's keep her last name private — fell in love with her dashing older and married neighbor, her parents disapproved. The couple fled and struggled to survive in hiding in Kurdistan, Iran, and Pakistan. Meanwhile, her father fervently hoped she would come home — so that he could kill her and uphold the family's honor. Now, Hadil and her husband have returned to Iraq (he missed his children, she missed her homeland). "When I walk down the street, I am very frightened," she says in a quiet, even voice. "I am expecting that one day someone will recognize me, and I am expecting to encounter one of them, and it will not pass peacefully," she continues, clasping her hands together. "The resignation that I will be killed is inside of me. I don't show it, but I am terrified." Hadil is quick to point out that her experience is shared by untold numbers of women in Iraq.
Honor killing is hardly the only example of the hell for women codified under Saddam. Crinkled identity cards still exist that list "Violator of Women's Honor" as the bearer's occupation. When a man whose party loyalty was under suspicion would travel outside Iraq, henchmen of the regime would sometimes force their way into his house, make a videotape of their rape of his wife and send it to his hotel as insurance that he stay in line during his travels.
And then there was Saddam's son Uday, who frequently kidnapped students from high school and university corridors, to be raped at his nightly debauches. Even lesser members of the extended regime were free to kidnap women at will for sexual violence. Pity the woman who reported rape by a friend of the regime. One woman, a dark beauty with ornately decorated fingernails, made the mistake of going to the police after Omar, the son of an important Baathist, abducted her and a group of friends, took them to a shack he owned for this purpose, and gang-raped them for days. After she told the police the last name of her rapist, she was thrown in jail for two and a half years on a bogus charge. (Her biggest fear in jail was not of predatory guards or torture, but that her father would discover she had been raped, and kill her when she was released.) In jail, religion eased her pain, and now the once-secular woman wraps herself in a black abbaya on the days she can gather the stamina to venture into the world — always accompanied by a man.
As the U.S. occupation passes its half-year anniversary, countless women like her are still hiding at home. The double threat of anarchy under occupation coupled with the danger from criminals Saddam released when he threw open his prisons, has led to an epidemic of sexual violence against women.
Amal Al-Khaderi, who has gone from her Red Crescent days of fearless travel to being afraid even to drive her own car, gazes out the cracked window of my driver's Toyota as we speed from lunch to her bomb-ravaged home. "I heard on the BBC yesterday that more than 400 women have been abducted and raped since the war. Could this be true?" she demands. I tell her about the numerous women who have told me horror stories of kidnapping and sexual violence under the occupation. "How could this be?" she demands. "How could they even find girls to steal? Do you see women on the street? There is no one. This country is like a cemetery." And then she adds, "You'd be crazy to think we can go on like this, covered and silent."
Without the freedom to walk through their neighborhoods or drive without fear, women can hardly be engaged players in the political process. ("This is liberation?" women ask each day.) When Washington appointed the Governing Council, it contained only three women, and the now-assassinated Al-Hashimi was the only one with political experience. "Who are these women?" is a persistent query by women discussing the likelihood that the Governing Council will advocate for their rights.
Their thinking lines up with how Al-Hashimi described the state of women in politics on the day we first met: "If you put a woman in a place of power and responsibility here, you just better be sure she will succeed," she said. "Men can fail. ... If we fail they will say, ‘Well, we tried with women, and look what happened.' And then we'll never be able to try again."
Like her murder, Al-Hashimi's words haunt the NGO meetings and dinner tables where women are free to meet to discuss political reform for the first time in decades. They speak tentatively, terrified of the consequences of failure, or perhaps, of a success that could expose them to Al-Hashimi's fate.
They are also fearful of alienating powerful religious groups that could bar them from the reconstruction effort. The Iraqi Women's League — strong and outspoken from its founding in the 1950s until Saddam's secret police forced it underground in the late 1970s — is meeting openly again. But it does not discuss, much less act on, the rise in rape, a crisis of overwhelming concern to Iraqi women. Most women in the league feel it would be suicide to say anything that might alarm radical Islamist groups, explains founding member Wassan Al Souz. "Just like under Saddam, the problem here is the barrier of fear," she says.
Some women are facing that fear head-on, like 25-year-0ld Estabarak Al Shamre, who has launched a women's magazine that in each issue lays bare the crisis that women face in Iraq today, in the hope of galvanizing her generation to speak out. And then there's Yanar Mohammed, suddenly a household name in Iraq because of her relatively radical public views, who speaks openly about women's rights in her role as founder of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq. She packs a pistol in her handbag and travels with bodyguards, so constant are the death threats she receives for her secular politics.
Mohammed is particularly concerned about the well-organized and popularly supported Shia institutions that gained considerable strength in the power vacuum created by Saddam's fall. And although some clerics speak optimistically about new roles for women in a Saddam-free Iraq, tradition rules.
One Friday this summer, just over one hundred women gathered for the first time in a mosque once led by a local hero whom Saddam murdered during his Shia-cleansing effort. Ecstatic at the opportunity to pray in the previously male-only main chamber, the women listened as the female prayer-leader repeated like a litany: "You rise early to make sure you have arranged the food for your husband and cleaned the house early each Friday now, so you can come to pray for two hours."
What constituted significant progress to the young women who crowded this mosque was a different concept entirely from that of Amal Al-Khaderi when she touched down in Libya with her cabal of Red Crescent colleagues. But it is their generation, born and bred under Saddam, who are Iraq's future. They have known the struggle of sanctions, the mourning of failed wars. Now they wonder what "liberation" will bring. Every day the Coalition lets pass without actively addressing their rights shoves them back toward an oppressive past they never chose. Every day in which their security, health, and welfare is ignored refutes the notion of liberation itself.
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