Women were more respected under Saddam, say women's groups

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UN expert: Iraqi women subjected to violence

GENEVA, November 25, 2008 -- Iraqi women are the victims of violence from US-led foreign troops, insurgents and militants after five years of occupation, a UN independent expert said Tuesday.

"The ongoing conflict, high levels of insecurity, widespread impunity, collapsing economic conditions and rising social conservatism are impacting directly on the daily lives of Iraqi women," said Yakin Erturk, the UN's special rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences.

"Violence against Iraqi women is committed by numerous actors, such as militia groups, insurgents, Islamic extremists, law enforcement personnel, members of the family as well as the community," she said in a statement to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

Women are victims of rape and sex trafficking, with many driven or forced into prostitution, and they are also victim to the disproportionate use of force by US and Iraqi forces, especially during raids on private homes, Erturk said.

She voiced concern at the rise of honour killings, in which women deemed to have broken moral codes are killed by members of their own family, and the impunity which is afforded the perpetrators.

Honour killings are among the primary causes of unnatural deaths among women in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where many women are also victims of female genital mutilation.

Kurdistan health minister Zarian Abdel Rahman said last week that in the region 60 percent of girls aged four to fourteen undergo circumcision.

The German non-governmental organisation Wadi carried out research in 201 villages in the three autonomous provinces and in the predominantly Kurdish Kirkuk area in September.

It found that 3,502 out of 5,628 women and girls surveyed had been mutilated - an average of more than 62 percent.

The rights of women have seriously worsened since the US-led invasion in 2003.

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Father kills 'soldier's girl'

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"Her crime was to fall in love. She paid with her life"

Hitmen charge $100 a victim as Basra honour killings rise

November 30, 2008 -- Authorities in the southern Iraqi city of Basra have admitted they are powerless to prevent 'honour killings' in the city following a 70 per cent increase in religious murders during the past year.

There has been no improvement in conviction rates for these killings. So far this year, 81 women in the city have been murdered for allegedly bringing shame on their families. Only five people have been convicted.

During 2007 the Basra security committee recorded 47 'honour killings' and three convictions. One lawyer in the city described how police were actively protecting perpetrators and said that a woman in Basra could now be murdered by hired hitmen for as little as $100 (£65).

The figures come despite international outrage which followed The Observer's coverage of the death of 17-year-old Rand Abdel-Qader, who was murdered by her father last April in an 'honour killing' after falling in love with a British soldier in Basra. The 4,000 British troops stationed in the city since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 withdrew to the airport last September.

Rand Abdel-Qader was killed after her family discovered that she had formed a friendship with a 22-year-old infantryman whom she knew as Paul. She was suffocated by her father then hacked at with a knife. Abdel-Qader Ali was subsequently arrested and released without charge.

Rand's mother, Leila Hussein, who divorced her husband after the killing, went into hiding but was tracked down weeks later and assassinated by an unknown gunman. Her husband had told The Observer that police had congratulated him for killing his daughter.

Seven months after the murders, the problem of these killings in Basra has become worse, according to lawyers. Ali Azize Raja'a, an Iraqi prosecutor who has represented the victims of 32 'honour killings' since 2004, said that, despite accumulating sufficient evidence to prove who was responsible in each murder, he had won only one case.

He said that the greatest issue was the decision by police to release suspects. Seven in 10 of those thought to be responsible for such a killing have left the city, with little attempt made to track them down.

The father of Rand is also understood to have left Basra. He was held by police in connection with his daughter's murder for only two hours. A local businessman who described the actions of Rand's father as 'courageous' is believed to have given a considerable sum of money to him and his two sons, who disowned their mother after she objected to Rand's killing. Raja'a said that when he was approached by Leila over Rand's case, his family was threatened by relatives.

Another Iraqi lawyer, who requested anonymity, said that some fathers had started to hire professional hitmen to carry out 'honour killings' which were then covered as 'sectarian murders'. He said: 'The life of these women isn't higher than $100. You can find a killer standing in any coffee shop of Basra, discussing prices of a life as if he was buying a piece of meat.'

Mariam Ayub Sattar, an activist in Basra, said that any woman caught speaking to a man in public who was not her husband or a relative was considered a prostitute and punished. A fortnight ago three women were burned with acid while walking through a market in Basra after stopping to speak to a male friend, Sattar said.

Nine of the 12 voluntary organisations helping women in Basra have closed down since the US-led invasion.

The Women's Rights Association in Basra was forced to close down after death threats were made following the murder of Rand's mother last May. Two women from a voluntary organisation who had been helping her to hide from her husband were also injured.

Alia'a Obeidi, the organisation's president, said that one of her colleagues was killed while driving to work and, fearing for her family's safety, she later moved to the Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

The Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights said that it was working on new projects to end gender discrimination in the country. 'We try to make a difference by teaching students at schools about gender equality, but it only will be possible when parents don't teach the opposite at home,' said Hameed Walled, senior official in the Ministry of Human Rights.

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What Kind of Liberation? : Women and the Occupation of Iraq by Nadje al-Ali and Nicola Pratt

In the run-up to war in Iraq, the Bush administration assured the world that America's interest was in liberation — especially for women. The first book to examine how Iraqi women have fared since the invasion, What Kind of Liberation? reports from the heart of the war zone with dire news of scarce resources, growing unemployment, violence, and seclusion. Moreover, the book exposes the gap between rhetoric that placed women center stage and the present reality of their diminishing roles in the "new Iraq." Based on interviews with Iraqi women's rights activists, international policy makers, and NGO workers and illustrated with photographs taken by Iraqi women, What Kind of Liberation? speaks through an astonishing array of voices. Nadje al-Ali and Nicola Pratt correct the widespread view that the country's violence, sectarianism, and systematic erosion of women's rights come from something inherent in Muslim, Middle Eastern, or Iraqi culture. They also demonstrate how in spite of competing political agendas, Iraqi women activists are resolutely pressing to be part of the political transition, reconstruction, and shaping of the new Iraq.

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The battle against brutality

January 28, 2009 -- 'Women [in Iraq] are being killed simply for being women," says Nadje al-Ali when I meet her at her home in south London. "In Basra in 2008 a reported 133 women were killed for not 'being Islamic' enough. And these are only the ones that made it to be officially counted. I saw the police photos - they were horrific."

Al-Ali's new book, What Kind of Liberation? : Women and the Occupation of Iraq, analyses how Iraqi women have fared since the US invasion of March 2003. The news, unsurprisingly, is grim. Written with the political scientist Nicola Pratt, the book is based on interviews with 120 women, including Iraqi women's rights activists, NGO workers and international policymakers. The climate that they describe in Iraq is one of lawless "hyper-patriarchy", and with this evidence in tow, Al-Ali and Pratt take aim at a wide range of targets. These include the occupying powers, extremist Islamist militias, Iraqi leaders and "imperialist feminists" (those who claim solidarity with women from developing countries while stereotyping their cultures as barbaric).

Al-Ali, 42, is a second-generation Iraqi immigrant whose extended family has seen the sharpest end of both Saddam Hussein's regime and the post-invasion chaos. An established author and academic at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, she is staunchly "anti-imperialist and anti-war" but finds herself regularly at odds with some of her natural allies, who object to her speaking out against Iraqi resistance fighters. Still, Al-Ali believes it's important to take this stance. "A significant proportion of Iraqi groups engaged in armed resistance against the occupation are also harassing, intimidating and even murdering ordinary Iraqis," she says, "particularly women and vulnerable groups."

In her book she highlights the fact that, as a result of consecutive wars, the Iraqi population is now disproportionately female - with some estimates putting the ratio of women to men at 65/35. There are 300,000 impoverished widows in Baghdad alone, forced to run their households on two hours of electricity a day. As early as July 2003 a Human Rights Watch report highlighted "the vulnerability of women and girls to sexual violence and abduction", and kidnaps that target women (often related to sex trafficking) have increased since the start of the war, as have female suicide rates and honour killings.

According to Al-Ali's interviewees, women are being bullied back into the home. So, for instance, she focuses on the story of Sarwa Abdul Wahab Al Darwish, a 36-year-old television journalist from Mosul whose high profile led her to receive death threats. Then, last May she was dragged from a taxi and killed with a shot to the head in front of her mother. Overall, the book backs up the opinion of an Iraqi journalist I met in London, who says that "occupation has put women's position back to the 1930s".

The fact that George W Bush depicted the invasion of Iraq as a path to women's empowerment makes the situation even more outrageous. In her book, Al-Ali meticulously explains how Condoleezza Rice and Laura Bush were deployed to reassure the world that the US was concerned with women's liberation - Laura Bush being wheeled out for photo-opportunities with US organisations such as Women for Free Iraq.

How has such posturing in Washington affected women's lives in Iraq? "It helped to legitimise the invasion in the first place," says Al-Ali. But surely no one really believed that the war was about liberating Iraqi women? "There's an imperialist brand of feminism that's very widespread in the States," she says. "When I give talks there, women's rights [in Muslim culture] are always the one big 'but' for anti-war peace activists." Al-Ali feels that the cynical use of the women's rights discourse by the US has also led to a backlash against feminist activists in Iraq, who can be easily undermined, or even vilified, by being accused of supporting an American agenda.

Does she see the establishment of a 25% quota for women in the Iraqi parliament as a sign of progress? "Yes," she concedes, "but who are the 25% in practice? They are the sisters, daughters and wives of the male conservative leaders. They've no political background and when there's a vote they look around to see what the men are doing before they lift their hands. However, yes it is a positive because it has allowed six to eight secular women's rights activists into parliament who wouldn't have got in otherwise."

The book repeatedly suggests that extremist Islamist groups are forcing Taliban-like conditions on Iraqi women - surprising given the cultural differences between Afghanistan and Iraq, where women have typically been well educated. How real is this threat? "It's very real," says Al-Ali. "In 2004, it was simply leaflets telling women to veil, and many of the women I spoke to said, 'If this is the only thing I have to do to go on with my life as normal, OK.' Soon it moved on to students at Basra university being threatened if they didn't agree to gender-segregated classes." Now, article 41 in the new Iraqi constitution effectively repeals the existing, and relatively progressive, laws governing marriage and divorce.

When I point out that throughout the book Islam only ever appears as a destructive force Al-Ali is rattled. Her use of the slippery term "Islamists" at times seems interchangeable with "terrorist insurgents", and progressives are invariably tagged with the approving "secular" but never "Muslim". She defends herself by saying that in the past she has "clashed with fundamentalist secular groups [in the anti-war movement] who say the problem in Iraq is Islam. Most of the secular women activists we refer to are practising Muslims."

Al-Ali was born to a German mother and an Iraqi father who had moved to Europe to study. She grew up in a non-religious household in Germany, and it wasn't until she attended university in Tucson, Arizona - where she met a circle of confident second-generation Arabs - that she began to think about her roots. On graduating, she moved to Egypt and became involved in the women's movement, before starting a PhD in London. By chance, she rented a room from the feminist sociologist Cynthia Cockburn and for the next few years found herself at the hub of an international network of peace activists.

In 2000, she established Act Together - Women's Action for Iraq - a group opposing economic sanctions against Iraq, and then against the invasion. This was followed, in 2007, by her book Iraqi Women - Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present, a social history of the women's movement. Al-Ali dedicated the book to her aunt Salima, a cancer patient who died in May 2003 after she developed severe breathing difficulties and a curfew in Baghdad prevented her from getting to hospital.

The short description of the night of Salima's death - when one of her male relatives went out into the neighbourhood, risking his life to find oxygen - fizzes with fury. The family had already coped with one of Al-Ali's uncles being executed under Saddam, and they remained in Baghdad until the murder of her nephew and another uncle in August 2007 at the family home, for what she now believes to be either political or sectarian reasons. "They thought they were safe, knowing all their neighbours, so they were just sitting in the kitchen when they strolled in and shot them." The rest of the family fled from Iraq to Jordan, thereby joining the two million Iraqis abroad. They put the three young men of the family on a plane to Syria for safety but they were turned back, forced to return to Baghdad. "We were very, very scared," says Al-Ali, "and there's only so much one can do from the outside."

Al-Ali treads a difficult path with caution. Like many, she believes that Iraqi women can never be "liberated" by western military intervention, but by speaking out against the Iraqi resistance, she has often alienated those in the anti-war movement. Ultimately, she doesn't know how much difference her work can make - she tells me that she often feels impotent watching atrocities in Iraq unfold on the news. But she is adamant that the future of Iraq depends on the energy and fearlessness of the grass roots women's groups that were much in evidence just after the invasion. It was they who went into hospitals and schools to salvage them and who have managed to co-operate across sectarian battle lines. "I hate the picture of Iraqi women as passive victims of honour crimes and bombs," she says. "I really want to break this".

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Iraqi women's minister resigns in protest

BAGHDAD, February 8, 2009: Iraq's state minister for women's affairs has quit to protest a lack of resources for a daunting task — improving the lives of "a full army of widows" and other women left poor or abandoned by war.

In an interview Sunday with The Associated Press, Nawal al-Samarraie described how her office's budget was so tight that she often found herself dipping into her own pockets for the women who came begging for help.

She said she finally submitted her resignation last week in part because her budget was slashed from $7,500 to $1,500 per month — part of overall government spending cuts forced by plunging oil prices. The figure didn't include staff salaries.

"I reached to the point that I will never be able to help the women," said al-Samarraie, whose job lasted just six months. "The budget is very limited ... so what can I do?"

Al-Samarraie's resignation has cast a spotlight on the overwhelming problems facing Iraqi women, tens of thousands of them left poor or widowed by war.

An untold number have lost their husbands or other male relatives to violence or detention since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, often leaving them alone with children and virtually no safety net or job opportunities.

Al-Samarraie claimed Iraq has 3 million widows, calling it "a full army of widows, most of them not educated." The figure, which she said came from a government survey, includes those who lost their husbands under Saddam Hussein's regime and was impossible to verify.

All Iraqis have undergone difficulties, but women face the additional danger of being sidelined in a male-dominated society. Widows in Iraq, for example, traditionally move in with their extended families, but many families find it increasingly difficult to care for them.

Other problems for women include homelessness, domestic violence and the random detention of women caught up in U.S.-Iraqi military sweeps.

Female lawmakers Sunday urged al-Samarraie to change her mind, and demanded that the government get serious about helping women.

"Iraqi women need a national strategy to empower them and support their constitutional, legal, health and social rights," Safiya al-Suhail, a lawmaker from a secular party, said at a news conference.

Al-Samarraie, a 47-year-old gynecologist and mother of five, said things quickly went downhill after she assumed her post on July 22, when her Sunni political party ended a boycott to rejoin the Shiite-dominated government.

The former lawmaker, who previously served on the Iraqi parliament's health committee, was full of ideas about how to help Iraqi women, from establishing regional offices and vocational programs to building a women's center that would double as a mall.

But her office — with a staff of 18 — was not a full ministry and had insufficient authority or resources to help women facing great hardship after nearly six years of war, she said.

She gave some of her own money to one woman who was left homeless with her four children after her husband was detained, her two brothers were killed and her father died.

"She's not educated, so she and her four children were in the street," al-Samarraie recalled. "I felt if I will not help her she will go in a wrong way. So I tried to help her to make a small shop."

Al-Samarraie warned of the desperate Iraqi women who have become suicide bombers.

"Many of them are widows, or homeless or hopeless," she said. "No one opened the door for them."

Other Iraqi ministries have faced the same, steep budget cuts, but al-Samarraie insisted women should be given priority because they make up 65 percent of the population and because so many have been stranded by the war after their husbands and brothers were killed or detained.

Al-Suhail, the female lawmaker, urged Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to refuse al-Samarraie's resignation and instead work with her to create an independent commission for women, with a larger budget.

But al-Samarraie said al-Maliki signed her resignation the day she submitted it.

A government spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.

"It's not such an important issue for him," she said. "It doesn't have the priority in the Iraqi government and not even the second or third."

But she said she planned to travel to Turkey for an international conference on Iraqi women soon and would think about the pleas for her to return to the job.

"Maybe with the next government it will be a priority," she said.

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