Women and Children as Victims in Iraq
excerpted from Andrew Buncombe and Katha Pollitt
Katha Pollitt recently reported a gruesome marriage of twenty-first-century technology and medieval barbarity: a video on the Internet of a young girl in a red track-suit jacket beaten, kicked and stoned to death by a mob of excited, shouting men. Her crime? The 17-year-old member of the Kurdish Yazidi religious minority, a non-Muslim sect, had fallen in love with a Sunni boy and possibly converted to Islam. For this "crime" against family and community, she was murdered in a small village near Mosul, in a collective act of woman hatred, led by her brothers and uncles, as local policemen looked on.
This is the new Iraq, where women were going to be free and equal--no more "rape rooms," no more psychopathic Uday Hussein summoning young virgins to the palace for his pleasure. In the early days of the occupation, we heard a lot about building schools, starting women's health programs, funding women's microenterprises. Well, scratch that. Iraq today is even worse for women: more repressive, more violent, more lawless. As if car bombs and suicide bombers weren't horrific enough, criminal gangs, religious militias and death squads kidnap, rape and kill with impunity, with special attention to women professionals, students and rights activists. According to the United Nations' most recent quarterly report on human rights in Iraq, domestic violence and "honor" killings are on the rise--Kurdistan, often described as comparatively peaceful and orderly, saw more than forty such killings between January and March of this year; in the province of Erbil, rapes quadrupled between 2003 and 2006. Women who'd worn Western clothes and moved about freely all their lives have been terrorized into wearing the abaya and staying inside unless accompanied by male relatives. In Sadr City and elsewhere, Shariah courts mete out misogynist "justice."
"The political climate in Iraq is such that anyone can carry out crimes against women," without any protection from the US, says Kurdish feminist, labor activist Houzan Mahmoud and UK representative of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI). "You can come upon women's bodies anywhere." Far from promoting women's rights and security, "the occupation has strengthened the tribes, political Islam and reactionary bourgeois parties--all of which are anti-woman." Indeed, the United States is part of the problem. Think of the 14-year-old girl raped and then murdered with her family by US soldiers in Mahmoudiya in March of last year. Think of the women imprisoned at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, sometimes only for being the wife or sister of a man US forces were looking for. Think of women terrorized by soldiers who break into their homes and hold them at gunpoint.
Like other women's groups there, OWFI now carries out its work in secret. It runs shelters for battered women in four Iraqi cities and an "underground railroad" to conduct women at risk of murder to safe havens. Such is the horrific condition of Iraqi women under occupation.
Meanwhile, two wars and a decade of sanctions have led to a huge rise in the mortality rate among young children in Iraq, leaving statistics that were once the envy of the Arab world now comparable with those of sub-Saharan Africa. A new report shows that in the years since 1990, Iraq has seen its child mortality rate soar by 125 per cent, the highest increase of any country in the world.
Figures collated by Save the Children show that in 1990 Iraq’s mortality rate for under-fives was 50 per 1,000 live births. In 2005 it was 125. While many other countries have higher rates, the increase in Iraq is higher than elsewhere.
Sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime were imposed by the UN in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and remained in place until after the coalition invasion in 2003. The sanctions, encouraged by the US as a means to topple Saddam, were some of the most comprehensive ever put in place and had a devastating effect on Iraq’s infrastructure and health services. As Denis Halliday, who resigned as the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in protest at the sanctions, said in 1999: “We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.” And it has only worsened since the US invasion and occupation, with children paying the heaviest price.
Women and children, always the most grievous victims of war and occupation.