WOMEN BEAR BRUNT OF POVERTY IN POST-INVASION IRAQ

By Ahmad Fadam & Nafia Abdul Jabbar

February 2, 2006 - (Middle East Times) Umm Ziyad, her husband, two sons and granddaughter were just making ends meet in a one-room hovel in Baghdad when a suicide bomber decided that the best way to attack a police station was to drive through the carwash where her husband worked. "We didn't used to need anyone. He worked and we could make do, but now it's obvious that we are in need," said the widow, swathed in black and looking much older than her 46 years. But one year after she applied for government assistance, she has heard nothing and her eldest son, Ziyad, has dropped out of high school to support the family with occasional work.

Poverty has exploded across Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion. A recent study by the United Nations Development Program and International Monetary Fund shows that 20 percent of the population has fallen below the international poverty line of $1 per day per person. The numbers of families registering for assistance with the labor and social affairs ministry has more than tripled since the war to 171,000 and even that, according to Leila Kazem, a director general at the ministry, is a "drop in the ocean".

"After the war, a new dangerous issue arose in Iraqi society - poverty, which is clear to everyone," she said, blaming unemployment and violence that has been killing off the main breadwinners, something "which is happening every hour of every day".

The families, however, do not receive any special treatment at the ministry. "We don't have a separate category for victims of terrorism, we just talk about needy families," she said.

Violence is hitting families, already weakened by decades of war and international sanctions under the regime of Saddam Hussein, who were just surviving and now have lost their sole means of income. "We were afraid a war would come and then it happened and our father is gone now," Umm Ziyad said, referring to her husband. As she tells her story, the electricity cuts out and her other son Ali, who is still in school, steps out into the twilight to finish his homework.

The family, which lives in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Qahira, is being helped by Umm Murad, who works with the social programs of the Iraqi Turkmen Front. "I know over 80 families in a perilous economic state and I am helping about 20 of them," she said."You can see them for yourself, any place you go just ask, there are hundreds of them - no one knows the exact number ... Most families who have six sons maybe only one or two are working, usually as policeman or soldiers." She promised to help Umm Ziyad negotiate the massive lines of applicants at the swamped labor ministry where hundreds try to register for assistance and suggests that she feigns an injury to get additional money.

Female heads of household under a certain age receive limited assistance if they are deemed able-bodied enough to work. For many willing to go out to work, there is simply no job. "I tried after my husband was gone to be the father and the mother at the same time for my children," said Atiyaf Mohammed, who lost her husband when he was caught in crossfire between insurgents and US soldiers. "I graduated from the faculty of chemistry, so I went to the education ministry, knowing there are job opportunities," said the mother-of-four, who graduated in 1994.

At 30, there are still hints of the beautiful, young university graduate with flowing brown hair whose picture is pinned in the living room of the crumbling house where she lives with her husband's parents in the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya. "They said, 'where have you been for the last 10 years' and they didn't give me a job," she said, her dark eyes flashing with anger. "Now I am on the same level as the ignorant and uneducated. "The Iraqi government is taking care neither of the Iraqi people, nor of the orphans, widows or elderly," she charged. Mohammed has survived so far by cobbling together donations from various social and religious charitable institutions and scoffs at the low level of government assistance. "What's the good of 50,000 [Iraqi] dinars [$35] every three months from the social affairs ministry, it's not enough," she said.

The ministry acknowledges that the level of assistance, which it says is more like 50,000 dinars a month, is insufficient and a new law will raise the monthly family assistance to between 70,000 and 120,000 dinars depending on family size.

From: http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060126-081440-7329r