Iraqi Women Say Leadership Roles Still Eluding Them
Mark Mueller

June 1, 2003 – (Newhouse News) Rahbiya Momad has lost count of the new political parties vying for power in postwar Iraq. She knows they number in the dozens now, their names and slogans brightly spray-painted on dusty brown buildings once occupied by Saddam Hussein's government.

Momad, 61, welcomes their growth, calling the development a step toward democracy. But she says she is deeply troubled by one striking omission: The parties are run almost entirely by men.

From the Kurdish powers in the north to the resurgent Shiite majority in southern and central Iraq, men are mapping the country's future - in consultation with U.S. overseers, most of whom also are men.

"Women have no voice right now," said Momad, reflecting a concern of many Iraqi women. "There is a lot of talk about a democratic government, but I fear we are being left behind."

Momad is the new president of the Iraqi Women's League, which was a leading voice for the country's women before Saddam's Baath party banned the group - along with all other political-minded organizations - in the 1970s. Women who continued to agitate for greater rights, Momad said, sometimes disappeared, driving the league's remnants underground.

Many Iraqi women now fear that if they don't organize quickly and enter political life, they will lose even the rights they had under Saddam, who permitted women to become doctors, lawyers and university professors as long as they became Baath members.

Particularly worrisome to many women is the political emergence of the Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraq's population. While opinions about the place of women in society vary among Shiite Muslims, powerful conservative clerics promote a philosophy that would see women relegated to two positions: homemaker and teacher.

Momad, who was 16 when she attended her first meeting of the Iraqi Women's League, would like to see the group's clout restored. She wants to see more women campaign for a greater role in the interim government planned for Iraq.

To that end, Momad has taken over a former regime building, which was looted and partially burned after Saddam's fall, and erected a large sign that carries her organization's name. She has printed fliers calling for social, economic and political protections for women.

But the streets of Baghdad illustrate Momad's most immediate problem. They are almost devoid of women. In shops and marketplaces, along bustling main thoroughfares and in neighborhood alleys, men outnumber women 20-to-1, remarkable in a nation where the population is 55 percent female.

Women who venture outside usually do so in the company of men, saying they don't yet feel safe enough to walk alone at a time when crime continues to be a top concern. While the U.S. military has flooded the capital with patrols in the past week to stem lawlessness, neighborhoods across Baghdad remain rife with accounts of abduction and rape.

"Every woman knows someone in her neighborhood or has heard about someone who was kidnapped, assaulted or threatened since the war ended," said Nadia Hamdan, 29, who works as a translator for an international aid agency operating in Baghdad.

"Until the issue of security is fully addressed, it will be extremely difficult for women to emerge as a political force."

In the meantime, "There's tremendous fear that the Islamists will take control and that our rights will decrease," said Rana Al-Khero, 29, a bacteriologist at Baghdad's Kindi Hospital.

"I worry especially about the younger women, who might not have the same opportunities I had."

Prominent clerics have called on all Iraqi women to don head scarves. Some consider scarves a tool of subjugation, but opposition is hardly universal.

On the campus of Baghdad University, a 19-year-old student named Hiba, who declined to give her last name, said she would support a government made up solely of men. When asked why, she hesitated a moment, flashing her bright blue eyes skyward and then toward the ground. In the silence, a male friend, 23-year-old Muhammed Al-Kaisi, answered for her.

"In our religion, a man should be first, ahead of a woman, because he can think better than her," Al-Kaisi said.

Asked what she thought of Al-Kaisi's statement, Hiba said: "It is reasonable."