IRAQI WOMEN FIGHT TO REDEEM THE PROMISE OF FREEDOM
By Kim Ghattas

September 3 2003 – (Financial Times) In a back room of the Communist party headquarters on Abu Nawas street in Baghdad, members of the party's Women's League are engaged in an animated discussion on what the next edition of their newly launched newspaper, Equality, should include - or at least what else it should include, aside from the group's slogan, pasted on all the pages: "No to the compulsory veil."

"I resisted wearing the veil for years but since the end of the war I have worn it, even against the will of my husband, because I am scared for my life," says Sahera Zouhair, one of the writers.

"During the time of Saddam we also faced pressure to wear the veil, and there was a lot of sexual harassment at work, in the ministries, but now it's worse: there's no security and a war is being waged against women by the Islamists."

While US intervention in Afghanistan brought a measure of emancipation to women and encouraged some to remove the burqa, in Iraq promises of more freedom have yet to materialise, as women struggle to cope with difficult living conditions.

These include a dire lack of security but, more importantly, the rising power of Islamists and the hawza, the highest Shia religious authority. Iraq's Shias are reckoned to account for at least 55 per cent of the population. In the holy city of Najaf, clerics recently refused the appointment by the governing council of a woman judge in the city.

Yanar Mohammed, the head of the Women's League, organised a demonstration last month demanding improved security. According to her, 400 women have been kidnapped and raped in Iraq since the end of the war.

"The lives of women in Iraq are worthless today. They are being used as a tool for political revenge: the rape of women is a way to take revenge on fathers or brothers who were close to the regime," says Mrs Mohammed, who recently returned to Iraq after six years in exile.

Yet life has got easier in some respects over the past few weeks. Women are back on the streets, shopping with their children, sometimes even after dark, and many have reported back to work.

New organisations are also being formed and several conferences for women have been held. One woman, Harvard-educated Nisreen Berwari, has been named to the new cabinet, as minister for public works. Three women also sit on the 25-member governing council: Raja Habib al-Khuzaai, a UK-trained doctor; Sondul Chapouk, a Turkoman engineer and teacher, from Kirkuk; and Aquila al-Hashimi, a former diplomat.

However, Heba Khaled, a university student, expresses an apparently widely held view in saying: "They don't represent us, they have no record in fighting for women's rights and, on top of that, two of them are veiled, which means they have submitted to men."

Women in Iraq say they are not only fighting the problems brought by the war and the collapse of authority but also the legacy of the ostensibly secular Ba'ath regime. That legacy includes a legal framework that Mishkat Mou'min has set out to change.

Ms Mou'min, a lawyer, says that for years she faced discrimination on several levels: her job applications were often turned down and she was told bluntly it was because she was a woman. As a divorcee she was, by law, not entitled to social security.

Successive Ba'athist measures since 1969 discriminate against women, she says, including laws allowing husbands to beat their wives and forbidding women to travel without the accompaniment of a male relative.

While some of those laws are common to the rest of the Arab world, Mrs Mou'min says they were introduced to Iraq only by the Ba'ath party.

"The image of the Ba'ath party being modern and liberal was simply that - an image, created thanks to actions such as literacy campaigns for women, but women suffered," said the soft-spoken but determined Ms Mou'min. "Iraqi women were once free and highly educated, especially during the monarchy and until the end of the 1960s. The first woman judge and minister in the Arab world were Iraqi. Now, after 35 years under the Ba'ath, we want our role back. We are back with a vengeance."

But for many more women around the country, too worried about basic necessities such as food and healthcare, women's rights are not a priority. Ms Abboud, a 28-year-old gynaecologist with her own clinic in a conservative Baghdad slum, meets dozens of these women every day.

"Women in rural areas have no right to say 'no'. They are treated worse than animals sometimes and they have no education about health for themselves or their children," says Lena Abboud, a strikingly tall woman dressed in a suit with a long skirt, who dismisses the growing influence of Islamists as a temporary phenomenon.

"It's our role, as educated women, to teach these women about their rights, about their role in society. It will take time but at least now we have hope, because Saddam is gone. Everything will be all right from now on."