- Jan 10, 2002
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Veiled and Worried in Baghdad
By LAUREN SANDLER
Veiled and Worried in Baghdad
BAGHDAD, Iraq
A single word is on the tight, pencil-lined lips of women here. You'll
hear it spoken over lunch at a women's leadership conference in a
restaurant off busy Al Nidal Street, in a shade-darkened beauty shop in
upscale Mansour, in the ramshackle ghettos of Sadr City. The word is
"himaya," or security. With an intensity reminiscent of how they feared
Saddam Hussein, women now fear the abduction, rape and murder that have
become rampant here since his regime fell. Life for Iraqi women has been
reduced to one need that must be met before anything else can happen.
"Under Saddam we could drive, we could walk down the street until two in
the morning," a young designer told me as she bounced her 4-year-old
daughter on her lap. "Who would have thought the Americans could have
made it worse for women? This is liberation?"
In their palace surrounded by armed soldiers, officials from the
occupying forces talk about democracy. But in the same cool marble rooms,
when one mentions the fears of the majority of Iraq's population, one can
hear a representative of the Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the
police, say, "We don't do women." What they don't seem to realize is that
you can't do democracy if you don't do women.
In Afghanistan, women threw off their burqas when American forces
arrived. In Baghdad the veils have multiplied, and most women are hiding
at home instead of working, studying or playing a role in reconstructing
Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, crimes against women - or at least ones his
son Uday, Iraq's vicious Caligula, did not commit - were relatively rare
(though solid statistics for such crimes don't exist). Last October, the
regime opened the doors to the prisons. Kidnappers, rapists and murderers
were allowed to blend back into society, but they were kept in check by
the police state. When the Americans arrived and the police force
disappeared, however, these old predators re-emerged alongside new ones.
And in a country that essentially relies on rumor as its national news,
word of sadistic abduction quickly began to spread.
A young Iraqi woman I met represents the reality of these rumors, sitting
in her darkened living room surrounded by female relatives. She leans
forward to show the sutures running the length of her scalp. She and her
fiancé were carjacked by a gang of thieves in July, and when one tried to
rape her she threw herself out of the speeding car. She says that was the
last time she left the house. She hasn't heard a word from her fiancé
since he went to the police station to file a report, not about the
attempted rape, but about his missing Toyota RAV-4.
"What's important isn't a woman's life here, but a nice car," she said
with a blade-sharp laugh.
Two sisters, 13 and 18, weren't as lucky. A neighbor - a kidnapper and
murderer who had been released in the general amnesty - led a gang of
heavily armed friends to their home one night a few weeks ago. The girls
were beaten and raped. When the police finally arrived, the attackers
fled with the 13-year-old. She was taken to an abandoned house and left
there, blindfolded, for a couple of weeks before she was dropped at her
door upon threat of death if anyone learned of what had happened. Now she
hides out with her sister, young brother and mother in an abandoned
office building in a seedy neighborhood.
"What do you expect?" said the 18-year-old. "They let out the criminals.
They got rid of the law. Here we are."
Even these brutalized sisters are luckier than many women in Iraq. They
have no adult male relatives, and thus are not at risk for the honor
killings that claim the lives of many Muslim women here. Tribal custom
demands that a designated male kill a female relative who has been raped,
and the law allows only a maximum of three years in prison for such a
killing, which Iraqis call "washing the scandal."
"We never investigate these cases anyway - someone has to come and
confess the killing, which they almost never do," said an investigator
who looked into the case and then dismissed it because the sisters "knew
one of the men, so it must not be kidnapping."
This violence has made postwar Iraq a prison of fear for women. "This
issue of security is the immediate issue for women now - this horrible
time that was triggered the very first day of the invasion," said Yanar
Mohammed, the founder of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq.
Ms. Mohammed organized a demonstration against the violence last month.
She also sent a letter to the occupation administrator, Paul Bremer,
demanding his attention. Weeks later, with no reply from Mr. Bremer, she
shook her head in the shadowy light of her office, darkened by one of
frequent blackouts here. "We want to be able to talk about other issues,
like the separation of mosque and state and the development of a civil
law based on equality between men and women, but when women can't even
leave their homes to discuss such things, our work is quite hard," she
said.
Baghdadi women were used to a cosmopolitan city in which doctorates,
debating and dancing into the wee hours were ordinary parts of life. That
Baghdad now seems as ancient as this country's Mesopotamian history.
College students are staying home; lawyers are avoiding their offices. A
formerly first-world capital has become a city where the women have
largely vanished.
To support their basic liberties will no doubt require the deeply
complicated task of disentangling the threads of tribal, Islamic and
civil law that have made the misogyny in each systemic. This is a matter
of culture, not just policy.
But to understand the culture of women in Iraq, coalition officials must
venture beyond their razor-wired checkpoints and step down from their
convoys of Land Cruisers so they can talk to the nation they occupy. On
the streets and in the markets, they'll receive warm invitations to share
enormous lunches in welcoming homes, as is the Iraqi custom. And there
they'll hear this notion repeated frankly and frequently: without himaya
for women, there will be no place for democracy to grow in Iraq.
Lauren Sandler, a journalist, is investigating issues of women and
culture in Iraq for the Carr Foundation.
By LAUREN SANDLER
Veiled and Worried in Baghdad
BAGHDAD, Iraq
A single word is on the tight, pencil-lined lips of women here. You'll
hear it spoken over lunch at a women's leadership conference in a
restaurant off busy Al Nidal Street, in a shade-darkened beauty shop in
upscale Mansour, in the ramshackle ghettos of Sadr City. The word is
"himaya," or security. With an intensity reminiscent of how they feared
Saddam Hussein, women now fear the abduction, rape and murder that have
become rampant here since his regime fell. Life for Iraqi women has been
reduced to one need that must be met before anything else can happen.
"Under Saddam we could drive, we could walk down the street until two in
the morning," a young designer told me as she bounced her 4-year-old
daughter on her lap. "Who would have thought the Americans could have
made it worse for women? This is liberation?"
In their palace surrounded by armed soldiers, officials from the
occupying forces talk about democracy. But in the same cool marble rooms,
when one mentions the fears of the majority of Iraq's population, one can
hear a representative of the Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the
police, say, "We don't do women." What they don't seem to realize is that
you can't do democracy if you don't do women.
In Afghanistan, women threw off their burqas when American forces
arrived. In Baghdad the veils have multiplied, and most women are hiding
at home instead of working, studying or playing a role in reconstructing
Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, crimes against women - or at least ones his
son Uday, Iraq's vicious Caligula, did not commit - were relatively rare
(though solid statistics for such crimes don't exist). Last October, the
regime opened the doors to the prisons. Kidnappers, rapists and murderers
were allowed to blend back into society, but they were kept in check by
the police state. When the Americans arrived and the police force
disappeared, however, these old predators re-emerged alongside new ones.
And in a country that essentially relies on rumor as its national news,
word of sadistic abduction quickly began to spread.
A young Iraqi woman I met represents the reality of these rumors, sitting
in her darkened living room surrounded by female relatives. She leans
forward to show the sutures running the length of her scalp. She and her
fiancé were carjacked by a gang of thieves in July, and when one tried to
rape her she threw herself out of the speeding car. She says that was the
last time she left the house. She hasn't heard a word from her fiancé
since he went to the police station to file a report, not about the
attempted rape, but about his missing Toyota RAV-4.
"What's important isn't a woman's life here, but a nice car," she said
with a blade-sharp laugh.
Two sisters, 13 and 18, weren't as lucky. A neighbor - a kidnapper and
murderer who had been released in the general amnesty - led a gang of
heavily armed friends to their home one night a few weeks ago. The girls
were beaten and raped. When the police finally arrived, the attackers
fled with the 13-year-old. She was taken to an abandoned house and left
there, blindfolded, for a couple of weeks before she was dropped at her
door upon threat of death if anyone learned of what had happened. Now she
hides out with her sister, young brother and mother in an abandoned
office building in a seedy neighborhood.
"What do you expect?" said the 18-year-old. "They let out the criminals.
They got rid of the law. Here we are."
Even these brutalized sisters are luckier than many women in Iraq. They
have no adult male relatives, and thus are not at risk for the honor
killings that claim the lives of many Muslim women here. Tribal custom
demands that a designated male kill a female relative who has been raped,
and the law allows only a maximum of three years in prison for such a
killing, which Iraqis call "washing the scandal."
"We never investigate these cases anyway - someone has to come and
confess the killing, which they almost never do," said an investigator
who looked into the case and then dismissed it because the sisters "knew
one of the men, so it must not be kidnapping."
This violence has made postwar Iraq a prison of fear for women. "This
issue of security is the immediate issue for women now - this horrible
time that was triggered the very first day of the invasion," said Yanar
Mohammed, the founder of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq.
Ms. Mohammed organized a demonstration against the violence last month.
She also sent a letter to the occupation administrator, Paul Bremer,
demanding his attention. Weeks later, with no reply from Mr. Bremer, she
shook her head in the shadowy light of her office, darkened by one of
frequent blackouts here. "We want to be able to talk about other issues,
like the separation of mosque and state and the development of a civil
law based on equality between men and women, but when women can't even
leave their homes to discuss such things, our work is quite hard," she
said.
Baghdadi women were used to a cosmopolitan city in which doctorates,
debating and dancing into the wee hours were ordinary parts of life. That
Baghdad now seems as ancient as this country's Mesopotamian history.
College students are staying home; lawyers are avoiding their offices. A
formerly first-world capital has become a city where the women have
largely vanished.
To support their basic liberties will no doubt require the deeply
complicated task of disentangling the threads of tribal, Islamic and
civil law that have made the misogyny in each systemic. This is a matter
of culture, not just policy.
But to understand the culture of women in Iraq, coalition officials must
venture beyond their razor-wired checkpoints and step down from their
convoys of Land Cruisers so they can talk to the nation they occupy. On
the streets and in the markets, they'll receive warm invitations to share
enormous lunches in welcoming homes, as is the Iraqi custom. And there
they'll hear this notion repeated frankly and frequently: without himaya
for women, there will be no place for democracy to grow in Iraq.
Lauren Sandler, a journalist, is investigating issues of women and
culture in Iraq for the Carr Foundation.
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