Dangerous Times for Iraqi Women

In light of Stellar's post on the rights of Indian women, I did some research on the rights of Iraqi women. Its an important time as the new Iraqi constitution is being drafted right now and many women's rights activists fear that it will reduce women's rights.

Whatever your opinion on the war in Iraq, everyone can agree that at this point the safety and security of the Iraqi people is what is important now. We are there- rightly or wrongly

- and now is the time to help Iraq emerge from its painful past and into a hopeful future.

You only have to look at the news reports coming out of Iraq to see that it won’t be easy. If you join the new Iraqi police force or army, you’re a target for insurgents. If you go to the market or travel through a checkpoint, you’re just as vulnerable. And if you allow your kids to take candy from American soldiers, you run the risk of watching them killed before your eyes.

Being a woman in Iraq is not easy - and it could get much harder in the near future.

To pre-empt any comments to the effect “you bleeding heart fem-nazis loved Saddam and hate our troops,” let me say that I am so unbelievably glad that Saddam is gone. He was a brutal, murderous tyrant who - along with his unimaginably cruel sons - subjected his people to years of suffering. As the State Department’s website points out, as a woman in Saddam’s Iraq, you would have faced:

Beheading. Under the pretext of fighting prostitution, units of "Fedayeen Saddam" (the paramilitary organization led by Uday Hussein, Saddam's eldest son) beheaded in public more than 200 women, dumping their severed heads at their families' doorsteps.

Rape. The regime used rape and sexual assault of women to: Extract information and forced confessions from detained family members; Intimidate members of the opposition by sending them videotapes of the rape of female family members; and Blackmail Iraqi men into future cooperation with the regime.

Torture. Saddam Hussein's thugs routinely tortured and killed female dissidents and the female relatives of Iraqi oppositionists and defectors. Children were imprisoned if they or their parents were not viewed to be faithful supporters of the Saddam regime.

Murder. In 1990, Saddam Hussein introduced Article 111 into the Iraqi Penal Code. This law exempted men from any kind of punishment if they kill their female relatives in defense of their family's honor.

(source www.state.gov/g/wi/c8973.htm)

Living in a democracy should allow Iraqi women a real chance at freedom and give them the oppurtunity to get involved in their government in a meaningful way. However, as with many things in Iraq today, things have not gone to plan.

Earlier this month, IRIN News reported that women in Baghdad and the province of Anbar are increasingly becoming the victims of acid attacks if they don’t wear the black abaya, a long black garment that covers most of the body. The Feminist Majority Foundation recounts the experiences of some of the woman affected.

Hania Abdul-Jabbar, a university student, had acid thrown on her face and legs by three men for not wearing the veil out in public. “They cut all my hair off while hitting me in the face many times, telling me it’s the price for not obeying God’s wish in using the veil,” according to IRIN News. Today Abdul-Jabbar is blind in one eye, and her face is completely deformed due to the acid attack.

Since Hussein’s removal in 2003, at least five women have been killed in Anbar for not obeying orders by religious extremists to wear the veil and women continue to be threatened today, IRIN News reports. Despite such threats, many Iraqi women refuse to be intimidated by religious extremists.

Hiba Zuheir, who is 24 years old, explained, “I won’t force myself to use something that I don’t feel comfortable with. Women in Iraq are losing their place in society and we have to fight that and determine who we are and how we should dress, despite these dangers,” according to IRIN News.

(source www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=9145)

We could write these incidents of as the actions of extremists who wish to limit women’s freedoms by intimidating them into submissiveness. However, when drafts for the new Iraqi constitution started leaking out, it become harder to believe that women’s rights are taking a high priority in Iraq.

At the moment, the interim constitution is still in effect and guarantees that women will occupy 25% of the seats in the National Assembly. Thanks to this measure, 31% of the seats went to female candidates during the elections. But the new draft indicates that this provision will be withdrawn, prompting many to fear that the female voice will be drowned out.

In addition to this, the new constitutions only guarantees equal rights for women as long as these rights do not "violate Shariah," or Koranic law. For the past forty years, Iraq's civil code has had legal protections for women. For example, it prohibited marriage below the age of 18, arbitrary divorce, and polygamy. Women's rights advocates argue that moving these laws under Islamic law will destroy the status of Iraqi women's rights regarding marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child custody rights. In February Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) expressed concern that a US backed regime could wind the clock back on women’s legal rights even further than Saddam’s awful regime if the proposed drafts become law.

One of the critical passages is in Article 14 of the chapter, a sweeping measure that would require court cases dealing with matters like marriage, divorce and inheritance to be judged according to the law practiced by the family's sect or religion.

Under that measure, Shiite women in Iraq, no matter what their age, generally could not marry without their families' permission. Under some interpretations of Shariah, men could attain a divorce simply by stating their intention three times in their wives' presence.

Article 14 would replace a body of Iraqi law that has for decades been considered one of the most progressive in the Middle East in protecting the rights of women, giving them the freedom to choose a husband and requiring divorce cases to be decided by a judge.
…

Critics of the draft proposal say that in addition to restricting women's rights, it could also deepen the sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shiites. The draft also does not make clear what would happen in cases where the husband is from one sect and the wife from another.

Religious Shiite politicians tried once before, in December 2003, to abolish the 1959 law. As is happening now, women's groups and secular female politicians took to the streets.

(source New York Times)

I understand that Iraq is a dangerous, difficult place to try and create a functioning democracy right now. Politicians are doing their best to prevent people getting blown to pieces and that is no easy task with an insurgency hell bent on sabotaging Iraq’s progress. However, as Hillary Clinton said in her famous speech in Beijing, "...women's rights are human rights--and human rights are women's rights." The Iraqi government must ensure that no woman is discriminated against because of biology.

And if America and Britain truly do care about the human rights of the Iraqi people they will pressure the Iraqi government to give women equal rights in Iraq.

From NY Times

This was published in the New York Times yesterday.

_______________________________

July 10, 2005

India and Pakistan's Code of Dishonor

By SALMAN RUSHDIE


IN honor-and-shame cultures like those of India and Pakistan, male honor resides in the sexual probity of women, and the "shaming" of women dishonors all men. So it is that five men of Pakistan's powerful Mastoi tribe were disgracefully acquitted of raping a villager named Mukhtar Mai three years ago. Theirs was an "honor rape," intended to punish a relative of Ms. Mukhtar for having been seen with a Matsoi woman. The acquittals have now been suspended by the Pakistan Supreme Court, and there is finally a chance that this courageous woman may gain some measure of redress for her violation.

Pakistan, however, has little to be proud of. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says that there were 320 reported rapes in the first nine months of last year, and 350 reported gang rapes in the same period. The number of unreported rapes is believed to be much larger. The victim pressed charges in only one-third of the reported cases, and a mere 39 arrests were made. The use of rape in tribal disputes has become, one might say, normal. And the belief that a raped woman's best recourse is to kill herself remains widespread and deeply ingrained.

For every Mukhtar Mai there are dozens of such suicides. Nor is courage any guarantee of getting justice, as the case of Shazia Khalid shows. Dr. Khalid was raped last year in the province of Baluchistan by security personnel at the hospital where she worked. A Pakistani tribunal failed to convict anyone of the crime.

Dr. Khalid says that she was subsequently "threatened so many times" that she was forced to flee Pakistan. "I was hounded out," she says, expressing dissatisfaction that the government neither brought her attackers to justice nor protected her from the threats that followed.

That is the same government, led by President Pervez Musharraf, that confiscated Mukhtar Mai's passport because it feared she would go abroad and say things that would bring Pakistan into disrepute; and it is the same government that has allied with the West in the war on terrorism, but seems quite prepared to allow a war of sexual terror to be waged against its female citizens.

Now comes even worse news. Whatever Pakistan can do, India, it seems, can trump. The so-called Imrana case, in which a Muslim woman from a village in northern India says she was raped by her father-in-law, has brought forth a ruling from the powerful Islamist seminary Darul-Uloom ordering her to leave her husband because as a result of the rape she has become "haram" (unclean) for him. "It does not matter," a Deobandi cleric has stated, "if it was consensual or forced."

Darul-Uloom, in the village of Deoband 90 miles north of Delhi, is the birthplace of the ultra-conservative Deobandi cult, in whose madrassas the Taliban were trained. It teaches the most fundamentalist, narrow, puritan, rigid, oppressive version of Islam that exists anywhere in the world today. In one fatwa it suggested that Jews were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Not only the Taliban but also the assassins of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were followers of Deobandi teachings.

Darul-Uloom's rigid interpretations of Shariah law are notorious, and immensely influential - so much so that the victim, Imrana, a woman under unimaginable pressure, has said she will abide by the seminary's decision in spite of the widespread outcry in India against it. An innocent woman, she will leave her husband because of his father's crime.

Why does a mere seminary have the power to issue such judgments? The answer lies in the strange anomaly that is the Muslim personal law system - a parallel legal system for Indian Muslims, which leaves women like Imrana at the mercy of the mullahs. Such is the historical confusion on this vexed subject that anyone who suggests that a democratic country should have a single, unified legal system is accused of being anti-Muslim and in favor of the hardline Hindu nationalists.

In the 1980's, a divorced woman named Shah Bano was granted "maintenance money" by the Indian Supreme Court. But there is no alimony under Islamic law, so orthodox Indian Islamists like those at Darul-Uloom protested that this ruling infringed the Muslim Personal Law, and they founded the All-India Muslim Law Board to mount protests. The government caved in, passing a bill denying alimony to divorced Muslim women. Ever since Shah Bano, Indian politicians have not dared to challenge the power of Islamist clerical grandees.

In the Imrana case, the All-India Muslim Law Board has unsurprisingly backed the Darul-Uloom decision, though many other Muslim and non-Muslim organizations and individuals have denounced it. Shockingly, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, has also backed the Darul-Uloom fatwa. "The decision of the Muslim religious leaders in the Imrana case must have been taken after a lot of thought," he told reporters in Lucknow. "The religious leaders are all very learned and they understand the Muslim community and its sentiments."

This is a craven statement. The "culture" of rape that exists in India and Pakistan arises from profound social anomalies, its origins lying in the unchanging harshness of a moral code based on the concepts of honor and shame. Thanks to that code's ruthlessness, raped women will go on hanging themselves in the woods and walking into rivers to drown themselves. It will take generations to change that. Meanwhile, the law must do what it can.

In Pakistan, the Supreme Court has taken one small but significant step in the matter of Mukhtar Mai; now it is for the police and politicians to start pursuing rapists instead of hounding their victims. As for India, at the risk of being called a communalist, I must agree that any country that claims to be a modern, secular democracy must secularize and unify its legal system, and take power over women's lives away, once and for all, from medievalist institutions like Darul-Uloom.

Salman Rushdie is the author of "The Satanic Verses" and the forthcoming "Shalimar the Clown."

Protecting Women - Or Not

I thought that in light of Zoe’s post, this article raises several important issues.

Supreme Court Decision Weakening Restraining Orders Short-Shrifted
in the News

6/28/2005 - In its last day before summer recess, the Supreme Court
issued decisions on six cases, only two of which, the decisions to outlaw
copies of the Ten Commandments at a Kentucky courthouse and to protect copyrighted material in Internet file sharing, were widely covered by the media. In a troubling but all too familiar trend in media reporting, Castle Rock, Colorado v. Gonzales – a case that weakens enforcement of restraining orders in domestic violence cases – was largely ignored.

In a 7-2 decision, the Court ruled that Jessica Gonzales did not have a
constitutional right to police enforcement of her mandatory court-ordered
restraining order against her husband. Gonzales had filed a $30 million
lawsuit against the Castle Rock, Colorado police department for failing to
respond to five phone calls she made reporting a violation of the
restraining order.

The town of Castle Rock, backed by the Bush administration and several police
organizations, won their argument that it would be unrealistic to enforce
every restraining order. With the vast majority of restraining orders requested by
women, according to the National Center for Violent Crime, the Castle Rock
decision puts women’s lives in jeopardy and potentially lets police departments
off the hook for failing to enforce mandatory orders.

http://www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswire.asp

I read this article and could barely believe it. Do we really live in an age where file sharing and the Ten Commandments are more newsworthy than the fact that the Supreme Court just made the decision that its perfectly acceptable for restraining orders not to be enforced?

It only gets worse when you read the details of this disturbing case.

In the early evening of June 22, 1999, Simon Gonzales violated the restraining order his estranged wife obtained against him and abducted his three young daughters while they were playing outside of their home in Castle Rock, Colo.

Once Jessica Gonzales realized her daughters were missing, she
suspected that her husband, who had a history of erratic and suicidal behavior, had taken them. At about 7:30 p.m., she made her first phone call to the Castle Rock Police Department, requesting that the restraining order against her husband be enforced.She produced a copy of the order for the police officers sent to her home, but they told her there was nothing they could do. They suggested she call the police department again if her daughters did not return home by 10 p.m.

Soon after the officers left, Jessica Gonzales spoke to her husband on his cell phone, and he told her he was with the girls at an amusement park in Denver, about 40 miles north of Castle Rock. She called the police department again and demanded that police find and arrest her husband. The officer she spoke with refused and again told her to wait until 10 p.m. When 10 p.m. came and there was no sign of her daughters, she again called, and the dispatcher told her to wait for another two hours. At midnight, she again informed the dispatcher that they were still missing and went to her husband's apartment, finding no one home. From there, she placed another call to the police department and was advised to wait for police.
She waited until 12:50 a.m., then went to the police station. There, an officer took an incident report but made no effort to enforce the restraining order or locate the children.

He went to dinner instead.

Nearly eight hours after Jessica Gonzales first contacted police, at about 3:20 a.m., Simon Gonzales arrived at the police station in his truck and opened fire on the station with a semi-automatic handgun purchased after abducting his daughters. He was fatally shot during the shootout, and police found the bodies of the three young girls, who were murdered by their father earlier in the evening, in the cab of the truck.

http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/~secure/docket/

mt/archives/001896.php

Mrs Gonzales followed all the legal procedures she could have - she got a restraining order, she notified the police when it was breached - and still, she was failed by the system. She trusted the police and her government to protect her and her children - they let her down.

And now, nobody even wants to take responsibility.

“Why doesn’t she leave him?” society sneers at women who stay in abusive relationships.

“Why won’t the Supreme Court support the rights of women who do?” feminists everywhere should reply.