Alternatives International

Les Irakiennes sous l'occupation*

Marjorie P. LASKY — 2006-05-02T23:53:36Z

La situation des femmes en Irak reflête la crise globale qui sévit dans ce pays occupé par l'armée américaine depuis mars 2003.

En 1958, les Irakiennes grâce à la révolution qui abolissait la monarchie probritannique acquérraient des droits. Un nouveau code de la famille est institué pour marginaliser la charria et protéger les droits des femmes en matière d'héritage, de divorce, de garde des enfants. Plus tard, les femmes eurent accès à l'emploi, l'éducation et des progrès remarquables furent réalisés. À la fin des années 1970 au moment du début du déclin de la dictature de Saddam, une période de régression s'amorça. Saddam pour courtiser les chefs de tribus et religieux permit le retour de la charria. Des hommes coupables de «crimes d'honneur» qui se traduisaient par le meurtre de leurs épouses, de leurs filles ou de leurs sœurs s'en tiraient facilement avec des peines légères. Plus tard à travers l'intensification de la répression, les femmes devinrent les cibles des milices du fils de Saddam, le redoutable Oudai.

L'occupation

Au moment de l'occupation en mars 2003, la condition des femmes était déjà très pénible. D'autant plus que, sous l'impact de l'embargo décrété par les Etats-Unis et leurs alliés, les systèmes de santé et d'éducation avaient été très diminués, affectant surtout les enfants et les mères. Avec la chute de la dictature cependant, la situation s'est détérioré. Un chaos permanent s'est installé dans les villes. Aujourd'hui même marcher dans les rues est dangereux pour les femmes qui sont facilement agressées, enlevées, tuées par les commandos kamikazes, par la police, par les milices.

Victimes de l'armée américaine

Viols, tortures, tueries sont pratiquées couramment par l'armée américaine. Amal Kadhim Swadi, une avocate qui défend les femmes détenues à la prison de Abou Ghraib parle d'une «sexualisation de la violence» dans les centres de détention partout dans le pays. Une des détenues, Mithal Al¬Hassan, une ingénieure de 55 ans, a été emprisonnée pendant 80 jours a documenté les viols commis par les soldats américains, ce qui a été confirmé dans le rapport du major-général Antonio Taguba dans le rapport qu'il a remis au Congrès américain en 2004. Dans d'autres cas, on rapporte des cas où des femmes ont été prises en otage par des soldats américains pour intimider la résistance. Souvent, les femmes violentées de peur d'être stigmatisées par les familles gardent le silence sur ces atrocités.

Menacées par les milices

Depuis 2003, des bandes armées sillonnent les rues des villes pour enlever et rançonner des femmes et leurs familles. Parallèlement, des milices affiliées à des groupes politiques ciblent les femmes qui refusent de porter le hijab ou l'abaya. La milice du mahdi associée au chef politico-religieux Moqtada Al-Sadr est particulièrement redoutée. Zeena Al¬Qushtaini, une militante des droits de femmes, a été assassinée par cette milice en 2005.

Pauvreté, misère, prostitution

Entre-temps, la crise économique et sociale aggrave le sort des femmes. Celles qui avaient des emplois dans le secteur public se retrouvent majoritairement au chômage. À cause des privatisations ordonnées par les autorités d'occupation, des milliers de femmes ont perdu leurs emplois, comme celles de la fabrique de vêtement de Agras à Bagdad.Sous l'influence des conservateurs rétrogrades, de vieilles traditions sont réanimées, comme celle de la mutaa, le mariage dit temporaire, qui est en fait une forme déguisée de prostitution. Le FMI estime que plus de 20% de la population vit avec moins d'un dollar par jour. Les veuves et les mères célibataires sont particulièrement affectées.

Des femmes qui résistent

En dépit des obstacles, des femmes résistent à l'oppression. Thanaa Salman, une enseignante de 24 ans, s'est imposée dans les élections municipales dans son quartier de Bagdad. Des femmes ont réussi à se faire élire dans l'Assemblée nationale, en dépit du non-respect d'une loi qui réserve 25% des sièges pour les femmes. D'autres femmes s'organisent en groupes d'entraide. Al Mareefa, par exemple, qui opère un centre de formation pour les femmes dans la banlieue de Bagdad. L'Organisation des femmes pour la liberté en Irak publie un journal et organise des refuges pour femmes violentées à Bagdad et Kirkuk. D'autres groupes s'organisent pour faire entendre la voix des femmes, contester la régression sociale et la constitution coupable aux yeux de beaucoup de femmes de faire beaucoup de trop de concessions aux religieux réactionnaires.

* Extrait d'un rapport produit pour l'organisation états-unienne «CODEPINK: Women for Peace and Global Exchange» en mars 2006.

Iraqi Women under Saddam

Marjorie P. LASKY — 2006-04-24T13:24:49Z

From 1958 to the 1990s Iraq provided relatively more rights and freedom for women and girls than most of its neighbors. Created in the 1920s and, as a Islamic state, initially adhering to interpretations of Shari'a, Iraq became a republic in 1958. At that point the govern¬ment legislated power away from the Shari'a courts over many aspects of women's lives.

Even after Saddam Hussein became president in 1979, at war with Iran and unsparing with political repression, women's access to education and to waged labor continued to grow — mainly because the expanding economy increasingly demanded their labor. Throughout, however, women's legal rights and social and economic position teetered in an uneasy relationship with tradition: the overarching importance of the traditional patriarchal family, reli¬gious ideologies, and norms of family “honor” and rep¬utation. As the conflict with Iran wore on, these tradi¬tional ideas regained some lost ground; Hussein looked for allies among conservative Sunni religious groups as well as tribal leaders, and women's rights and freedoms began to contract. This trend gathered momentum during the 13 years of United Nations' sanctions.

In 1959 Iraq broke somewhat from Shari'a by introduc¬ing a Personal Status Law (ILPS) that granted equal inheritance and divorce rights, relegated divorce, inher¬itance and marriage to civil, instead of religious, courts, and provided for child support. Shari'a was still allowed to adjudicate cases that the ILPS did not cover, and polygamy was permitted under certain circumstances.

In 1968, the newly controlling Ba'ath party harnessed female labor in the service of Iraq's flourishing economy. Spurred by the West's thirst for oil, Iraq's burgeoning economy after the nationalization of the oil industry in 1972 created labor shortages that women were encour¬aged to fill. The carrot was a host of labor and employ¬ment laws, including gender equity in education, civil service jobs, equal pay for equal work, maternity bene¬fits, and freedom from workplace harassment. The exo¬dus of men to fight the Iran¬Iraq war (1980¬88) created yet more demand for female workers. Women took ever more positions in the workforce, particularly in civil service and in formerly male¬dominated professions, such as oil¬project designers, construction supervisors, scientists, engineers, doctors, and accountants. However, in the last years of the war, a backlash against women entering the work force arose—a movement which grew significantly when men came home from the war in 1988 to a faltering economy.

Not surprisingly, patriarchal and conservative values of most Iraqis did not automatically change in tandem with the transformations in legislation and the econo¬my. Women's access to all rights still depended greatly on social class, religion, and rural/urban residency. For example, religious and patriarchal values weighed more heavily on rural and impoverished women than on their more secular, educated, and urban peers. As we explore Iraqi women's fate over time, we will see how tenacious are the urban¬rural split, secular¬religious conflicts, and class differences.

Still, the Ba'ath party's program, which sought to cement loyalty to the state, penetrated as well into edu¬cation, politics, and society. In the early 1970s, the party established the General Federation of Iraqi Women (GFIW) to implement state policy. The only women's organization allowed, the GFIW operated pri¬marily through female¬based community centers to offer educational, job¬training, and other social pro¬grams. It also communicated state propaganda. The government passed laws to encourage literacy for the entire population, female and male, between the ages of 6 and 45. Women were given the right to vote in 1980 and to be elected to the National Assembly and local governing bodies, although the number of female repre¬sentatives remained small. Around the same time, laws on divorce, polygamy, and inheritance still further expanded women's rights.

Although a great deal of policy and law continued to women's advantage when Saddam Hussein became presi¬dent, his voracious appetite for dictatorial power over the entire population could not but undermine women's gains. Women, like men, were jailed, tortured, raped, and mur¬dered. To extract information from dissidents, suspected dissidents, and opposition members abroad, Hussein was fond of sending them video tapes showing their female rel¬atives raped by members of the secret police.
The war with Iran subjected Iraqis not only to the dep¬rivations of war but also to gross human rights viola¬tions inflicted by their own government. Women were targets for rape and sex trafficking because of their rela¬tionship to male oppositionist activists; thousands of women, children and men were expelled because of their actual or alleged Iranian descent; tens of thousands of Kurds disappeared, and the Iraqi government used chemical weapons against thousands of Kurds.

By 1990 Hussein was courting support for his war¬weary regime from neighboring Islamic states and from religious and tribal leaders. Hussein's public embrace of Islam's moral authority changed many of the laws gov¬erning divorce, child custody, and inheritance rights so as to limit women's rights and freedoms. Laws restrict¬ed women's ability to travel abroad without a male rela¬tive and reintroduced single¬sex education in high school. The GFIW stopped promoting women's rights to work and education and focused primarily on humanitarian aid and health care. Honor killings of women who were suspected of pre¬marital sex or vic¬tims of rape, thereby “dishonoring” the family name, dramatically increased after Hussein reduced the prison sentences of male perpetrators from 8 years to no more than 6 months—a punishment in any case rarely imposed.
And the government's brutalization of women contin¬ued. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991 and the sub¬sequent Gulf War ended with U.S. President George W. Bush urging the Kurds and Shi'a, whose religious activ¬ities were strictly regulated by the Ba'athists, to rise up against Hussein's government. They did so—unsuccess¬fully. During and after the uprisings, government forces killed thousands of people, including women and chil¬dren, who were also allegedly used by government forces as “human shields.” By 2000, a militia founded by Hussein's son, Uday, was beheading women in a cam¬paign against prostitution.
According to the World Health Organization, prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq's health conditions and health system were among the best in the Middle East. The degradation of the system and the health of the popula¬tion began during the Iran¬Iraq war and seriously accel¬erated during the 13 years of United Nations sanctions that followed the 1991 war. Between 1991¬1997, the government could only supply 10¬15% of the country's medical needs, material and human. The Oil¬for¬Food Program, instituted in 1997, allowed the Iraqi govern¬ment to sell oil and use the revenues to obtain humani¬tarian aid. But the health care system never really recovered, and women paid the price. Pregnant Iraqis had to rely heavily on emergency obstetric care, prena¬tal care all but disappeared, and skilled delivery person¬nel were scarcely available. No wonder that maternal mortality tripled. At the same time, increasing poverty and poor nutrition undermined all women's health, as it did men's. Approximately 60% of the population became dependent on rations handed out by the gov¬ernment and paid for by the oil¬for¬food program.

Widowed woman and women who had lost fathers, sons, or prospective husbands in the wars were especial¬ly impoverished. Women had difficulty finding paid work or could not afford to work as the state withdrew its free child¬care and transportation. The wages of women who still worked dropped precipitously, and many middle¬class women fell into poverty. Impoverishment forced families to keep their female children out of school, and illiteracy soared. Prostitution, domestic abuse, and divorce soared. Two wars and the economic migration of men had led to a gender imbalance, so that the number of marriages fell while polygamy, which had generally been confined to rural or less educated Iraqis, grew.

The deteriorating economy, social crises, and Hussein's courtship of religious and tribal leaders were reflected in the government's support of returning women to domesticity. A generation gap emerged between educat¬ed mothers and their less educated, more conservative, daughters. Young girls wearing the hijab became ever more noticeable on Iraqi streets, motivated by many fac¬tors, not least of which was an increased religiosity and changing cultural and moral values.

By 2003, then, the position of women in Iraq had wors¬ened, particularly for those who did not enjoy the priv¬ileges of class or Ba'athist affiliation or the benefits of the black market economy. Indeed, one might even have imagined that groups of women would welcome American “liberators,” and briefly, when Hussein was removed from power, that might have been true for many people. However, that moment passed quickly as everything that could have been done wrongly was indeed so wrongly done.

Women in Iraqi Kurdistan

Marjorie P. LASKY — 2006-04-24T13:21:55Z

The study of Iraqi women's lives is complicated by the fact that Iraq is a country cobbled together from various ethnicities, tribes, social classes, and even religions, all of which influenced women's lives. As we follow Iraqi women through the war and occupation we must be attentive to both the differences in their experiences and to those aspects of their lives that transcend the differ¬ences. To that end we will examine the Kurdish north separately from the Arab central and south of Iraq, which we will bring together when we discuss their common experiences.

WOMEN in KURDISTAN

By Marjorie P. Lasky

Pre¬war

In the north, the vast majority of Iraq's Kurdish popula¬tion of 6 million people inhabits the mountainous Iraqi Kurdistan, an area of about 83,000 kilometers. Although most Kurds are Sunni Muslim, a minority, the Failis, are Shi'a, the Kurds have Indo¬European roots and differ in race, history, and culture from Iraq's 19¬20 million Semitic Arabs. From the 1920s until 1991, the Kurds repeatedly rebelled against the central govern¬ment which responded by destroying villages. Further, its reprisals against the Kurds included deportations, detentions, disappearances, murders, and kidnappings for sex trafficking. The Saddam Hussein government used biological and chemical weapons; the 1988 Anfal campaign exterminated entire segments of the rural population. In addition, the Ba'thists' Arabization poli¬cy forcibly expelled Kurdish, Turkoman, and Assyrian families from their northern homes and replaced them with southern Arabic families.
After the Kurds rose against the Hussein government in 1991, Iraqi Kurdistan was divided in half. The UN declared a safe haven and no¬fly zone over the three northeastern governates (provinces) and the Iraqi gov¬ernment voluntarily withdrew all civil administration. Two major political parties, the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) and KDP (Kurdish Democratic party) govern in the resulting autonomous governates—albeit from rival administrative bases. At present, most Kurds live in the autonomous governates and in two nearby provinces that contain the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. Several other ethnic groups, including Arabs, Assyrian¬Chaldeans, Armenians and Turkoman live in Kurdistan.

Violence, fueled by an almost¬fratricidal conflict between the PUK and KDP, scarcely abated after 1991. Under UN sanctions and Hussein's embargo of trade with the north, the area's humanitarian crisis worsened. However, the self¬governing areas generally had much less repression, anarchy, and lawlessness than the rest of the country endured, and compared to the rest of Iraq, Kurdistan thrived.

Thus, before 1991, Iraqi Kurdish women experienced fear, displacement, and violence along with the restric¬tions and occasional brutality of this male¬dominated society. After 1991, male dominance persisted, but women in the autonomous region gained more freedom of movement and speech and basic human rights than many women in other regions of Iraq.
Putting aside for the moment the relative well¬being of Iraqi Kurdish women, their lives were somewhat deter¬mined by the policies of the two political parties, the PUK and KDP. Critics of the parties claim that, after the parties came to power, hundreds of women were murdered in honor killings, wearing the hijab became a necessity, and girls could no longer attend school. More widely reported are both parties' disregard of women's issues and their attempts to suppress women's organizations. Between 2000 and 2002 both parties outlawed honor killings in their separate administrative bases, but have generally not enforced the laws. Still, some women have held political positions and served as judges, and the regional and local governments have allowed the development of women's centers and organ¬izations. Wadi, a German NGO working with local women for more than a decade, has established centers to help women with serious social and psychological problems to reintegrate into society, dispersed mobile teams to deal with women's health, and initiated litera¬cy campaigns.
As in other restrictive societies, Kurdish women and girls navigated within their female world towards self¬expres¬sion and self¬sufficiency. They created women's groups that frequently operated underground, and, in urban areas, had experienced some benefits from the Personal Status Law. Since the early 1990s women's rights organ¬izations have raised awareness about the suffering caused by violence against women. In 1999, Wadi worked with local women to open the first shelter for Iraqi female vic¬tims of violence—a movement that subsequently spread to other cities in Iraqi Kurdistan. Some Muslim clerics also supported women's groups in the struggle against widespread female genital mutilation.

War and Occupation

During the recent war, Kurdish forces fought alongside the Coalition. For most Kurds the war was a continua¬tion of the process of liberation. In the northeastern governates, peshmerga (Kurdish militia) guard the streets and the Coalition forces are barely present.

Thus, most Kurds, and women in particular, are some¬what isolated from much of the horror experienced in southern and central Iraq. Nonetheless the north still reports a degree of terror, chaos, and deprivation — sui¬cide bombings, particularly outside the autonomous governates; fighting between Coalition troops and insur¬gents, mainly in the northwest, close to the Syrian bor¬der, and in the cities of Mosul and Kirkuk; Kurdish attacks on Arab families seeking to undo the Arabization policy; and daily deprivation caused by a collapsed infra¬structure. Kurdish Sulaimaniyah is reported to be the safest city in Iraq, but ex¬patriot Kurdish families who have returned still lament the lack of oil, electricity and water, and the rising costs of housing.

Still, women's lives today differ markedly from their peers in central and southern Iraq—except for the per¬sistence of a male¬dominated culture and a rural¬urban divide, which we will discuss in a moment. Indeed, in some ways there have been interesting improvements. Before the war, compared to other regions in Iraq, the north had the lowest levels of education for women and girls. Because now girls in the north can venture out of their homes without fear for personal safety, they attend elementary and intermediate schools in much greater numbers relative to the population than girls in central and southern Iraq. More women's centers have opened, Kurdish women have held positions in the interim Iraqi governments, and urban Kurdish women strongly protested in 2004 when the Iraqi Governing Council attempted to scrap secular family laws and rein¬state Shari'a to define women's affairs. With U.S. sup¬port, Ms. Ala Talabani, a member of the PUK, has established several female¬based NGOs.

Women's lives in remote Kurdish villages close to the Iranian border have also improved somewhat since the invasion. Before 2003, radical groups of Islamists had forced women to wear black, to stop attending schools, to throw out their televisions and radios, and to suffer constant surveillance by those in power. Attacked by U.S.¬Kurdish forces, the radical Islamists fled. Women could dress as they once did and NGOs rushed in to build schools, homes, and income¬generating projects, offer literacy classes, and establish women's centers with sewing classes and information on women's rights.

However, the rural¬urban divide that more often than not influenced women's position in Kurdish society in the past persists. As in the rest of Iraq, rural women and girls are much more likely to be illiterate and less likely to attend school than their urban peers. In rural areas, honor killings and mutilations, forced marriages, and female circumcision persist on a much greater scale than in urban centers. The strongly secular PUK and more conservative KDP derive much of their support from the cities, but are being challenged by growing Islamic political parties with allegedly liberal, democratic ideals and anachronistic beliefs that oppose any major changes in women's traditional roles.

Radical Religious Groups Threaten Women in Iraq

Marjorie P. LASKY — 2006-04-24T13:19:18Z

Some radical religious groups are using alleged Shari'a principles to justify assaults on women. Freed from Hussein's vengeful eye and increasingly in control of local and regional governments and local resources, sev¬eral radical clerics, conservative Shi'a political parties, and paramilitary forces have gained followers and influ¬ence in Central and Southern Iraq.

As a result, radical religious groups can more openly harass women who defy their interpretations of Shari'a. Many girls and women in urban areas who might have previously worn western clothes will not now leave home without wear¬ing the hijab or the abaya. Although choice of dress does not necessarily mean insecurity or loss of freedom, women's rights advocate Yanar Mohammed claims, “If you go without the protection of the scarf, [armed men] can stop you and you may get assaulted…Being good and chaste means you put a veil on. They tell you it's voluntary, but how can it be voluntary when there's that much pressure on you?” Even Christian women in the south have resorted to wearing the hijab.

The tactics of the radical Shi'a that terrorize Iraqis, par¬ticularly in the South, often fall more heavily on women. In March 1995 group of Shi'a militiamen with rifles, pistols, thick wire cables and sticks charged into a crowded college picnic in Basra. The students' transgres¬sions: men dancing and singing, music playing, and couples mixing. Most of the women were veiled, although a handful, including some Christians, was bare headed. Especially hard on women, the militiamen who were loyal to the militant Shi'a cleric Moqtada Sadr, fired shots, beat students and hauled some stu¬dents away in pickup trucks.
Radical religious groups are also apparently guilty of more severe crimes against women. A group of men in Mosul threw acid in the face of a Christian female lawyer whom they had previously warned to wear a veil or face death. In 2005, on a highway near Baghdad the body of pharmacist and women's rights activist Zeena Al¬Qushtaini turned up ten days after assailants had abduct¬ed her at gunpoint. Al¬Qushtaini had two bullet holes close to her eyes and was reportedly dressed in an abaya; she normally wore Western clothes. Pinned to the abaya was a message that read, “She was a collaborator against Islam.” In Latifya, a city south of Baghdad, Sunni radi¬cals have covered walls warning women and girls not to go out in public without covering their heads and faces and threatening death to the violators.
Public violence, shortages in the economy, and a crum¬bling infrastructure have transformed women's work lives. Public violence has driven low¬income women engaged in street commerce out of their jobs and into their homes, and fewer children, particularly girls, brave the streets to attend school. Older, educated women who had created small businesses in their homes during sanctions are often out of work because of the lack of electricity. Female heads of household have lost work as the formal economic sector collapsed. The women most likely to earn money are the better¬educated urban women who work in education and public administra¬tion and rural women with little or no education who do agricultural work. However, even then, a non¬sectar¬ian wave of assassinations against academics, journalists, and scientists has not spared women.
The privatization of businesses and the U.S. introduc¬tion of “free market reforms” are also exacting their toll on women. At the Agras clothing factory in Baghdad, 600 seamstresses, most of whom were supporting their families, havelost their jobs since the U.S. authorities slashed tariffs in 2003. Agras now sends its designs to China and imports the finished product. As free market policies kick into full gear over the next year, cheap fuel , inexpensive commodities and public sector jobs, all part of the pre¬war Ba'athist regime's social contract with the Iraqi people, are bound to disappear.

Working for the Coalition Forces is often the only employment available, but this can be perilous. Among other incidents, women working as cleaners and laun¬dry personnel at a U.S. base near Baghdad were gunned down in 2004, and a translator for a U.S. news organi¬zation found a note under her door reading: “'Warning: Those who deal with the atheists and the infidels on the soil of the homeland deserve but death and destruction. Thus, we warn you to stay away from the infidels and the blasphemists, the followers of Satan, otherwise your killing shall be a mercy for Muslims. Those who heed the warning shall be excused.'”
The increased power of conservative Islamists has revived the practice of mutaa—a 1,400¬year¬old tradi¬tion alternately known as pleasure marriage or tempo¬rary marriage. A pleasure marriage may last a few min¬utes or a lifetime, and an unmarried woman may enter into one with any man, regardless of his marital status. Although many Shi'a clerics in Iraq, including the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, believe that temporary marriage accords with Islamic law and is consensual, Sunni authorities generally disagree. Outlawed during Hussein's presidency, the practice never entirely disap¬peared. Since the invasion, Shi'a women are increasing¬ly entering into these marriages. Perhaps Iraq's dire eco¬nomic straits lead unmarried women to hope that mutaa may provide financial salvation even though the man has the right to end the relationship at will.

Since the occupation, the notion that secularization will transform Iraqi women's lives for the better has been severely undermined. For example, freed from Hussein's restrictions, more Shi'a women are involved in religious studies. Before 2003, teaching women about Islam, if it occurred, took place informally in homes or underground— more because of Hussein's desire to control the Shi'a's religious activities than his opposition to women's education. If a man were found performing religious practices outside of strict guidelines, he might face arrest; a woman faced the danger of having her entire family taken into custody. In 2004, some of Baghdad's Shi'a mosques introduced women's religious classes and in March of that year one source estimated that there were classes in 100 Baghdad mosques. The tone of the classes is generally conservative, no personal questions are allowed although practical matters arise. Some advocates for women support the increased reli¬gious freedom and practices but worry about the link to social conservatism and the potential for discrimination against women.

And, in 2004, when urban Kurdish and Sunni women were marching in the streets to protest the Iraqi Governing Council's attempt to scrap secular family laws and reinstate Shari'a, Shi'a women's groups demon¬strated in Najaf in support of the Governing Council's action. But the Shi'a were not alone—a Sunni spokes¬woman, the head of the Islamic Union for Women in Iraq, also backed basing family law on Shari'a.

Since senior clerics, particularly among the Shi'a, derive much of their influence from their ability to build and support mosques, schools, libraries, and other public institutions and to provide for students and the poor, the more the Coalition and the Iraqi government fail to meet the population's basic needs, the more Iraqis have looked to the clerics as providers. And, the more influ¬ential the clerics will become.