Veiled And Worried
in Baghdad
By Lauren Sandler
New York Times
01 October, 2003
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.