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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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May 10th,
2007 - ‘Democracy’ Is Hell |
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By Katha Pollitt The Nation May 10, 2007 The video, originally posted
on jebar.info, a Kurdish website, is now plastered all over the Internet: a
young girl in a red track-suit jacket and black underpants, beaten, kicked
and stoned to death by a mob of excited, shouting men. It's a gruesome
marriage of twenty-first-century technology and medieval barbarity. At one
point, bloody and dazed, the girl tries to protect herself, whereupon a man
drops a big rock or lump of concrete on her face, killing her. Her crime? As
an Agence France-Presse story explains, Doaa Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old
member of the Kurdish Yazidi religious minority, a non-Muslim sect, had
fallen in love with a Sunni boy and possibly converted to Islam. For this
"crime" against family and community, Doaa was murdered in the
small village of Beshika, near Mosul, in a collective act of woman hatred,
led by her brothers and uncles. In the video you can see local policemen
watching and one man recording the killing on his cellphone. This is the new Iraq, where
women were going to be free and equal - no more "rape rooms," no
more psychopathic Uday Hussein summoning young virgins to the palace for his
pleasure. In the early days of the occupation, we heard a lot about building
schools, starting women's health programs, funding women's microenterprises.
At the 2005 State of the Union address, Laura Bush sat with proudly
purple-fingered Safia Taleb al-Suhail telegraphing the message that women's
rights and democracy went together and that both were part of the big plan
for Iraq. Well, scratch that. Women's status was never as
high under Saddam as opponents of the war sometimes asserted, and it was
already declining throughout the 1990s, as Saddam embraced Islam to distract
the populace from the effects of the Gulf War, UN sanctions and his own
depredations. But Iraq today is even worse for women: more repressive, more
violent, more lawless. As if car bombs and suicide bombers weren't horrific
enough, criminal gangs, religious militias and death squads kidnap, rape and
kill with impunity, with special attention to women professionals, students
and rights activists. According to the United Nations' most recent quarterly
report on human rights in Iraq, domestic violence and "honor"
killings are on the rise - Kurdistan, often described as comparatively
peaceful and orderly, saw more than forty such killings between January and
March of this year; in the province of Erbil, rapes quadrupled between 2003
and 2006. Women who'd worn Western clothes and moved about freely all their
lives have been terrorized into wearing the abaya and staying inside unless
accompanied by male relatives. In Sadr City and elsewhere, Shariah courts
mete out misogynist "justice." "The political climate
in Iraq is such that anyone can carry out crimes against women," Kurdish
feminist and labor activist Houzan Mahmoud told me when I reached her by
phone in London, where she serves as the UK representative of the
Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI). "You can come upon
women's bodies anywhere." Far from promoting women's rights and
security, "the occupation has strengthened the tribes, political Islam
and reactionary bourgeois parties - all of which are anti-woman." The
true extent of the violence may never be known. According to Yifat Susskind,
author of Madre's 2007 report Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy:
Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq, comprehensive statistics don't
exist: The Iraqi institutions responsible for collecting human rights data
are complicit in human rights abuses, and besides, the United States has told
the Ministry of Health not to publish figures on civilian fatalities. "I haven't seen the
United States offering any protection for women," Mahmoud told me.
Indeed, the United States is part of the problem. Think of Abeer Qassim
al-Janabi, the 14-year-old girl raped and then murdered with her family by US
soldiers in Mahmoudiya in March of last year. Think of the women imprisoned
at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, sometimes only for being the wife or sister of a
man US forces were looking for. Think of women terrorized by soldiers who
break into their homes and hold them at gunpoint. Given the punishments meted
out to "unchaste" women, victims are unlikely to report rapes
committed by US or allied soldiers or Iraqi military or police forces - but
if the case of Abeer was unique, this would be the first military occupation
in the history of the world in which the invaders and their local sidekicks
didn't help themselves to girls and women. Four years after the fall of
Saddam, the country is a political and economic basket case. The
US-engineered Constitution undermines secularism in favor of religious
authority, while billions in US aid disappear into the pockets of contractors
and bribe takers. One third of the population is poor; last year there were
300,000 widows in Baghdad alone; according to a new report from Save the
Children, Iraq now boasts the world's biggest fifteen-year increase in infant
and child mortality. In 2005, 122,000 children under 5 died - that's one in
eight. I asked Mahmoud if the
American presence had achieved anything at all for women. "No," she
said. "I can't honestly say it has." Like other women's groups
there, OWFI now carries out its work in secret. External link: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070528/pollitt |