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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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December 13th,
2007 - Freedom Lost |
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After the invasion of Iraq, the US government claimed that women there
had ‘new rights and new hopes’. In fact their lives have become immeasurably
worse, with rapes, burnings and murders now a daily occurrence. By Mark Lattimer The Guardian December 13, 2007 They lie in the Sulaimaniyah
hospital morgue in Iraqi Kurdistan, set out on white-tiled slabs. A few have
been shot or strangled, some beaten to death, but most have been burned. One
girl, a lock of hair falling across her half-closed eyes, could almost be on
the point of falling asleep. Burns have stretched the skin on another young
woman's face into a fixed look of surprise. These women are not
casualties of battle. In fact, the cause of death is generally recorded as
"accidental", although their bodies often lie unclaimed by their
families. "It is getting worse,
especially the burnings," says Khanim Rahim Latif, the manager of Asuda,
an Iraqi organisation based in Kurdistan that works to combat violence
against women. "Just here in Sulaimaniyah, there were 400 cases of the
burning of women last year." Lack of electricity means that every house
has a plentiful supply of oil, and she accepts that some cases may be
accidents. But the nature and scale of the injuries suggest that most were
deliberate, she says, handing me the morgue photographs of one young woman
after another. Many of the bodies bear the unmistakable signs of having been
subjected to intense heat. "In many cases the
woman is accused of adultery, or of a relationship before she is married, or
the marriage is not sanctioned by the family," Khanim says. Her husband,
brother or another relative will kill her to restore their
"honour". "If he is poor the man might be arrested; if he is important,
he won't be. And in most cases, it is hidden. The body might be dumped miles
away and when it is found the family says, 'We don't have a daughter.'"
In other cases, disputes over such murders are resolved between families or
tribes by the payment of a forfeit, or the gift of another woman. "The
authorities say such agreements are necessary for social stability, to
prevent revenge killings," says Khanim. In March 2004 George Bush
said that "the advance of freedom in the Middle East has given new
rights and new hopes to women ... the systematic use of rape by Saddam's
former regime to dishonour families has ended". This may have given some
people the impression that the American and British invasion of Iraq had
helped to improve the lives of its women. But this is far from the case. Even under Saddam, women in
Iraq - including in semi-autonomous Kurdistan - were widely recognised as
among the most liberated in the Middle East. They held important positions in
business, education and the public sector, and their rights were protected by
a statutory family law that was the envy of women's activists in neighbouring
countries. But since the 2003 invasion, advances that took 50 years to
establish are crumbling away. In much of the country, women can only now move
around with a male escort. Rape is committed habitually by all the main armed
groups, including those linked to the government. Women are being murdered
throughout Iraq in unprecedented numbers. In October the UN Assistance
Mission in Iraq (Unami) expressed serious concern over the rising incidence
of so-called honour crimes in Iraqi Kurdistan, confirming that 255 women had
been killed in just the first six months of 2007, three-quarters of them by
burning. An earlier Unami report cited 366 burns cases in Dohuk in 2006, up
from 289 the year before, although most were not fatal. In Irbil, the
emergency management centre had reported 576 burns cases since 2003,
resulting in 358 deaths. When questioned, Iraqi
doctors have told UN investigators that many of these burnings are self-inflicted.
"More than half of these women had sustained between 70-100% burns
which, according to doctors, suggested that they were self-inflicted,"
the earlier Unami report said. A UN human rights officer has relayed to me
the words of one judicial investigator in Irbil: "The woman is unhappy,
or there is domestic abuse, but the family doesn't listen. So she does it
because she wants to draw attention to herself." The claim that some of these
injuries are self-inflicted is something you hear from different quarters in
Iraq. The human rights minister in the Kurdistan regional government, Yousif
Aziz, says: "[Burnings take] place daily. Some are killed, some burn
themselves." Activists, however, say that if the wounds are
self-inflicted, it is because the women have been forced to do it. The Iraqi penal code
prescribes leniency for those who commit such crimes for "honourable
motives", enabling some of the men involved to get off with no more than
a fine. The Kurdish authorities, Aziz says, have removed these provisions for
leniency from the code - but the killings continue to mount. "The
politicians say the situation of women is all right with the new constitution
in Iraq and new laws in Kurdistan," says Khanim, "but it is
deteriorating." Khanim's organisation sees
cases from across Iraq, including from Baghdad and as far away as Basra. She
tells me of a man from Kirkuk who accused his sister of adultery. "When
we asked him why he wanted to kill his sister, he said, 'Because it is now a
democracy in Iraq'. He thought that democracy meant he could do whatever he
wanted." But the man's stupidity hid an important point: under the new
system of government developing in Iraq, family disputes are increasingly
settled not in state courts but by local tribal or religious authorities.
"Not that any religion allows such abuse - it is the culture," says
Khanim. "And we see cases from all the communities, including the
Christians. It is even worse outside Kurdistan." An Iraqi staff member at the
UN mission agrees. "As there is no state authority in Iraq, everyone
turns to the local sheikh. Every year since 2003 honour killings have
increased." In just one month last year, 130 unclaimed women's bodies
were counted in the Baghdad morgue, a representative from the Organisation of
Women's Freedom in Iraq has told the BBC. Another women's activist tells me
why she refuses all media interviews: "The work has to be secret. In
Kurdistan it is possible, but in Baghdad we couldn't open a shelter for
women, we would just be attacked." In a nondescript building on
a busy road in the north I visit one of the few secret shelters in Iraq for
women fleeing violence. A broom-cupboard door is unlocked to reveal a hidden
staircase, leading to a two-room apartment where the morning sunshine and the
hum of traffic filter through high-set windows. A pile of thin mattresses
show that up to 20 women can stay here at any one time. The most recent
arrivals are a woman and her two children from the local area. The woman,
Zaynab, says she wants to divorce her abusive husband, a drunk, but he has
refused. She had gone to live with her mother but he had come to threaten
her. "I love my children. My family wanted me to marry again but I don't
want to marry anyone, I want to be with my children." She stretches her
arm out towards the room next door where her curly-haired daughter, eight,
and son, seven, are playing. Nur is here because she
helped someone on impulse. Near her home in Diyala she heard the screams of a
man locked in a compound and helped him escape. It turned out he was being
tortured by a militia group. Later, the militia found out she had helped the
man. "My father is dead, I have no brothers, just my mother and my
little sister. They can't protect me." She fled north to Kirkuk, where
she heard about the shelter. Solaf, the young manager of
the shelter, is used to receiving threats herself. (Her name, like those of
Nur and Zaynab, has been changed for this article.) With nowhere else for the
women to go, she tries to negotiate with their families to see if they can be
reconciled, sometimes threatening to take them to court. "Women now know
more about human rights, but the men and the culture don't allow it.
Sometimes the family marries off the daughter from a young age - from 12
years old. But even if she stays out shopping too long, they say she is a bad
woman." I ask about the burnings.
"Sometimes the family burns their daughter or wife, because no one can
tell. They say in the hospital it was an accident. Some kill
themselves." Solaf can see that I still find it hard to accept that
someone, even under duress, would commit suicide by burning herself alive.
"You have to realise," she says, "that the family just locks
the girl into a room until she does it. They may leave her a knife, but it is
hard to kill yourself with a knife. In one way, it is easier with fire." At the Iraqi parliament in
Baghdad, the women MPs file into the chamber beside their male counterparts,
smiling, arguing, some in white or coloured headscarves, a few in the
full-length abaya or the Iranian-style chador, a handful with heads
uncovered. Under the new constitution a quarter of the 275 seats are reserved
for women, making the level of female representation among the highest in the
world. But, as one MP reminds me: "Even getting here is dangerous.
People watch you come in." In 2005, one female MP, Lamia Abed Khadouri,
was gunned down and killed on her doorstep. "If security in Iraq
can be provided - and it's a big if - then we have great hope," says a
Baghdad economics professor who herself survived an assassination attempt
last year (and also asked not to be named). "Three years has been a
short time for women to be mainstreamed in the political establishment, but
women have had the courage to expose themselves as activists. They have a
chance to prove themselves outside of the home, to establish NGOs, to work in
parliament and in the private sector." But asked if she believes that
security will improve in the long term, her optimism disappears. "No. It
is not in the interest of the different groups that make up the government
for the security situation to get better. The domination of the religious
parties, which is a negative for women, is helped by the insecurity. The
ground is emptied for them." While the new constitution
has empowered women in parliament, she fears that what it has to say about
the family may have had the opposite effect in the home. A committee
reviewing the constitution is due to present its final amendments to
parliament by the end of the year, and an alliance of women's organisations
has been lobbying for the removal of article 41, under which the old
statutory family law will be replaced with a new system where marriage,
divorce, custody and inheritance will be determined according to the
different religions and sects in Iraq. Campaigners argue that this
would strengthen the control of religious institutions and give
"constitutional legitimacy to sectarianism". Most of all they fear
an explosion in violence against women as traditional tribal codes take hold. But only two of the
committee's 27 members are women, and many of the women MPs represent the
more conservative religious parties. Some are escorted everywhere by their
husbands. A cabinet minister in Baghdad tells me: "The Islamisation had
already started under Saddam, but now it is much more pronounced. My young
son came to me laughing and showed me what he had in his schoolbook. It was a
verse from the Koran saying that when a man has a son in his family he will
be happy but when a girl is born he will be sad. They had made them learn
that." Many meetings for MPs are
now held outside the country. One evening earlier this year I joined a group
of women MPs in Amman who were attending a UN gathering on women's rights.
During a traditional Jordanian meal of mansaf - lamb cooked in goat yoghurt -
one of them, Samira al-Musawi, a member of Iraq's ruling Shia alliance and
chair of the women's committee in the Iraqi parliament, said: "We are
making progress, because now we are a democracy and we can discuss these
issues together." Her faced framed in black, she dismissed the concerns
over article 41 and said that "only one or two" members of her
committee wanted it changed. Reaching forward for some green salad known
locally as zjerzil, she suddenly pulled back. "It is haram - forbidden,"
explained her companion, and then in an undertone: "It increases sexual
desire." I broke off a small corner of the leaf. It was a kind of
rocket. At another table, an Arab
Sunni MP in a white headscarf disagreed pointedly over article 41. "We
want the old law back, we and the Kurds, but the Shia prevent it. You want to
know what the situation of women is? How many widows are there now?" But
her bitterest comments were reserved for Iraq's prime minister, Nuri
al-Maliki. Earlier that week three members of the interior ministry's public
order forces had been accused of raping a Sunni woman, who was admitted to a
hospital in the government's fortified green zone compound. Two days later,
Al-Maliki publicly rejected the woman's account and instructed that the
policemen should be honoured. "They may have done it, or they may not,
but how could he just say she was lying before any proper investigation had
been done? He has turned them into heroes." The coordinator of a women's
organisation in Baghdad, who asked not to be named, says some groups target
women - through kidnapping or sexual assault - "to make a family
weak". "A girl was raped and returned to her family but she
committed suicide rather than face the shame. Saddam was a dictator but at
least then we had the freedom to go out. Then there was only one criminal -
Saddam - but now they are everywhere, you do not know who your persecutor
is." Claims of rape being used as
a weapon of war to humiliate and terrify communities are now frequently made
against all the main parties in the conflict, and not just Iraqi forces.
Since 2003 US forces have denied numerous allegations that soldiers have
raped and abused female detainees or held them as bargaining chips in the
hunt for family members wanted as insurgents. But the Pentagon's Taguba
report into abuse at Abu Ghraib prison confirmed that US military police had
photographed and videotaped naked women prisoners and referred to a guard
"having sex with a female detainee". Earlier this year, four US
soldiers were found guilty of the rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim
Hamza and three members of her family in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, in an
attack the US military had at first blamed on Sunni insurgents. Abeer's body
had been set on fire, her killers believing that their guilt could be burned
away. Rapes carried out against
Shia or Christian women have been justified by insurgent groups as revenge
for what was done to women in Abu Ghraib. But the extent to which the abuse
of women has become both the vehicle and the justification for sectarian
hatred in Iraq was demonstrated most chillingly in the April killing of Du'a
Khalil Aswad. A 17-year-old from Nineveh, Du'a was stoned in front of
hundreds of men, some of whom videoed what happened on their mobile phones. Climbing steadily past olive
groves north of Mosul, the road into Du'a's home town of Bashiqa is dominated
by the conical shrines of the Yezidi sect, an ancient religion that predates
both Islam and Christianity. Their veneration of a fallen angel in the form
of a blue peacock has led to the common slur in Iraq that the Yezidis are
devil-worshippers and the community suffers entrenched discrimination. After Du'a's death, the
international media widely repeated a claim made on a number of Islamic
extremist websites that she had been killed because she converted to Islam,
but local reports do not concur. Some people tell me she had run away with
her Muslim boyfriend and they had been stopped at a checkpoint outside Mosul;
others say she had been seen by her father and uncle just talking with the
boy in public and, fearing her family's reaction, they had sought protection
at the police station. Either way, the police handed Du'a into the custody of
a local Yezidi sheikh. One woman tells me that after she was stoned in the
town square, Du'a's body was tied behind a car and dragged through the
streets. But the killers' taste for
publicity quickly backfired. As the videos circulated around mobile phones in
the region, and were even posted on the internet, Islamic extremists called
for Yezidis to be killed in revenge. Meanwhile Du'a's body was exhumed and
sent to the Medico-Legal Institute in Mosul so that tests could be performed
to see whether she had died a virgin. Just after 3pm on April 22 a
bus carrying workers from a textile factory in Mosul back to Bashiqa was
stopped at a fake checkpoint. Gunmen ordered the Muslims and Christians off
the bus and drove it to the east of the city. They then dragged out the
Yezidis. They were lined up, there was a shout of "Allah, curse your
devil" and then they were shot. Other Yezidis living in the city started
fleeing to the countryside, as an extremist Sunni group claimed
responsibility. In all 24 Yezidi men were killed. Three days later, I was
printing out the first local reports of the massacre at a ramshackle business
centre in Irbil when the manager approached me. "What do you know about
it?" he said, anger breaking his habitual deference, as he dropped my
print-outs on the desk. I asked him what he thought about the case.
"Look what has happened now because of her," he said, jabbing his
finger at the headlines. "She was a very bad girl". External link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2226600,00.html |