Laura Flanders: For Women in Iraq, A Sad Day (The Nation)

[marmar]

BLOG | Posted 03/08/2007 @ 4:29pm
For Women in Iraq, A Sad Day

Laura Flanders

It's Women's Day in Iraq, again, but not the bread-and-roses kind of day women want. The fact is, since the US invasion, every day has been a sick-and-twisted kind of women's day in that country -- a day on which Iraqi women's rights and their lives are under assault.

In the four months following the US invasion and occupation, women's rights groups estimate that some four hundred women were abducted and raped. At the time, the violence was blamed on the general breakdown of society, but there were always women warning that the killings weren't chaotic, they were systematic, and they heralded something worse.

They were right. A new report from the international women's human rights organization MADRE makes the case that gender-based violence is rampant and made worse by the US presence. As Houzan Mahmoud of the Organization for Women's Freedom, told a MADRE-organized press conference this week at the United Nations, reliable data is hard to gather in Iraq, but when OWFI visited a hospital in Basra last October they found 100 women's corpses, many showing evidence of torture. "The bodies were mutilated and unclaimed because families are too scared to pick them up."

The violence isn't a detail, it's strategic, said MADRE's Yifat Susskind (the author of the group's report.) "Gender based violence is central to the Islamists' agenda to create a theocratic state." The targets aren't just any women, but women whom the killers' claim flout Islamic law--other targets include artists and LGBT Iraqis--anyone whose continued existence doesn't suit the kind society the Islamists want. The media report the killings (as they did this week, when reporters covered attacks on a historic Baghdad book-market,) but they don't connect the dots. Why are militias bombing intellectuals? Because they're secular, says Susskind. For the same reason they've been beating and beheading women who refuse to cover their head. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15

[rodeodance]

1. SH ran a secular society (wwomen at least had a chance)

[MasonJar]

2. Actually women had a good life under Sadaam. They attended

universities; they had rights; they dressed in western attire; etc. The US cabal led by the unelected GWB has ruined that country. Now there is another religious government intent upon turning women into chattel and slaves.

[Briar]

3. And just yesterday

the US state department warned Iran to observe Iranian women's rights (echoing the pretended concern for women in Afghanistan and Iraq before military attacks on those country). American intervention in Iraq has been catastrophic for women's rights there.