Common Dreams: Saddam Better for Women

[apnu]

Published on Thursday, Mach 30, 2006 by Inter Press Service
Saddam Better for Women
by Sanjay Suri


LONDON - Women were far better off under former Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein, a women's group has found after an extensive survey in Iraq.

''Under the previous dictator regime, the basic rights for women were enshrined in the constitution,'' Houzan Mahmoud from the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq told IPS in an interview. The group is a sister organization of MADRE, an international women's rights group.

Under Saddam, she said, ''women could go out to work, university and get married or divorced in civil courts. But at the moment women have lost almost all their rights and are being pushed back into the corner of their house.''

(snip)

''The rape, abduction, abuse in prisons by prison guards, and killing of women is widespread,'' she said. ''The lack of security and proper protection for women is a major issue and no one, neither the occupying forces nor the local police of the puppet regime. is doing anything about it.''

(more: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0330-02.htm)

One of the ironies of the Iraq war, and kinda shoots the whole "Saddam is a very bad man, shouldn't he be removed from power?" rationale for the war.

[FloridaPat]

1. An Iraqi woman visited a friend of mine. She told him the women

now take antidepressants and stay home all day. I love how * keeps insisting the Iraqs are better off now. Maybe when he's convicted of war crimes, he should serve his life sentence in Iraq. He built it - he can live there.

[Brazenly Liberal]

11. BL's free Fill-in-the-blank service

What Bush says: The Iraqis are better off now.

What that means: The supermegacorporations with a financial stake in Iraq's oil but not in the welfare of actual Iraqis are better off now.

:evilgrin:

[Kailassa]

13. Yes, send * to live as an Iraqi, but let them know he's gay first.

[Boojatta]

2. Not only that, but could a Soviet puppet regime in Afghanistan have

been better for women than what Afghanistan is going to have when the US pulls out of Afghanistan?

[htuttle]

4. "Could" it have been better in Afghanistan back then? It clearly was.

These women will tell you that:

http://www.rawa.org/

[Boojatta]

6. Wouldn't they be guessing, given that US troops are still in Afghanistan?

[htuttle]

7. I think they're just being realistic

They can see the direction Afghanistan has been going, and short of an overnight miracle it's not going to be anywhere as egalitarian as under the former Communist regime. At least not for many decades.

The US and its troops are doing nothing to protect and promote women's rights in Afghanistan -- that much is clear just by reading the news items on the RAWA site.

[FloridaPat]

12. Women have equal rights under communism. Things are a little

different now with their brand of democracy. But they are still better off than the women in Iraq or Afghanistan.

[Neil Lisst]

3. oh but to hear Bush tell it, he liberated those womens!!

[donsu]

5. and Saddam worked for the CIA when he was 22 yrs. old

from the article:

Saddam Hussein is bad man. As a 22 year old he worked with the CIA on a botched effort to assassinate Iraqi President Abd al-Karim Qasim. The CIA and Egyptian intelligence got him out of Iraq and to Lebanon, where the CIA paid for his Beirut apartment, and then to Cairo. In 1963, under the new government headed by President 'Abd as-Salam 'Arif, he was placed in charge of the interrogation, torture and execution of communists whose names the CIA happily provided the new regime. He rose in the Baathist party ranks, and although jailed between 1964 and 1966, grabbed power in 1979. The Reagan administration cozied up to him after he attacked Iran; Donald Rumsfeld met with him twice and provided his regime with invaluable intelligence abetting his aggressive war on Iran in the '80s, which took a million lives. A bad man and bad regime. The propaganda of the occupiers requires that we believe things have improved since his fall. But the evidence suggests otherwise.



our CIA taught him how to torture

ain't that nice

[tanyev]

8. K&R!

[donsu]

9. kicking

nt

[Hell Hath No Fury]

10. A very sad kick...

the gods forgive us for what we have done to Iraqi women. :(