When the Bush administration was gearing up to invade Iraq, the plight of Muslim women was used as one of a handful of human rights justifications for war. They conveniently conflated “Muslim women” with “women in Afghanistan living under the Taliban,” and most Americans seemed to be under the impression that Iraqi women were roundly oppressed. In fact, women in Iraq had more rights under Saddam Hussein than they do under the current Iraqi constitution. I’m no Saddam apologist, and I don’t think that women’s rights are particularly grand achievements when human rights are virtually non-existent. However, we can’t ignore the fact that women in Iraq are inarguably worse off now than they were before we showed up.
The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion — some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.
The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other “rules” that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce.
“Fear, fear is always there,” says 30-year-old Safana, an artist and university professor. “We don’t know who to be afraid of. Maybe it’s a friend or a student you teach. There is no break, no security. I don’t know who to be afraid of.”
Her fear is justified. Iraq’s second-largest city, Basra, is a stronghold of conservative Shia groups. As many as 133 women were killed in Basra last year — 79 for violation of “Islamic teachings” and 47 for so-called honor killings, according to IRIN, the news branch of the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
One glance through the police file is enough to understand the consequences. Basra’s police chief, Gen. Abdul Jalil Khalaf, flips through the file, pointing to one unsolved case after another.
“I think so far, we have been unable to tackle this problem properly,” he says. “There are many motives for these crimes and parties involved in killing women, by strangling, beheading, chopping off their hands, legs, heads.”
“When I came to Basra a year ago,” he says, “two women were killed in front of their kids. Their blood was flowing in front of their kids, they were crying. Another woman was killed in front of her 6-year-old son, another in front of her 11-year-old child, and yet another who was pregnant.”
The killers enforcing their own version of Islamic justice are rarely caught, while women live in fear.
Boldly splattered in red paint just outside the main downtown market, a chilling sign reads: “We warn against not wearing a headscarf and wearing makeup. Those who do not abide by this will be punished. God is our witness, we have notified you.”
Women in Afghanistan — you know, the ones we liberated from the burqa — aren’t doing much better. Women’s rights leaders have been murdered. Girls in school are prime targets for religious fundamentalists. And fundamentalist religious groups are taking hold of large parts of the country.
Oh, and our favorite ally in the Middle East is really great on women’s rights, too.
Three cheers for “liberation.”