Mick Hartley

Houzan Mahmoud in the Guardian seems to believe that life for women in Iraq has worsened since the overthrow of Saddam:

Women in Iraq endured untold hardships and difficulties during the past three decades of the Ba’ath regime. Although some basic rights for women, such as the right to education, employment, divorce in civil courts and custody over kids, were endorsed in the Personal Status Code, some of these legal rights were routinely violated. The Ba’ath regime’s “faithfulness campaign”, an act of terrorism against women that included the summary beheading of scores of those accused of prostitution, is just one example of its brutality against women.

However, it is now almost a year after the war, which was supposed to bring “liberation” to Iraqis. Rather than an improvement in the quality of women’s lives, what we have seen is widespread violence, and an escalation of violence against women.

From the start of the occupation, rape, abduction, “honour” killings and domestic violence have became daily occurrences. The Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (Owfi) has informally surveyed Baghdad, and now knows of 400 women who were raped in the city between April and August last year.

A lack of security and proper policing have led to chaos and to growing rates of crime against women. Women can no longer go out alone to work, or attend schools or universities. An armed male relative has to guard a woman if she wants to leave the house.

Girls and women have become a cheap commodity to be traded in post-Saddam Iraq. Owfi knows of cases where virgin girls have been sold to neighbouring countries for $200, and non-virgins for $100.

The idea that a woman represents family “honour” is becoming central to Iraqi culture, and protecting that honour has cost many women their lives in recent months. Rape is considered so shaming to the family’s honour that death – by suicide or murder – is needed to expunge it.

I wouldn’t for a moment doubt that there are problems for women in Iraq, but it’s typical of a certain sort of Guardian thinking that although lip service is paid to the “untold hardships and difficulties during the past three decades of the Ba’ath regime”, the assumption when comparisons are made with the present is that apart from the odd bit of beheading, things weren’t that bad: no rapes, no honour killings, no domestic violence. The “right to education, employment, divorce in civil courts and custody over kids, were endorsed in the Personal Status Code”, so really the Baathists were progressive secularists who, unfortunately, happened to lapse into brutality from time to time.

We come then to the inevitable conclusion:

Iraq’s lack of basic rights for women and the rise of political Islam are the result of three wars and the ongoing occupation. The only way out of this chaos is through the direct power of the real people of Iraq – the progressive, secular masses.

So Iraq’s lack of basic rights for women has nothing to do with 30 years of Baathism, and stands in marked contrast to all those surrounding Arab countries with similar cultures where women’s rights are so far advanced. As for the “progressive, secular masses” – what sort of fantasy world is this?