Veiled and Worried in Baghdad

By LAUREN SANDLER

New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/opinion/16SAND.html

September 16, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq

A single word is on the tight, pencil-lined lips of
women here. You’ll hear it spoken over lunch at a
women’s leadership conference in a restaurant off busy
Al Nidal Street, in a shade-darkened beauty shop in
upscale Mansour, in the ramshackle ghettos of Sadr City.

The word is "himaya," or security. With an intensity
reminiscent of how they feared Saddam Hussein, women now
fear the abduction, rape and murder that have become
rampant here since his regime fell. Life for Iraqi women
has been reduced to one need that must be met before
anything else can happen.

"Under Saddam we could drive, we could walk down the
street until two in the morning," a young designer told
me as she bounced her 4-year-old daughter on her lap.
"Who would have thought the Americans could have made it
worse for women? This is liberation?"

In their palace surrounded by armed soldiers, officials
from the occupying forces talk about democracy. But in
the same cool marble rooms, when one mentions the fears
of the majority of Iraq’s population, one can hear a
representative of the Ministry of the Interior, which
oversees the police, say, "We don’t do women." What they
don’t seem to realize is that you can’t do democracy if
you don’t do women.

In Afghanistan, women threw off their burqas when
American forces arrived. In Baghdad the veils have
multiplied, and most women are hiding at home instead of
working, studying or playing a role in reconstructing
Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, crimes against women â€" or at
least ones his son Uday, Iraq’s vicious Caligula, did
not commit â€" were relatively rare (though solid
statistics for such crimes don’t exist).

Last October,
the regime opened the doors to the prisons. Kidnappers,
rapists and murderers were allowed to blend back into
society, but they were kept in check by the police
state. When the Americans arrived and the police force
disappeared, however, these old predators re-emerged
alongside new ones. And in a country that essentially
relies on rumor as its national news, word of sadistic
abduction quickly began to spread.

A young Iraqi woman I met represents the reality of
these rumors, sitting in her darkened living room
surrounded by female relatives. She leans forward to
show the sutures running the length of her scalp. She
and her fiancé were carjacked by a gang of thieves in
July, and when one tried to rape her she threw herself
out of the speeding car. She says that was the last time
she left the house. She hasn’t heard a word from her
fiancé since he went to the police station to file a
report, not about the attempted rape, but about his
missing Toyota RAV-4.

"What’s important isn’t a woman’s life here, but a nice
car," she said with a blade-sharp laugh.
Two sisters, 13 and 18, weren’t as lucky. A neighbor â€" a
kidnapper and murderer who had been released in the
general amnesty â€" led a gang of heavily armed friends to
their home one night a few weeks ago. The girls were
beaten and raped. When the police finally arrived, the
attackers fled with the 13-year-old.

She was taken to an
abandoned house and left there, blindfolded, for a
couple of weeks before she was dropped at her door upon
threat of death if anyone learned of what had happened.
Now she hides out with her sister, young brother and
mother in an abandoned office building in a seedy
neighborhood.

"What do you expect?" said the 18-year-old. "They let
out the criminals. They got rid of the law. Here we
are."

Even these brutalized sisters are luckier than many
women in Iraq. They have no adult male relatives, and
thus are not at risk for the honor killings that claim
the lives of many Muslim women here. Tribal custom
demands that a designated male kill a female relative
who has been raped, and the law allows only a maximum of
three years in prison for such a killing, which Iraqis
call "washing the scandal."

"We never investigate these cases anyway â€" someone has
to come and confess the killing, which they almost never
do," said an investigator who looked into the case and
then dismissed it because the sisters "knew one of the
men, so it must not be kidnapping."

This violence has made postwar Iraq a prison of fear for
women. "This issue of security is the immediate issue
for women now â€" this horrible time that was triggered
the very first day of the invasion," said Yanar
Mohammed, the founder of the Organization of Women’s
Freedom in Iraq.

Ms. Mohammed organized a demonstration against the
violence last month. She also sent a letter to the
occupation administrator, Paul Bremer, demanding his
attention. Weeks later, with no reply from Mr. Bremer,
she shook her head in the shadowy light of her office,
darkened by one of frequent blackouts here.

"We want to
be able to talk about other issues, like the separation
of mosque and state and the development of a civil law
based on equality between men and women, but when women
can’t even leave their homes to discuss such things, our
work is quite hard," she said.
Baghdadi women were used to a cosmopolitan city in which
doctorates, debating and dancing into the wee hours were
ordinary parts of life.

That Baghdad now seems as
ancient as this country’s Mesopotamian history. College
students are staying home; lawyers are avoiding their
offices. A formerly first-world capital has become a
city where the women have largely vanished.
To support their basic liberties will no doubt require
the deeply complicated task of disentangling the threads
of tribal, Islamic and civil law that have made the
misogyny in each systemic. This is a matter of culture,
not just policy.

But to understand the culture of women in Iraq,
coalition officials must venture beyond their razor-
wired checkpoints and step down from their convoys of
Land Cruisers so they can talk to the nation they
occupy. On the streets and in the markets, they’ll
receive warm invitations to share enormous lunches in
welcoming homes, as is the Iraqi custom. And there
they’ll hear this notion repeated frankly and
frequently: without himaya for women, there will be no
place for democracy to grow in Iraq.

Lauren Sandler, a journalist, is investigating issues of
women and culture in Iraq for the Carr Foundation.