Iraqi author and dissident Haifa Zangana, formerly imprisoned under Saddam Hussein’s regime but adamantly opposed to US occupation, writes, “in the aftermath of the 1958 revolution ending the British-imposed monarchy [in Iraq]... women’s organizations achieved within two years what over 30 years of British occupation failed to: legal equality.”
Two years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, what are we to make of the Bush administration’s alleged project to bring it democracy and raise the status of women? Early on following the invasion, mainstream US media such as The New York Times reported on growing insecurity, including the escalating rapes and kidnappings of women and girls. The media tended to frame this problem as caused by Iraqi men and indigenous patriarchy at its roots – with skillful US intervention needed to alleviate the situation. The international anti-war and anti-occupation movement was largely unable to deliver an adequate response to the immediate issue of daily sexual violence at the hands of Iraqis – how has it failed to tackle issues particular to Iraqi women, and what is at stake?
This article is a plea for greater feminist intervention in the anti-imperialist and anti-war movement. I discuss how the US invasion and occupation of Iraq have not brought liberation to Iraqi women – but rather, resulted in the worsening of living conditions along gendered lines.
‘Liberating’ and planting ‘democracy’ in Iraq and Afghanistan? Whose ‘democracy’?
The justification of imperialism on humanitarian grounds has a sordid history that dies hard. But Third World feminists have pointed to a complex patriarchal collusion between male elites of both the occupying and subject states. The supposed beneficiaries of imperial magnanimity are lost in the shuffle of their rulers’ own more pressing economic and political interests.
This entangled complicity and exploitation should make US feminists – as stakeholders in the world’s premier military and economic superpower – uncomfortable. How do paternalistic leaders continue to maneuver and manipulate the interests of certain women and minorities for imperial ends? Have they ‘co-opted’ feminist aims – and if so, whose feminism? While claiming to stand for womankind, do they exploit or depend upon the fractures in this ‘sisterhood’? Who do they pit against each other in this process – and whose agendas are served when feminists willingly cooperate?
The Bush administration has flaunted the liberation of Muslim women, and later the promotion of women-friendly democracy, as central principles justifying its invasions and subsequent occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq. The ideological coherence of acting as a humanitarian benefactor is a unifying theme behind the otherwise fractured, amnesiac rationale to this administration’s foreign policy – where the threat of terrorism, supposed weapons of mass destruction and evil dictatorships have alternately been held as reasons for military aggression.
Before discussing Iraq more extensively, though, it is useful to briefly revisit the invasion of Afghanistan, drawing attention to the collusion of liberal feminists with US militarism and imperialism.
Afghanistan and the complicity of American feminists
In the weeks after 9/11, the Taliban’s public executions of women were catapulted into mainstream view, as a focus of prime-time TV documentaries. Years-old email forwards about the Taliban’s abuses began to recirculate among socially conscious youth, as the position of burqa-ed Muslim women grew to a matter of mainstream interest. Following the invasion of Afghanistan, Laura Bush was paraded before the UN Commission on the Status of Women on International Women’s Day, 2002, to celebrate the US attack as a new chapter of “rebuilding” Afghan women’s lives. Her husband continues to incessantly remind us how he has birthed a “new constitution, guaranteeing free elections and full participation by women,” and opened education to both “boys and girls.”
Ironically, the originator of the grisly documentary footage of women’s murders that made national television was the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a group vehemently opposed to both fundamentalist regimes and US military intervention. RAWA had their own message on International Women’s Day, 2004: “The freedom of a nation is to be achieved by itself – similarly the real emancipation of women can be realized only by themselves. If that freedom is bestowed by others, it may be seized and violated any time.”
RAWA prescribes an alternative method for social change: the intensification of mass movements and struggles by local Afghans against their oppressors. Yet despite its fame, including publicity from celebrities like Eve Ensler, RAWA’s anti-war, pro-local movement stance has largely been ignored in American press. Liberal American feminists have helped enforce this silence by not acting to widely disseminate its analysis.
What’s more, prominent feminist organizations were complicit in aiding Bush’s justification of the war on Afghanistan. Shortly after the bombardment began, leader of the Feminist Majority Eleanor Smeal met amicably with war generals: “They went off about the role of women in this effort and how imperative it was that women were now in every level of the Air Force and Navy … It’s a different kind of war,” she is quoted as reporting about their chat. This tete-a-tete rode on years of feminist campaigning against the Taliban.
What has happened in Iraq? A brief background to women’s status before invasion
Haifa Zangana, quoted at the beginning of this piece, writes the following in opposition to the US occupation: “The main misconception is to perceive Iraqi women as silent, powerless victims in a male-controlled society in urgent need of ‘liberation.’ This image fits conveniently into the big picture of the Iraqi people being passive victims who would welcome the occupation of their country. The reality is different.”
In 1958, with the end of British indirect rule over Iraq, tens of thousands of Iraqi women demonstrated in the streets for their civil rights. They won the most egalitarian family civil code in the Arab world. Aspects of this progressive family law persisted until the eve of the US invasion, when Iraq still remained exceptional in the region. Divorce cases were to be heard only in civil courts, polygamy was outlawed unless the first wife consented and women divorcees had an equal right to custody over their children. Women’s income was recognized as independent from their husbands’.
When Iraq’s expanding economy needed women in the workforce during the 1970s and early 80s, Saddam Hussein’s regime implemented policies to encourage their participation, such as generous maternity leaves, equal pay and benefits, and free higher education. For instance, the radical feminist group Redstockings has pointed out how before the US invasion, Iraq provided 62 days of maternity leave with the woman’s wages paid 100% by its social security system. Its valuable analysis, focusing on economic arrangements and class inequality, hints towards what US feminists have to lose if we keep privileging our own country, with its privatized healthcare, as the epitome of women’s liberation. Unlike the US, in fact, nearly all Gulf states have provisions for paid maternity leave. By contrast, Redstockings notes that US law offers 12 weeks of unpaid sick leave – if your employer has over 50 employees, and only if you have been working for the same employer for more than a year (the US is also one of a handful of countries that still provides no paid parental leave).
Despite Iraqi women’s significant gains, their condition began to decline after the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War bankrupted the government. The Gulf War and subsequent US/UN sanctions exacerbated this process by crippling Iraq’s economy. The economic hardships disproportionately affected women and girls. In the early 1980s, women had made up 40 percent of the nation’s workforce, filling the war-time shortage of men. This deteriorated to 22% by 1992. Prostitution increased, and as women became jobless, their right to travel without a male relative was revoked. Childcare, education and transportation became impossibly expensive. Female literacy dropped sharply after the Gulf War as girls abandoned school to help with increasingly inconvenient household chores – resulting in the second largest gender gap in literacy for the region. In post-Gulf War years, more than a third of girls abandoned formal schooling before completing primary education. UNESCO reports that while 75% of Iraqi women were literate in 1987, this dropped to under 25% by 2001! At the same time, Hussein allowed a shift towards local religious and tribal codes; he amended the law in 1990 to permit honour killings without penalty. In the late 1990s, Hussein implemented new laws dismissing all female secretaries in government agencies and restricting women from work in the public sector. Economic hardships and political attacks worked in conjunction with each other to roll back the status of women; the connections between Iraqi women’s loss of paid economic power and increased vulnerability to patriarchal attacks demands further exploration.
In the context of over 12 years of debilitating sanctions, the US occupation must be viewed as only the latest chapter of its role in the dramatic decline of conditions for Iraqi women. Nevertheless, in spite of their fragile position just before the 2003 invasion, Iraqi women constituted a larger portion of the paid workforce than women of many other Gulf States. To focus on an elite subsection of the population: more professional women held positions of power than in almost any other Middle Eastern country. In 1994, 11% of seats in Iraq’s congress were filled by women, a percentage significantly higher than in other Gulf states. US women, incidentally, held only 10% of seats in Congress the same year. Earlier, in 1987, Iraqi women had filled 13% of seats, compared to 5% held by US women the same year.
The impact of invasion and occupation in Iraq
The US invasion and occupation have caused enormous violence and economic devastation. As of October 2004, the Lancet, in what remains the most authoritative study, estimated that military action and the subsequent occupation had resulted in the excess deaths of at least 100,000 Iraqis. Women and children of both sexes together made up the majority of those violently killed by coalition forces, according to this study. Acute malnutrition among children is now double pre-occupation levels – translating to 400,000 children who suffer from “wasting,” or dangerous protein deficiency. Unemployment hovers at over 70 percent. Obviously excess deaths would be considerably higher if the study were conducted today.
In a country where 55 to 65% of the current population is female, of course women and girls are heavily affected by these conditions. Repeating the pattern during the sanctions in the 1990s, Iraqi women are the hardest hit by unemployment. Men are preferred for the few jobs available, although many women are widows or single heads of households. Moreover, formerly 72 % of salaried Iraqi women were public employees, so many lost their jobs when government ministries were dismantled after the invasion. While before the invasion indigent women could at least rely on food rationing, today they are left to fend for themselves.
As the US continues to bomb Iraqi hospitals, electricity in large cities remains intermittent, water unsafe and telephones non-operational. At the time of the November, 2004 presidential elections, the Bush administration instigated increased bombing runs in Iraq, secure that the papers and public opinion would be focused elsewhere, but the tactic of aerial bombardment is particularly deadly to non-combatants who just happen to be in the way. Almost two years after the invasion, reconstruction is damningly absent. As of June 30, 2005, the United States had set aside $24 billion for Iraq’s reconstruction. Of this, only $9 billion has been paid out for work done. More tellingly still, the latest report from Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, indicates that as of May, 2005, power generation in Iraq remained below the level before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Iraqis are facing overwhelming burdens in carrying out the simplest tasks for household subsistence; Zangana discusses the extra toil that falls on women responsible for finding clean water and basic cooking supplies, writing, “In the land of oil, they have to queue five hours a day to get kerosene or petrol.”
Rapes of women and girls skyrocketed after the invasion, with the displacement of usual law and order. But investigating these were no priority of US authorities, who had toppled the previous police and court system, only to replace it with a makeshift and illegitimate military force. Instead, occupying troops were engaged in arbitrary roundups and killings in pursuit of terrorist insurgents that brutalized locals and ransacked their homes. Misplaced and heavy-handed conduct put together, the occupation has failed to offer real security; kidnapping and the growth of trafficking now keeps women and girls in fear of venturing outside – “prisoners in their own homes,” in Zangana’s words.
A May, 2004 Red Cross report disclosed that 70 to 90% of 43,000 Iraqis detained in the last year were arrested by mistake. Today, in a form of collective punishment, coalition authorities regularly imprison the female relatives (and even alleged lovers) of male suspects, to use as hostages. Needless to say such treatment utterly denies that women have a separate legal status from their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, or alleged lovers. Along with the other innocent detainees, these women are imprisoned for supposed ‘intelligence purposes’ – in other words, because the occupying authorities deem it convenient and have no accountability to the public. Belying the focus on male prisoners in the Abu Ghraib scandal, the sexual abuse and gang rape of female detainees is widespread, a fact known throughout in Iraq that has received little attention in the US.
Iraq contains the world’s second largest oil reserves, and the US has already begun building bases on its soil. The US government’s priorities – besides establishing control over these reserves to influence world oil price fluctuation – have been to privatize and sell entire sectors of Iraq’s economy, as well as lucrative ‘reconstruction’ contracts, to corporate cronies of the military-industrial complex. Besides major defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, which received boosts from the invasion itself, Halliburton, Bechtel and other corporate heavies have won no-bid contracts to ‘reconstruct’ Iraq and manage its infrastructure. They have reaped tremendous profits at the expense of Iraqis and US taxpayers. Although reports of fraud abound, the investments of US corporations in Iraq are backed up risk-free by the Iraq Development Fund – formerly the UN oil-for-food program – which consists mainly of Iraq’s oil revenues.
The US occupation authority restructured Iraq’s economy in flagrant violation of international law on occupation and, needless to say, without the democratic consent of Iraqis. Besides the sale of national industries to private corporations, its ‘shock therapy’ reforms included the liberalization of foreign investment, taxes and tariffs. The corporate tax rate was capped at an extremely low 15%. J.P. Morgan now manages the newly formed Trade Bank of Iraq, set up to favour companies from militarily contributing nations, regardless of the quality and price of their products. Through it, Iraqi ministries can borrow funds to buy equipment from overseas suppliers by mortgaging national oil revenues.
Despite their profiteering, corporations have actually managed to sue Iraq for millions of dollars in ‘war reparations’ for ‘lost profits.’ As of March 2005, Iraq was saddled with a debt of $200 million in such ‘reparations’ to companies like Bechtel, Halliburton, Shell, Mobil, Nestle, Pepsi, KFC and Toys R Us. What’s worse, this debt is dwarfed by an unpayable sovereign debt of $125 billion. The industrialized nations that are its creditors are working to make the sovereign debt’s partial cancellation contingent on compliance with IMF austerity programs, which will wreak economic havoc on the majority of Iraqis. Feminists have extensively documented the disproportionate impact IMF structural adjustment programs have had on poor women in other countries.
The Bush administration is more committed to ensuring control over Iraq’s oil reserves, and establishing an economy dominated by US corporations, than to the rights and well-being of Iraqi people. Using military control to pursue its economic and strategic interests continues to run in direct conflict with, and come at the expense of, accountability to the Iraqi public. Its harsh measures further undermine the occupiers’ legitimacy. The Bush administration’s hypocrisy and lies have been evident in the conduct of its occupying forces. From the beginning of the occupation, US forces stopped or nullified elections in a number of cities, repeatedly used violence to repress peaceful public protests, raided and sacked the offices of Iraqi trade unions and shut down newspapers. The US has also installed a series of puppet governing authorities. Unfortunately, the newly ‘elected’ regime will only prove to be the latest in a string of nominal ‘handovers’ staged to divert public opinion. Naomi Klein has noted that if anything, significant support for the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) in the elections, and the routing of the US’s handpicked stooge, Iyad Allawi, represented a strong vote against the US occupation. The second plank of the UIA’s platform called for a timetable for the withdrawal of multinational forces in Iraq, while other aspects repudiated the economic restructuring under Bremer. A Zogby poll two days before the election found that 82% of Sunni and 69% of Shiites favoured US forces withdrawing immediately or after an elected government is in place. Yet the Pentagon plans troop escalations and the government has no intention of ending either military or economic occupation, much less setting a timetable for such. The war is not and has not been about bringing democracy to Iraq.
Altogether, the occupation has reinforced and colluded with endemic patriarchy to worsen the situation of Iraqi women. Its gendered effects have been to intensify the harms of patriarchy in Iraq, adding new levels of violence and deprivation. If Iraqi men are perpetuating the kidnappings and rapes of women, they do so in the context of the occupying authorities’ carelessness and inability to foster security. If Iraqi women face job discrimination, severe economic hardships have only worsened their plight. Zangana suggests some of unemployment’s gendered effects: “Unemployment… is exacerbating … prostitution, backstreet abortion and honour killing.”
Why won’t occupation bring liberation to Iraqi women?
The US occupation cannot represent the best interests of Iraqi women because of the ulterior motives part and parcel to the structures of its enforcement. Its lack of democratic transparency and accountability to Iraqis – as well as the US government’s lack of accountability to the its public – are barriers to the reform of the occupation’s ground operations, and the main motives that shape them. Furthermore, the Bush administration and the military-industrial complex it represents, only benefit, at least in the short-term, from substituting true accountability with P.R. stunts.
Putting its maintenance of indirect regional control first, the Bush administration has proved willing to collaborate with conservative elements in its hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), as well as its ensuring puppet authorities, recalling its tactics in Afghanistan. From the first meeting for post-Baathist reconstruction, where only four out of 80 delegates were women, to the IGC where three out of 25 seats were filled by women (before one was assassinated), the US government has decreased the upper-level government representation of women by filling their former parliamentary seats with men. The former IGC included conservative forces which passed a resolution for sharia law to replace the standardized family civil code, essentially allowing for the despotism of local clerics to legislate the role of women in families. Thousands of Iraqi women took to the streets and helped raise an international outcry that caused Paul Bremer to eventually overturn the resolution. While this move allowed Bremer to pose as the saviour of women’s rights, in reality the Bush administration has been hedging its political bets, if you will.
The Bush administration appointed conservative Islamists to power, only to defy them when politically practical. The dynamics of the controversy over sharia illustrate the limits of the occupation’s commitment to women’s equality, because the US’s first priority is to remain in control over Iraq’s oil and economy. Meanwhile, other women did not even bother to protest the controversial resolution because they felt the IGC irrelevant and inactive regarding the problems of their daily lives.
At times, the Bush administration’s gestures towards uplifting Iraqi women are clearly an empty hoax for feminism that should disturb even liberals who support the occupation. In the winter of 2005, the US State department launched a $10 million “Iraqi Women’s Democracy Initiative,” to train women in political participation for the January election. Most of the money was allocated to organizations embedded in the Bush administration, including the reactionary Independent Women’s Forum (IWF). The IWF was founded by Lynne Cheney, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and rightwing National Review editor Kate O’Beirne in 1991, as a counter to the so-called “radical feminism” of NOW. Ironically – given Iraq’s history – IWF is opposed to, among other things, paid maternity leave, government-provided childcare, equal pay for equal work (because it violates ‘free market’ principles), minimum quotas for women in government service and the Violence Against Women Act.
The Iraqi Women’s Democracy Initiative can be seen as just one instance of the paternalism inherent in the State Department’s democracy trainings more generally. Past orchestrated events tutoring what democracy means – because Iraqis need to be instructed about their own interests – have involved scripted panels performed before audiences, without any room for confrontational questioning or genuine dialogue. Zangana’s infuriation is understandable.
Although token women have been appointed to political positions, Zangana criticizes their role as pawns of the occupation incapable of challenging its violence: “The silence of the ‘feminists’ of Allawi’s regime is deafening. The suffering of their sisters in cities showered with napalm, phosphorus and cluster bombs by US jet fighters … is met with rhetoric about training for democracy.”
Women and resistance – what now?
Rather than helping Iraqis, the Bush administration’s posturing at defending women’s interests has delimited a difficult and fraught political terrain for those committed to women’s rights. Its pretensions at women’s liberation, combined with the sheer brutality of the occupation, have only narrowed possibilities for resistance that is both feminist and anti-imperialist, by placing feminist organizers in a tough political bind in terms of both constructing ideological appeals and taking practical action. For one, as the place of women becomes a contested battleground between nationalism and occupation, it grows harder for feminist organizers to independently push an agenda that risks coming in conflict with nationalist conservatives. That is, the ideological confusion created by the US occupation posing as feminist lends credence to reactionaries who further an anti-woman agenda in the name of nationalism, and when patriarchal actors begin with the upper hand in terms of political power, they may be in a better place to define the character of a unifying nationalist movement than feminists trying to carve their own space.
Women’s organizing has been shaped significantly and hindered by the occupation’s direct repression, as well as the attacks on women it has unleashed. When women are afraid to even step outdoors, their possibilities for political participation are circumscribed. When women must deal first and foremost with the work of everyday survival, they may be less inclined to devote time to lobbying an irrelevant and unresponsive occupation authority for abstract rights; they may be increasingly relegated to the tasks of holding together their families. Now, when resistance is propelled by armed insurgency women’s involvement as equal participants on the same footing of men, given social norms and political inequality, will be marginalized until they organize against these conservative forces. At the same time, the brutality of the occupation lends urgency to those who would unite resistance under a reactionary agenda.
So what course should be taken? Must we dismiss the political exploitation of Iraqi women as inevitable? Iraqi women appear to be in a tenuous ‘lose-lose’ situation: they lose if the US military and economic occupation remain, plunging the country into further violent polarization and indigence; and possibly lose if the US military immediately leaves, transferring power to male-dominated forces. A Women for Women International survey in 2004 found that 94% of Iraqi women want secure legal rights for women, around 80% believe in unlimited participation in local and national political councils, 95% want no restrictions on female education, and 57% want no restrictions on women’s employment. The Bush administration might like us to believe there are only two choices in the long-run – US occupation or fundamentalist authoritarianism – but unfolding events only underline the imperative for an alternative to this bind. The struggle of groups like RAWA can serve as inspiration. International anti-imperialist activists can act in solidarity with Iraqi women organizing against the occupation and for their rights. Feminists in the US and Canada must recognize and resist how imperialism reinforces patriarchy and the oppression of women.