In 2003, just after the
Aiyer had no love for Hussein, describing his "expressionless grey-green eyes - straight out of The Day of the Jackal," and said he ran a brutal dictatorship. However, he also said that Saddam’s revolution ended Iraqi backwardness. "Education, including higher and technological education, became the top priority," he wrote. "More important, centuries of vicious discrimination against girls and women was ended by one stroke of the modernizing dictator’s pen."
Driving past Mustansariya University, "It was miraculous," he recalled, "to see hundreds of girl-students thronging the campus, none in ‘burkhas’ or ‘chador’ - the head- to-toe black cape that was, and is, essential dress for women in most of the Islamic world - and almost all in skirts and blouses that would grace a Western university." He went on to describe women in positions on authority, running Iraq’s state-owned cement company, heading up the Industry Department’s legal division, and managing the engineering division of the State Organization for Industrial Housing, "the driving force behind the massive housing program, which turned Baghdad in the first decade of Baath rule from a dirty shantytown into a pulsating modern metropolis that provided a roof over the head of every family in the city." He also pointed to what he described as an "astonishing revolution" in health care.
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निश्चित रूप से,
Asked for her opinion of this article, Nancy Gallagher, a
In a recent article distributed by the French news service Agence France Presse, Shameran Marugi, head of the non-governmental organization Iraqi Women’s Committee, says that today the lives of women in
Marugi notes that before the 2003 War women could engage in political and economic activities through the official Union of Iraqi Women. After the invasion that group was dismantled because it was affiliated with the Baath Party. In the past few years, she said, violence against women has increased significantly. "At home a woman faces violence from her father, husband, brother and even from her son. It has become a kind of a new culture in the society."
Women are subjected to verbal abuse on the streets if they don’t wear a hijab; in extreme cases, they’re abducted by unknown gunmen, who sexually abuse and then kill them. "It has also become normal for women to receive death threats for working for example as a hairdresser or a tailor, for not wearing a hijab or not dressing ‘decently’," she told the news agency. "In addition to equal rights we are now demanding the ‘right to live’."
Although no nationwide official figures are available, human rights activists report numerous cases of so-called "honor killings" in the southern city of
A new report by the US-based Women For Women International says the state of Iraqi women has become a "national crisis" since the March 2003 invasion. "Present day
According to the group, 64 percent of the women surveyed complained that violence against them had increased. "When asked why, respondents most commonly said that there is less respect for women’s rights than before, that women are thought of as possessions, and that the economy has gotten worse," the report said.
Three quarters of the women interviewed said that girls in their families were forbidden from attending school. Selma Jabu, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s consultant for women’s affairs, confirms that, in addition to being sidelined politically, Iraqi women are subjected to abuse and intimidation on the streets and face violent sexual abuse.
Although it is difficult now to find much information about life in
As I explained in my book Uneasy Empire: "Based on the theory that domination of the Gulf region by a Hussein-led Iraq could jeopardize access to oil supplies, Colin Powell, then chairing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called on General H. Norman Schwarzkopf in late 1989 to prepare a blueprint for combat. In May 1990, the National Security Council released a white paper that cited Iraq, and Hussein personally, as ‘the optimum contenders to replace the Warsaw Pact,’ using that claim as a justification for increased military spending."
The rest, as they say, is history. But Condoleeza Rice and the administration she serves are still trying desperately to rewrite or erase it.
Greg Guma, the former Executive Director of Pacifica Radio, is an editor and writer based in
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