Ghali Hassan
"Today you are free. The torture chambers and rape rooms have been shut down" — US Secretary of State Colin Powell, told Iraqi women on March 8, International Women's Day.
In one of the most secular countries in the Arab world, where women were until recently a visible and integrated part of public life, females have all but disappeared. The lawlessness brought by the occupation forces into Iraq is felt disproportionately by young women and girls who have yet to finish their education. This is the "freedom" US President George Bush and his cabal brought to the Iraqi people.
When the Iraqi regime collapsed, there was a complete breakdown of law and order — encouraged by the invading forces. According to a March 31 Amnesty International report, "violence against women and girls has sharply increased in Iraq compared to the time before last year's war".
Under international humanitarian law, the occupying forces are responsible for guaranteeing the safety of the civilian population in Iraq. This includes an obligation to maintain and restore public order.
The Amnesty report also pointed out that Iraqi women were being arrested "solely because authorities seek their relatives or husbands". The May 26 edition of Newsday reported: "The US military is holding dozens of Iraqis as bargaining chips to put pressure on their wanted relatives to surrender. These detainees are not accused of any crimes, and experts say their detention violates the Geneva Conventions and other international laws. The practice also risks associating the United States with the tactics of countries it has long criticized for arbitrary arrests."
The wife and daughter of the former vice-chairperson of the Iraqi Revolutionary Council were arrested in November last year. The occupation authority has acknowledged that they are detained, but has refused to reveal why they are detained, or what their current legal status is, despite protests from Anmesty International and other human rights organisations.
US officials have acknowledged detaining women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information. "The issue is the system", Nada Doumani of the International Committee of the Red Cross told Luke Harding of the Guardian, in an interview published on May 12. "The system is not fair, precise or properly defined."
Amal Swadi, a lawyer representing Iraqi women detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, has detailed systematic abuse and torture (including rape) perpetrated by US soldiers against Iraqi women held in detention. Swadi told the June 6 British Guardian that the women have been detained not because of anything they have done, but because of who they married. US soldiers raiding a house in their usual violent manner, she explained, will often take wives and daughters of suspects if the suspects are not there.
The Australian SBS's World News reported on May 29 of horrific cases of Iraqi women detainees tortured and raped by US soldiers and their quislings. The program reported that one female detainee had smuggled a note out of prison asking resistance fighters to bomb the prison, and "spare the dignity" of the women prisoners.
Iman Khamas, head of the International Occupation Watch Centre, a non-government organisation which gathers information on human rights abuses under coalition rule, told SBS that one detainee had reported the rape of her cellmate. According to Khamas, the prisoner said "her cellmate had been rendered unconscious for 48 hours ... she had been raped 17 times in one day by Iraqi police in the presence of American soldiers".
Kamas reported that, "since December 2003 there are around 625 women prisoners in Al-Rusafah prison in Umm Qasr and 750 in Al-Kazimah alone. They range from girls of 12 to women in their 60s".
Furthermore, British Labour MP Ann Clwyd, Tony Blair's personal human rights envoy to Iraq, highlighted the humiliation last year of an Iraqi woman in her 70s detained by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib for about six weeks without charge. The elderly woman had been abused, insulted and ridden like a donkey by US soldiers.
These heinous crimes against Iraqi women and Iraqi prisoners of war are not the acts of a " few bad apples" in the US military, as suggested by Bush and his lackey British PM Tony Blair. All the evidence now indicates that defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was responsible for physical coercion and sexual humiliation in Iraqi prisons.
Julian Borger of the British Guardian reported on May 24, "General Ricardo Sanchez, head of the coalition forces in Iraq, issued an order last October giving military intelligence control over almost every aspect of prison conditions at Abu Ghraib with the explicit aim of manipulating the detainees 'emotions and weaknesses'."
Borger writes, "[T]he October 12 memorandum, reported in the Washington Post, is a potential 'smoking gun' linking prisoner abuse to the US high command. It represents hard evidence that the maltreatment was not simply the fault of rogue military police guards".
Writing in Z-Net on May 3, Aseem Shrivastava said that the rape and torture revelations of female detainees: "constitute the writing on the wall for a decadent civilization which has been proclaiming its moral and cultural superiority to the world for some centuries now and using that public delusion to control their own populations and bludgeon all the world's peoples into submission, with vacuous promises of civilization or freedom". Western culture has never stood lower in Moslem and Arab eyes.
US scholar, Joseph Massad, wrote in the May 20 Al-Ahram Weekly: "It should not be forgotten that in America, not in the Moslem world, between 40% and 60% of women [murdered], are killed by their husbands and boyfriends, but such murders of course are no longer even called 'passion' crimes; much less 'honour' crimes.
"It is the misogynist trait of imperial American culture and its violent racism that propels the torture to which Iraqi prisoners (POWs and civilians) have been, and may still be subjected."
Powell's promises on International Women's Day stand in stark contrast to the reality on the ground in Iraq. Powell is more concerned with the international standing of the US than with the welfare of the Iraqi people. Powell's job for the past decades has been selling wars against innocent and defenceless people, and history will show that he sacrificed moral principles and human rights for his own increasingly pathetic career.
There is no military solution to the situation in Iraq. The best way to end the violence against Iraqi women, and the Iraqi people as a whole, is to end the military and economic occupation. It will also be a historical day in the struggle for liberation from colonial occupation. That day will certainly come to Iraq.
[Ghali Hassan is in the Science and Mathematics Education Centre, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia and can be contacted on <Hassan@exchange.curtin.edu.au>].
From Green Left Weekly, June 30, 2004.
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