Reply #51: Iraq's Second-Class Citizens [View All]

[BrklynLiberal]

Iraq's Second-Class Citizens Yifat Susskind August 18, 2005

Yifat Susskind is associate director of MADRE, an international women's human rights organization.

This week’s constitutional crisis in Baghdad demonstrates again that the Bush administration’s drive to recreate the Middle East in its own image is producing theocracy, not democracy, in Iraq. On Bush’s watch, Iraq’s once-secular government has been delivered to religious parties (Dawa and the Prime Minister’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) that want Iraq to be ruled by Islamic law. In the provinces they control (which make up roughly half the country), Islamists have already imposed severe restrictions on the rights of women and religious minorities. Now, they are fighting to ensure that Iraq’s new constitution paves the way for the creation of an Islamic state.

Like religious fundamentalists in the United States and around the world, these parties use religion as a means of asserting a reactionary political agenda that begins with the subjugation of women within the family. That’s why the first battle over the new constitution concerns family status laws governing marriage, divorce and women's inheritance and property rights. The Islamists are pushing to replace Iraq’s current statutes—among the most progressive in the Middle East—with language that would subordinate women’s human rights to arbitrary interpretations of Islamic law.

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The administration’s decision to trade women's rights for support from religious conservatives has left Iraqi women worse off today under U.S. occupation then they were under the notoriously repressive regime of Saddam Hussein. The Ba'ath Party utilized women's rights only to consolidate its own power. Yet, for all its brutality, Saddam Hussein’s government guaranteed women’s rights to education, employment, freedom of movement, equal pay for equal work and universal day care, as well as the rights to inherit and own property, choose their own husbands, vote and hold public office. Ironically, these fundamental rights stand to be abolished in an Iraq “liberated” by the United States in the name of (among other things) promoting democracy.

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http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050818/iraqs_secondclass_citizens.php