Iraqi Women Under US Occupation

[chlamor]

Iraqi Women Under US Occupation

by Ghali Hassan
www.globalresearch.ca 6 May 2005

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HAS505A.html



"Respect for women… can triumph in the Middle East and beyond!" President George Bush at the UN, September 2002.

Under the US Occupation, the situation of Iraqi women has continued to deteriorate. In addition to torture, sexual violence and rape by U.S. Occupation forces, a great number of Iraqi women and girls are kept locked up in their homes by a very real fear of abduction and criminal abuse. Since the invasion of Iraq, Iraqi women have been denied their human right, including the right to health, education and employment.

Prior to the 1991 U.S. war and the 13 years of the genocidal sanctions, Iraqi women enjoyed unquestionable quality rights to education and health. Iraqi women had the most progressive human rights in the region and Iraqi women were the first Arab women to hold high positions in academia, law, medicine and government. Before the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Iraqi women made up 40 per cent of the public-sector work force. Men and women received equal pay for work, education and health care were free at all levels.

In addition, Iraq’s Constitution with regard to women's rights s was the most advanced in the Middle East, if not of the Muslim World. Women rights were enshrined in the Constitution, which was dissolved (together with Iraqi Police and Security) by the U.S. Occupation and replaced by a U.S-crafted "Interim Constitution" that deprives Iraqi women of their rights and dignity. In today’s Iraq, crimes and abuse against women are back to the levels before independence from colonial Britain in 1958. The crime of rape was capital offence under Iraq’s Constitution.

Since the beginning of the U.S. Occupation, there has been a dramatic increase in sexual assaults and violations of women’s rights by U.S. forces in Iraq. Many women have been taken hostage, tortured, and sexually abused. The sexual abuse, rape and torture against Iraqi women is not confined to the Abu Ghraib prison, parroted by the Western media, is "happening all across Iraq", said Amal Kadhim Swadi, an Iraqi lawyers representing women detainees at Abu Ghraib. "Sexualized violence and abuse committed by U.S. troops goes far beyond a few isolated cases", she added.

[fudge stripe cookays]

1. How about at home?

You fucking asshole.

"Respect for women… can triumph in the Middle East and beyond!" President George Bush at the UN, September 2002.

Yeah, let's remove any chance women might have to make something out of themselves by denying them birth control, abortions, and immunizations for HPV since they might actually have SEX.

FSC

[libodem]

2. Since we aren't allowed to know the real truth

about the conditions I can only surmise that the lack of infrastructure, housing, security, clean water, sewer systems, jobs, hospitals, food, schools, Mosques, all the things that provide for a woman to survive with children are lacking. I'm pulling from the ethers that the towns are still lying in rubble while all the reconstruction money is going to make permanent military bases, embassy's, pipelines, and soccer fields. The support structures, that make a safe home and family are the last on the reconstruction list. Security/survival/safety is at the root of any further advancement of those poor god-forsaken people. Bush doesn't care about women and/or children. Actually, the new police forces...the ones that have a rat's ass chance of not being blow-up during recruitment... are raping and plundering...as they go house to house tracking 'insurgents'. Who will protect those poor disenfranchised women?

[chlamor]

3. Every Time Someone

on this board or any other forum/conversation suggests the Troops Can't Leave Now-Civil War BS please post what you just wrote.