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“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 defenseless
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>].
Poignant truths:
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