Iraqi Women the Worse for War

Remember those photos of Iraqi women triumphantly raising freshly inked fingers for Western cameras after voting in their new "democracy"? They were presented to the world by the U.S. government as an indication of a policy that would liberate Iraqi women and men. Well, it didn't quite work out that way, according to Iraqi women's rights activist Yanar Mohammed, who argues that the situation for women in her country has significantly worsened since the American invasion in 2003.

Despite his immense failings and unforgivable atrocities, Saddam Hussein ran an essentially secular government that gave women more educational, professional and social freedoms than does the current regime. This is a source of chagrin to people like Mohammed who detested the dictatorship but fear that the future will only bring new restrictions and greater oppression for Iraq's women under the guise of "democracy."

On April 14, Yanar Mohammed was honored by the Feminist Majority Foundation, an organization that warned the world about what the Taliban was doing to women and girls in Afghanistan long before the U.S. decided to take military action. As one of four special guests at the foundation's Global Women's Rights Awards, she was able to speak out about the many battles that she and other members of her activist group, the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, are fighting on behalf of women in their country, risking their lives on a daily basis for their cause.

Mohammed tells Kasia Anderson about her mission and explains how the current state of affairs for Iraqi women differs from the picture painted by many Western media outlets.

Kasia Anderson: Can you tell us in your own words about your work [with the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq], how you started and what issues are most important to your cause right now?

Yanar Mohammed: After this war started on Iraq I immediately decided to go back to set up an organization and to be the voice for free women there, and since the beginning, in my organization, we decided to do demonstrations, to do campaigns, to make petitions, and to see whatever is needed. And it started with speaking out against the human trafficking of women, and we were the first to demonstrate. It was a few months after the [March 2003] beginning of the war -- in August 2003 -- we started that.

But later on, our work was mainly on sheltering women from honor killings, and also on seeking out the reports of women's trafficking, and later on in the last two years we found out -- especially after the breakout of the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison, we found out that it is very important to have a presence in all the women's prisons and see what's happening there. So, we managed to become regular visitors to the central prison -- it's called Khadamiyah, a women's prison, and we interviewed all the women in there, and we found out terrible things happening before they reached the prison.

Six of them, actually, spoke out about being assaulted, about being raped, some of them serially raped by the staff of the police station before they reached the prison. So, we decided: This is a program that we will have to pursue immediately. And the surprise here is that most of this work we do with very minimal funding -- mostly depending on volunteer work.

Anderson: How did the onset of the Iraq war change things for Iraqi women, specifically? I would imagine that there would be an increase in particular forms of oppression and violence once things became more volatile and uncertain. ...

Mohammed: Well, although people on this part of the world think that Iraqi women are liberated, actually, we have lost all of the achievements or all the status that we used to have. It is no longer safe to leave your house and get groceries. We're not speaking here about a young woman trying to reach the university, because that is beginning to get too difficult. We're not speaking here about women who are trying to go back and forth to work and even those of my friends who do that already because they have to -- many of the police at work are being killed for sectarian reasons.