Iraqi Women Slide Back into Dark Ages

Saddam was a murderous butcher but, under his regime, Iraqi women enjoyed equality and a level of freedom unparalleled in the Muslim world. Those days seem gone forever as Iraq reverts to Islamic fundamentalism. In other words, half the population of Iraq is being put back in a position of demeaning servitude.

Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women, describes the current plight of Iraqi women:

"Almost four years into the Bush administration's ill-fated adventure in Iraq, Iraqi women are worse off than they were under the Baathist regime in a country where, for decades, the freedoms and rights enjoyed by Iraqi women were the envy of women in most other countries of the Middle East.

"Before the U.S. invasion, Iraqi women had high levels of education. Their strong and independent women's movement had successfully forced Saddam Hussein's government to pass the groundbreaking 1959 Family Law Act, which ensured equal rights in matters of personal law.

"Iraqi women could inherit land and property; they had equal rights to divorce and custody of their children; they were protected from domestic violence within the marriage. They had achieved real gains in the struggle for equality between women and men. Iraqi women, like all Iraqis, certainly suffered from the political repression and lack of freedom, but the secular -- albeit brutal -- Baathist regime protected women from the religious extremism that denies freedom to a majority of women in the Arab world.

"The invasion of Iraq changed the status of Iraqi women for the worse. Iraq's new colonial power, the United States, elevated a new group of leaders, most of whom were allied with ultraconservative Shiite clerics. Among the Sunni minority, the quick disappearance of their once dominant political power led to a resurgence of religious identity. Consequently, the Kurds, celebrated for their history of resistance to the Iraqi dictator, were able to reclaim such traditions as honor killings, putting thousands of women at risk.

"While many believed that interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq would result in greater freedoms for women, international women's rights organizations such as the Global Fund for Women were highly skeptical of the Bush administration's claims from the start. U.S. representatives in Iraq failed to even listen to, much less validate, the voices of independent and secular Iraqi women leaders such as Yana Mohammed during the process of drafting the constitution."

When Bush or Blair or Harper boast about all that their War Without End on Terror has achieved for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, remember that they have all turned their backs on half the populations of those countries, the weakest and most vulnerable half.