THEORIZING FEMINIST STRUGGLE IN POST-WAR IRAQ
by
YANAR MOHAMMED
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Adult Education and Community Development Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto
© Copyright by Yanar Mohammed 2019
Theorizing Feminist Struggle in Post-War Iraq
Yanar Mohammed
Master of Arts, Adult Education and Community Development
Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education University of Toronto
2019
Abstract
The 2003 imperialist occupation of Iraq brought out the worst in the society, unleashing Islamist religious extremism, ethnic division, and misogyny, causing atrocities on women such as enslavement, trafficking and misogynist legislation. This research is based on personal experience of founding the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, a secular feminist organization to confront patriarchy and capitalism. The research begins with an analysis of the forced socio-political changes and proceeds to investigate the problematic of extreme patriarchal violence against women and demonstrates the ways in which feminists of the organization resisted and challenged patriarchy through establishing a network of women’s shelters. This research is a Marxist feminist analysis of systemic patriarchal violence, concluding a theoretic framework of its concepts, power relations, and social structures; thus, informing the articulation of an organizational feminist platform to guide the struggles of Iraqi women to dismantle patriarchy and capitalism within a revolutionary movement.
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Acknowledgments
The beginnings of my political feminist struggle in Iraq were made possible with the support of many comrades who helped me articulate a variety of radical feminist ideas and concepts into a Marxist feminist position and build a women’s organization in Iraq based on it. One of the reasons that motivated me to write the thesis was the need to resolve the argument of Marxism versus Feminism which continued to come up in our daily struggles, debates and organizational activities within the Worker Communist Party of Iraq. Being part of the Iraqi communist circles was reason for an ongoing attempt of articulating a Marxist feminist agenda which separated our women’s organization from the liberal feminism of the NGO scene, and yet there were not many successful Marxist feminist women’s groups to whose agenda we could refer to, neither was the prevailing group in the party supportive of my feminist affiliation; thus the task was very difficult.
In some moments of burn-out from a never-ending conflict with the liberal-feminist NGO scene, the challenges with the US-backed ruling religious groups, the patriarchal communists inside and outside the party, and a devastating political scene, I needed to step out and have short breaks in my home in Toronto. I was fortunate to meet Professor Shahrzad Mojab who encouraged me to take the time and study Marxist feminism within an academic program to shed more light on our struggles on the ground. Mojab’s patience with my continued travel to Iraq, and her engaging arguments throughout different stages of my study helped offer guidance throughout years of my study in Toronto. To all the Marxist feminist professors who offered guidance along my academic journey of the past years, I forward all appreciation and gratitude.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments...... iii
Table of Contents ...... iv
List of Appendices ...... vii
List of Figures ...... viii
Chapter 1 Revolutionary Feminism in Post-war Iraq ...... 1
Where to Begin ...... 5
The Objectives, Methodology, Problematic and Structure of the Research ...... 10
Reasons and Motivation for Research...... 15
3.1 Documenting OWFI’s Political Struggles: Denied in Leftist Western Writings of Post-war Iraq ...... 16
3.2 Documenting OWFI’s Feminist Struggles: Denied in Feminist Writings and within NGO Feminism ...... 17
3.3 OWFI’s Feminist and Anti-imperialist Positions Contested as a Small Women’s Group with too Much Rhetoric ...... 18
3.4 The Question of Women’s Right-to-life Altogether: Avoided by Both Mainstream Left and Women’s NGOs ...... 20
Background and Perspective of Researcher ...... 22
Relevant Literature Review ...... 26
Iraqi Women’s Movement: A Chronology ...... 32
Chapter 2 Social and Political Context in Post-War Iraq: Challenges and Political Confrontations ...... 36
The Iraqi Political Context before the Occupation ...... 36
7.1 Iraq during the 1980s: A Reckless Dictatorship with Incredible Wealth ...... 39
7.2 The First Gulf War on Iraq Followed by a Decade of Economic Sanctions ...... 41
7.3 The Second Gulf War on Iraq 2003 ...... 43
7.4 Reasons behind the 2003 Occupation ...... 44
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7.5 Imperialist Politics of Division Based on Religion, Ethnicity and Gender: A Requirement to Confiscate Iraqi Oil ...... 46
7.6 Privatization and Restructuring Economy: A Blow to the Working Class ...... 51
Chapter 3 The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq: Circumstances, Statements, Activities, Struggle against Patriarchy ...... 55
Founding the Organization: Conditions and Event of the First Year...... 57
8.1 An NGO, or a Political Mass Organization for Women: On the Co-opting of the Movement ...... 64
8.2 Combating Violence Against Women: An Activity of Providing Services or a Revolutionary Agenda ...... 69
Political and Social Challenges ...... 70
9.1 Struggle against Imperialist Policies and Internal Conflict ...... 70
9.2 Struggle against Islamic Provisions and Groups ...... 73
9.3 Struggle against NGO/Civil Society Culture ...... 75
9.4 Dismay at Leftist Indifference to Women’s Dilemma: Women’s Right-to-Life as a Central Demand ...... 78
Main Activities and Campaigns of the Organization ...... 80
Chapter 4 Analyzing Patriarchal Violence to Shape Conceptual Framework of Dismantling it: A Feminist Platform for OWFI ...... 95
Analysis of Systemic Patriarchal Violence: Investigation of Practices, Concepts and Tools of Patriarchal Dominance ...... 96
11.1 Mass Killings of Women in the Center and South: Systemic ‘Honour-Killing’ ...... 99
11.2 Sex Trafficking of War Widows and Orphans 2003 Onward...... 100
11.3 Jaafari Legislation of Female Child Marriage and Objectification of Women ...... 103
11.4 ISIS Enslavement of Women of ‘Other’ Religion/Ethnicity ...... 105
11.5 Theoretic Analysis of Patriarchal Practices and Relations: Marxist Feminist Responses to Concepts and Methods ...... 106
A Platform for Marxist Feminist Organizing: Conclusion, Concepts and Guidelines ...... 109
12.1 Kinds of Feminist Consciousness ...... 110
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12.2 A Marxist Feminist Platform for Liberation: Organizing Towards the Demise of Patriarchy, Capitalism and Politics of Division ...... 111
12.3 Organizational Guidelines ...... 115
References ...... 130
Appendix A ...... 135
Appendix B ...... 153
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List of Appendices
Appendix A: List of OWFI Statements
Appendix B: Al Mousawat Newspaper Issues
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List of Figures
Figure 1. Discussing with US soldier about holding demonstration ...... 83
Figure 2. OWFI members march from residential complexes – Images are taken from my personal archive...... 84
Figure 3. Speeches and banners for secular constitution ...... 84
Figure 4. Speeches to the gathering in Firdawse square – Baghdad on IWD 2004 ...... 84
Figure 5. Front page of Al Mousawat - Issue 35 ...... 85
Figure 6. Community Radio station Al Mousawat 103.8 FM ...... 85
Figure 7. Tahrir square demonstration on February 25, 2011, in Baghdad and in Samarra -Images are taken from my personal archive...... 87
Figure 8. OWFI demonstrates against Jaafari Law...... 89
Figure 9. One of the first women's shelter in Baghdad 2005 ...... 92
Figure 10. OWFI shelters in 2017: 10 shelters ...... 93
Figure 11. 2017 shelter in Mosul ...... 93
Figure 12. Mapping patriarchal violence through areas of investigation and through a variety of perspectives ...... 98
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Chapter 1 Revolutionary Feminism in Post-war Iraq
The US and UK started a military attack on Iraq in 2003 which brought destruction, mass killing and poverty upon the Iraqi population at large. The oil resources fell under the control of the occupying forces, and the governmental institutions ceased to function, stopping the basic services from working overnight, leaving the Iraqi population in disarray, terror and deprivation for more than two years. The occupying forces, called the Coalition Provisional Authorities1 (CPA) then, installed a parliamentarian democracy for which it empowered the religious, ethnic and tribal groups to become national political organizations, and eventually secured their own military armed groups to terrorize, control and prevail. Many aspects of modern civil life in the capital and other cities began to shrink and get replaced with old religious rituals from the past2 and timeworn ethnic/nationalist tradition and symbols. Revival of old religious and ethnic tradition entailed less acceptance of women in public space and as socially accepted figures of leadership or high status. The revival of Islamic religious culture and speech in public spaces assigned women to domestic spaces while providing historic pretext and reasons to eliminate feminine appearance and existence from streets, workplaces and public media. The Hijab became the norm and unlegislated condition for women to move, work and be accepted in public places.
Four rounds of elections did not bring along noticeable change to the ruling political parties, but rather established the power of religious groups, starting a sectarian tension which turned into divisions and conflict polarizing the country into regions in conflict, and resulting in the alienation of a good part of the population which eventually welcomed extreme religious groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to take over many cities and assumedly save them from the governmental sectarian policies3. Oppression and enslavement of women became daily practices which the ruling government and the opposing factions condoned, and in some cases legislated for. Corruption, despotism and women’s oppression became daily practices of the parliamentary legislators and ISIS similarly, while democratic change of faces and parties did not bring about considerable change in protecting women throughout the past 15 years. The following chapters will expand more on the daily oppression of women on both sides of the conflict.
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Patriarchal control and violence against women had the support of the state both in legislation and in practice, whether in security institutions, legal provisions or health system, treating them either as private property to be kept and returned to their patriarch ‘owners’, or as loose and damaged goods to be used, discarded, or punished. Women who were alone or who did not submit to their patriarchs were left with no options of defending their own safety, well-being and status. Patriarchal tribal views began to prevail even in the mainstream circles of the Iraqi Left, which chose not to defend women from sexual violence committed by individuals, or by organized groups like ISIS with the pretext that it was not “decent” to indulge in “honour” issues, as if defending women from violence was a personal matter or a family affair4. The mention of Iraqi Left in the research includes socialist and communist parties, groups, or individuals who distance themselves from right-wing agenda of being pro-occupation, pro- religious rule, and in submission to capitalistic politics and economy. Patriarchal views and positions of the right-wing religious and tribal groups seemed to have managed to de-humanize women and treat them as commodities which are disposed of once they turn into damaged goods; thus, turning women into prisoners of their own families and tribes; and have furthermore seeped into the Iraqi Left groups who have not had a feminist awakening throughout the past decades.
Iraq was known to have the highest rate of education and political participation of women in the 1980s among women of the Middle-East (Ismael, Ismael, 2015). The same generation of women who witnessed the high levels of education in the eighties find themselves now trapped in militarized and patronizing patriarchal culture, where their daughters are deprived of the freedoms which their mothers once had, and the education which was easily available. The daughters are currently covered from head to toe while the influence of religion, superstition and patriarchal glorification of marriage and motherhood supersedes women’s opportunity to education.
Iraqi women’s options to resist and fight back against war-time and conflict-related violence and oppression were close to none. For women who plan to have a feminist platform of resisting a militarized patriarchy which is backed by religion, tribal culture, and discriminatory laws, the solution would need to be as strong and sizeable as their precedents of national struggle movements, for which examples exist in Iraqi modern history of anti-imperialist struggle for liberation, one which was led by socialist underground political groups who aimed for class liberation, and defended gender equality and civil life standards. Iraq has a history of socialist
3 and communist organizations which were always in opposition to the state but had also affected the society at large to a more modern lifestyle where women had the right to education, work and life choices. The women’s organizations which were founded or supported by the communist or socialist parties had pioneering gender equality agenda relative to their time, and they became the most popular women’s organizations since the 1950s of the twentieth century, such as the Iraqi Women’s League (Efrati 2005, p.579). Nevertheless, the agenda of those organizations did not develop since then and did not make use of a world-wide rise in feminist expectations, the reason for which may have been their close ties with the Iraqi Communist Party.
Out of the local political groups who are active in Iraq, the communist political parties are the strongest ones to defend women and fight for their rights albeit under a restrained agenda of rights to work, rights to education, and equality in theory rather than social practice. Nevertheless, it is a good starting point to base a feminist agenda which relates to an existing and well-established community, rather than isolating oneself from the society. For many of us who were educated within communist parties, we were attracted by the notion of equality for all, where the vision was to fight for a future with no class difference or gender differences. Some of us were aware that hard work, organizing, theoretic debates and writings were still needed in order to raise the ceiling of expectations for women. Building a feminist platform from within our communist political organization felt like the right place to start, while keeping our activism and organizing within a working-class environment, one which had no interest of joining efforts with the ruling capitalist patriarchs against women, and one which aims to achieve gender equality in the future.
Alongside two of my female comrades, we decided to start a women’s organization, albeit with different motivation; one of us in compliance with a party decision, while the other had a history of being the leading woman activist within the Kurdish beginnings of our political group in Iraq. I was the third person, a new-comer to communist politics, but with strong feminist enthusiasm. The three of us founded the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), with the help of some male comrades who supported us in drafting the founding statement and then holding the founding event in June 22nd 2003.5 In the years following the founding event, the vision of creating a mass organization proved to be hard to implement, especially under the circumstances of what a comrade called the “dark scenario” of the war on Iraq where all the state provisions for supporting and protecting civil life were ousted, and there was total lack of law, security, or
4 governance (Taghvaie, 2003). Insecurity and extreme poverty of the following years created unprecedented violent attacks on women such as ‘honour killings’, epidemic prostitution, sex trafficking, and later on enslavement. The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq started out with organizing women from workplaces and factories, but eventually found the task difficult to achieve, and reached to the understanding that the greater need of women was for protection from unprecedented violence in the public and private domain. Rising numbers of women and girls who escape the oppression of their families found themselves in compromising positions of sexual violence and prostitution. For the past 15 years, OWFI indulged in sheltering women from violence, and educating them upon a feminist and Marxist understanding of the world, and starting a community radio and a feminist newspaper to create awareness of women’s ordeal and raise consciousness of a revolutionary way to undo the changes which were brought upon the society by the occupation of Iraq. After a decade or more of OWFI activism and political confrontations, it was time to take a few steps back, and to see the picture from a distance in order to study and analyse the history of 15 years of Marxist feminist activism in the times following the US/UK occupation of Iraq.
This research is a historical analysis of the political circumstances surrounding the feminist organization of OWFI, including the imperialist attack on the Iraqi society, and the resulting violence on women by the patriarchal factions which were supported by the US/UK occupation. This research studies local patriarchal concepts, methods and practices of oppressing women, based on Marxist feminism analysis, in order to conclude a theoretic framework of women’s empowerment through reversing and combatting the oppressive methods and practices while building a Marxist feminist agenda to provide vision and guidance to women’s struggles for equality in Iraq against capitalist patriarchal dominance.
The research will first demonstrate and analyze the political context surrounding and inherent in the feminist work of OWFI, and will then recount the main landmarks of violence against women of Iraq throughout 15 years of post-war conflict. The latter part of the research will build a theoretic understanding and analysis of the patriarchal violent practices against women, and their politics and legal system which supports them, in order to conclude ways to dismantle the capitalist patriarchal system within a conceptual approach and methods of organizing which will be the platform for Marxist feminist struggles for equality in the coming years of OWFI’s feminist struggle for women’s rights in Iraq.
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The ultimate objective of the research is to draft a political agenda for the Marxist feminist organization and activism of OWFI for the near future, an agenda which instills our vision of achieving a better future of gender equality, working-class liberation and ending all discrimination against marginalized groups. For that purpose, a thorough investigation of the political and social changes which were forced by the occupation is required, in order to understand the reasons, motivations and length of one of the darkest episodes which befell Iraqi women in modern history.
Where to Begin
When the US/UK war-machine started to bomb Baghdad on the night of March 20th of 2003, it divided a world of observers into two groups: a silent majority hit by despair and hopelessness that imperialist wars can ever be stopped, and a minority of an opposition who resisted, looked for, and practiced methods to confront and challenge the imperialistic brutal military attack on the people of Iraq. I was among the second group who opposed and organized for ways to challenge and overcome the presence of the imperialist occupation which partnered on the ground with the most reactionary, inhumane and patriarchal parts of the Iraqi society: the Islamist political parties, ethnic/nationalist parties, and tribal groups.
In those days, I was a new-comer to organized socialist politics. I had just joined the Worker Communist Party of Iraq6 (WCPI) which I first encountered after immigrating to Canada - Toronto, and which had an appealing anti-capitalist, secular and feminist agenda. Their firm position against the growing Islamist politics in Iraq and in the Middle East, coupled with their defense of women against violent patriarchal practices was unique in Iraq and the region. It was a first encounter with a progressive political group who took women’s issues into the heart of their political struggle, or so I thought. After joining the WCPI in 1998 and learning activism of defending women and working class in the years following the occupation of Iraq of 2003, and after almost two decades of party factions’ conflict and internal wars with feminist positions, and as I was finalizing this thesis, I resigned from the party in June 2018, within a group resignation of leading members, for reasons that may be outside the scope of this research. Alongside many of the leading members, I am in the process of negotiating the terms of founding a new communist party which will be more democratic, more feminist, and far from despotic sectarian practices which prevail in Stalinist parties. The main gain from two decades of political activism
6 within the WCPI in my case was the founding of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), a feminist organization which strives to organize women into a mass feminist-socialist movement, but works within the dynamics which are available on the ground such as NGO spheres and party alliances. OWFI was incepted and grew in the margins of the WCPI, as most of the leadership did not approve of its “feminist” agenda – an unwritten agenda which was basically my own understanding and reflection of Marxist feminist analysis, organizing and practices.
My main purpose from political involvement was to confront the patriarchal religious new wave of politics which made Iraqi women lose their status and all their rights. I found myself indulged in finding ways to organize and mobilize women based upon radical positions to shape the future of women and all in Iraq. Nevertheless, debates and daily readings about class liberation come so natural to a feminist whose main motivation is to end inequalities and vulnerabilities, and thus the task was double-fold: a feminist and a socialist one.
In a newly occupied country where the military invaders shut down all governmental institutions, and took over the presidential palace, they began to celebrate a farce victory which was only the beginning to a series of unprecedented humanitarian catastrophes on Iraqis, including mass killings, sectarian violence, ethnic conflict, women’s enslavement, displacement and deprivation of millions of civilians. After the occupying forces established their presence in Iraq, the oil extraction and exportation did not stop for a single day. It continued to sell throughout the bloodbath battles of Falluja, the sectarian massacre of “Sunnis” in Baghdad, the fall of the city of Mosul to the hands of ISIS, and the genocide of Yazidis on the hands of ISIS.
It was no coincidence that the US involvement of building a state in Iraq resulted in one of the most corrupt governmental systems in the world, draining the resources of the society into the foreign banks, with a portion of it in the pockets of a newly assigned capitalist class who became the representatives and guards of an imperialist control of our resources. After fabricating a Fuel and Gas Law to allow foreign companies to extract the oil, they started their endeavours towards re-structuring Iraqi economy towards a ‘free market’ economy, in order to raise all barriers to imperialist exploitation of Iraqi resources as privatized industry and a local market (Klein, 2005).
One of the heaviest industrialized economies in the region began to get sold piece by piece to individuals from the newly appointed ruling class for almost no money at all. The government
7 began to propagate for the ‘benefits’ of privatization and seek foreign debt from the World Bank and the International Monitory Fund even if in small amounts which had no effect on the economy, but were enough to get Iraq’s economy hooked on the imperialist organizations (Alwan, 2018). The newly established government continues to be in the process of restructuring the economy to serve a ‘free market’, resulting in mass lay-offs of the working class, in favour of inviting investors to reap the surplus of Iraqi economy into their pockets with no obligation towards the well-being of the Iraqi working class, and the population at large.
In the midst of one of the biggest state corruption and estate robberies, dismantling of the national industry base for the benefit of capitalist individuals (Klein, 2004, p. 44), and collecting capitalist primitive accumulation from oil revenues, the society was subject to effective political campaigns of religious division leading to sectarian bloodbath, whereas targeting women for abuse, enslavement, and killing became a systemic part of imposing political authority.
After founding OWFI, I held daily meetings in Baghdad with women who expressed interest in feminism, some of whom began to share details of kidnappings of women in their neighborhood. When the report was repeatedly shared by others, it became clear that the lack of security in the summer following the occupation gave way to gangs to kidnap and supply women’s bodies for a growing sex industry which dwelled on the rising poverty and insecurity. In the same time, the unreported and unpunished “honour-killings” began to rise to unprecedented numbers, while being overlooked as “private family affair”. In the founding statement of OWFI, we announced it to be a mass organization to recruit and educate women on revolutionary and anti-capitalist literature so as to become part of the masses to liberate Iraq from imperialist control and install working class rule; nevertheless we found ourselves functioning in crisis mode where protecting ourselves and other women became priority, thus throwing us off the planned objectives and keeping busy while addressing increasing waves of violent tribal and Islamic extremism in speech and practise. Instead of educating the members for a revolutionary movement to confront capitalism, we found ourselves striving to start initiatives to protect women from rising extremist religiosity and a revival of ancient tribal practices which treat women as objects and commodities for male desire, service and breeding.
In a society where women were threatened by violence, poverty and starvation, security became the first priority to address. Although violence against women caused the dismay of most in the
8 society, few were interested in addressing the political, social, and economic roots of the newly rising violence against women; thus, leaving the dilemma of women’s insecurity unresolved. The best tool for feminist organizing in such times proved to be educating women for standing for their rights to safety and respect in the domestic and public zone, and for them to take on the responsibility of defending vulnerable females who became victims to systemic ways of trafficking and abuse, building a women’s ‘force’ who speak for the well-being of women. It helped us base our political feminist struggles on dilemma driven from the ‘premises of the real world’ instead of restraining ourselves to emancipatory ideological text from the realm of thinking and abstract concepts7. The question of how to build a Marxist feminist organization, and which agenda to base it on did not have an answer in the first years of OWFI’s activism.
Having joined the WCPI party, as a leftist group, exposed me and many other female comrades to text and concepts of women’s equality and freedom as abstract concepts and slogans; which were to be realized in practice after achieving a social revolution. Nevertheless, there was no ‘manual’ or text to address our current issues of social inequality, menial status, or how to organize for a future of ending gender discrimination. In other words, mobilizing women within a working-class organization was supported with abstract concepts of parallels between workers’ struggle and feminist struggle aiming to achieve equality in the future, still there wasn’t much text or initiative of how to combat gender inequality in immediate praxis. On the other hand, the women’s NGOs atmosphere in Iraq began to absorb methods of thinking and activism of liberal feminists whose struggles are against gender inequality without challenging the political roots of women’s oppression; thus, affecting our activities from time to time.
While having daily contact and coordination with the WCPI organizations and unions, it was getting clearer that OWFI’s feminist struggles against Islamic extremism and patriarchal tribalism did not gain attention or importance, within the party activities or agenda of revolutionary struggle. The sole objective of liberating the working class from the demise of capitalism did not seem to include a feminist factor in it. Although OWFI defended and stood in solidarity with working class issues during the first years of demonstrations in Baghdad and in front of the Green Zone, we noticed that most of the working-class organizations were not interested in joining the feminist demonstrations and campaigns which OWFI held. Many of the comrades repeatedly criticized that the ‘wasted energy’ which OWFI dedicated for the empowerment of ‘victimized women’ would take us away and outside the actual arena of
9 socialist political struggle. The political struggle which did not address women’s oppression and suffering but demanded women’s participation and support to realize a social revolution which should implement gender equality in an assumed future did not feel right, complete, or convincing. Since the early years within OWFI’s feminist struggle, it began to get clearer, that focusing on women’s well-being and immediate social equality distanced OWFI further from the “ideologues” in the movement, who would only agree to the party agenda, resolutions, and socialist historic text. The analysis of women’s struggles from oppression under the imperialist military conditions and monstrous tribal attacks did not seem to become a priority to be addressed by those ideologues. While claiming to be the avant-garde of the political left in Iraq, the party continued to practice veiled patriarchy in the choices of whom to defend and empower. It might have well been said loud and clear, that the ‘personal’ was not the political priority, and that gender conflict was ‘just’ a secondary conflict within capitalism.
In a country with a history of patriarchal views about women and patriarchal social structure, a political change which is supported by an imperialist military attack can hardly be promising for women, in spite of all the claims of the US government on this matter. The Coalition Provisional Authorities (CPA), or rather the US/UK occupation authorities which was led by the US administrator who “possessed full executive, legislative, and judicial authority” (Dobbins et al., 2009, p. xiii), had plans for the ‘content’ of the future Iraqi government which they had in mind; one which represented religious sects, nationalist/ethnic groups, and tribal figures. In other words, all right-wing reactionary groups of the Iraqi society were welcome to meetings with Paul Bremer, and invited to hold seats in the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). Although the selected groups were different in most aspects of their politics, yet they shared extremist patriarchal views and practices against women.
In such a historic moment, when all the fears of Iraqi women came true: the most dangerous military arsenal in the world stomped the cities, there was no government to be responsible of citizens’ safety, neighborhoods were torn apart by sectarian and ethnic tension, and the only resistance to the military occupation were the extremist religious factions who justify killing Iraqis if they couldn’t get to the Americans; in such a historic moment, the lessons from Iraq’s modern history inform us that the response had to be an organized, revolutionary, anti-imperialist and leftist one. The following question was: would the revolutionary organized response adopt a feminist agenda, or will we still be tailing class struggle with no recognition of women’s
10 expectations? Although historic materialism is the lens through which it is best to understand the surrounding world, the available Marxist text and praxis did not provide enough guidance for the current and future feminist struggle of OWFI.
After nine years of occupation, and six years of occupation representatives’ rule, Iraqi cities continue to witness violence of armed militia factions mobilized by some religious narrative (CICJ, 2014, p.13).8 Tens of new Islamist TV stations spread idealist thought and stories about gods in ‘another world’, and mainstream Arabic TV stations portray women as either the ideal female wife/mother/daughter, or as the evil sexual creature who deserves severe physical punishment, or even an immediate death sentence. Applications of this form of patriarchal knowledge/background continue to fill the morgues with hundreds of unclaimed female bodies every year in Iraq.9
The terror of US/UK military presence, sectarian and ethnic tensions around the country, and tens of Islamic militias forcing ‘morality’ on women in many violent ways, all created circumstances of horror for women. For some who want to resist the violence and become agents of change, a new kind of feminism is required; one which is willing to confront patriarchy and its violent partners at all levels: the imperialist war machine, politicized religious institutions, and fully armed misogynist tribal groups. Modern Iraqi history of political struggle against British colonization and against governmental practices of capitalist exploitation bring forward and high-light a long history of communist organizations mobilizing the masses of workers and women to fight for their political demands. Have the rules of political confrontation of left and right changed in the twenty first century? Only time can tell. As for the “women’s question” set in front of Iraqi feminists, there is no alternative formula to struggle, and the above-mentioned history informs the need to hold on to socialist positions and the consequential theoretic framework for planning the post-war feminist struggle of OWFI.
The Objectives, Methodology, Problematic and Structure of the Research
This research aims to create a theoretic platform for the feminist political struggles of OWFI for the coming decade or more in Iraq to combat patriarchy and to be an effective part of the political socialist forces to put an end to capitalism. The problematic of the study and the point of departure is the unprecedented mass acts of violence against women throughout the years of the
11 conflict 2003-2018: to analyze the social contradictions, the political context, and the historic background that led to them, and finally the resulting social changes/transformations which resulted from them. The method of investigating into the problematic is a dialectic critical investigation of the oppression of women in a volatile and changing society of post-war Iraq as a whole, while focusing into the internal relations between the recently created state and women, the empowered social tribal structures as a vehicle of oppressing women, the appearance of these relations and their essence, the historic factor as determinant of some of the aspects of violence, the complexity and interconnectedness of cultural/political/personal, and finally the transformation in the consciousness of the public at large and of feminists who resist and organize in an attempt to combat patriarchy albeit in small parts of the bigger picture.
A dialectic method of inquiry requires an understanding of the prior history of Iraq and the women’s movement in Iraq, to be able to foresee what the current changes can lead to in the near and far future. The inquiry needs to indulge in understanding the relation of the whole to the part, which in this case is the historic moment of a military occupation paralyzing the whole country/society to the specific changes brought upon the women of Iraq. The connection of gender relations deterioration to the rise of new tribal social structures and the establishment of newly expanded and ruling religious institutions; whereas articulating on the systemic contradictions in gender relations created by the new social structures and the text of the religious institution. The method of inquiry will aim at comparing the appearance of the interactions relevant to women with the essence and the concrete implications of the interactions on the safety, status, and future of women. The inquiry will always refer to the bigger picture of social and political context which will be the main content of chapter 2.
Although the demonstration of the bigger political and social context is a requirement of the investigation, it is also one of the objectives of this research, that is to document the occupation of Iraq through the eyes of people who were the receiving end of the pounding and arrogance of the US/UK war machine, persons who did not benefit from the invasion while observing it over the television, from Washington, or from the Green Zone, but rather through the experience of someone who lived in a working class neighborhood in Baghdad, woke up to bombing and gunshots for many years, lit candles while waiting for the government-given electricity to turn on, and experienced what women had to endure in their daily lives. The standpoint of a woman
12 who witnessed the ruling relations is not a perspective that can be easily found in the myriad of literature written about Iraq after the occupation.
A common mistake of Socialist feminists’ writings is to start from the concepts/idea, and then implement the ideas to reality; an approach which can only be called or related to an ‘idealist’ philosophical approach, even if they claim to have a dialectical materialist approach. One of the main characteristics of this research is that it starts from ‘real life premises’, studies and analyzes them, before concluding the concepts, relations, and theoretic framework. Although activists have the tendency of short-cutting theoretic inquiries into a previously planned conclusion, this research was a tedious effort to avoid under-estimating the value of theory in shedding light on socialist and feminist political struggle. After being an organized member in a Leftist party and a feminist activist for 15 years, the plan and reason for studying and writing this thesis was to gain better theoretic insight into the meaning, direction and planning of political feminist activism in Iraq for the coming years.
The research is based on historic materialist methodology of Marxist feminism, with a critical investigation into all elements related to women’s oppression and to planning a feminist agenda for dismantling patriarchy. As a Marxist, I believe that the eradication of patriarchy is impossible under a capitalist state, moreover the past socialist experiences around the world teach all observers that a social revolution does not automatically achieve gender equality. The feminist platform to be concluded in this research will have the strategy of aiming for a socialist and feminist revolution, but will also accommodate tactics of reform of women’s rights to alleviate women’s social burden and better qualify them to become agents of change10, and hopefully revolutionary change.
The site of the research is in post-war Iraq where the study investigates into the mass violence against women, for the purpose of analyzing the social construct which informs the violence; and thus, concluding the patriarchal concepts and theoretic framework which justify and require the practices of misogyny. Concluding a reverse theoretic framework of feminist concepts and women’s empowerment will provide conceptual guidelines for articulating a Marxist feminist platform for organizing women to resist the unleashed patriarchy of post-war years.
Although the final destination of this research is the configuration of a platform and an agenda for Marxist feminist struggle for women’s equality and freedom in a post-occupation Iraq, other
13 secondary objectives will be addressed also; the first one to be recounting Iraq’s post-war history from working class and women’s perspectives, while the second one is to share a brief history of OWFI founding, activities and political positions locally and globally. The point of entry will be through explicating the problematic of the research while constructing the changes of the social and political context in Iraq throughout the years following the occupation. The research will go back and forth between the bigger social picture, the social systems and political components, and their relation to the status quo of women. A dialectic inquiry into the relations, circumstances, and historic background will prepare for the main subject of the thesis: the attacks and mass violence on women in the past 15 years following the occupation, in an attempt to analyze the theoretic framework of the growth and transformation of patriarchal violence in response to a militarized sectarian bloody conflict which was designed and supported by the US/UK political logistics. The analysis of a political, militarized and sectarian patriarchy of that moment in time informs the research into concepts, objectives, and methods to dismantle such a patriarchy, and will be the theoretic framework for a Marxist feminist agenda for women to build the anti-patriarchal struggles upon for the decade/s to come.
The following is an overview of the structure of the thesis. The first chapter will introduce the subject matter of revolutionary feminism in Iraq and will explain the methodology of the research, continuing into drawing the parts of the picture of the social and political context surrounding the founding of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, and includes a literature review to analyze the perspectives through which the subject matter was studied. The Second chapter is a more focused historic analysis of the political and social changes which were introduced by the occupation, and the resulting kinds of confrontation which OWFI had to endure locally and globally. The third chapter is a summary of the post-war history from women’s perspective: the elections, legislative wars, and the mass crimes against women such as enslavement, systemic ‘honour killings’, forcing dress code, sexual exploitation and trafficking, and tribal enslavement; ending in a section of analyzing the main patriarchal concepts in each case, the changes of the concepts into criminal methods, the legal text which allowed and supported patriarchal control, concluding the articulation of a methodology of misogyny which is subsumed in many social constructs and institutions. The fourth chapter is a conclusion of responses, concepts, and guidelines to organizing. It starts with analysis of kinds of women’s resistance to the violence of systemic patriarchy as explained in the previous chapter, then
14 indulges in building a theoretic platform of feminist resistance to the system of patriarchy explicated above, which is mainly an agenda with a theoretic introduction section of analysis for the status quo, followed by the strategy and objectives which will inform methods of organizing and activities of the organization. A final suggestion of the required forth-coming studies will be the ending section of the thesis.
The research attempts to gather a dialectic understanding of the problematic of the study which is: How and why the hatred and oppression of women can escalate to the extent of mass killings and enslavement in a post war Iraq? It is hard to understand the theoretic framework of local misogynist practices without studying the historic and political context of the societal circumstances in post-Iraq. Therefore, the second chapter of the research unfolds the political, economic and social implications of the US/UK military occupation on the Iraqi society, one which was already suffering from 35 years of dictatorship and a decade of United Nations economic sanctions. Some historic background of the Iraqi state, progressive initiatives for women, and past tribal socio-economic structures will be included to explicate the internal social relations and contradictions.
The third chapter will pinpoint into the instants of mass violence against women, then will investigate into their justifications in appearance and essence, and add an historical and political insight to draw a conceptual framework of the patriarchal motivations which were behind them. Analysis of the motivations/concepts of the mass violence and their supporting patriarchal epistemology will inform the methodology of reversing the oppression of women within a theoretic framework of concepts and methods for liberating women. Lise Vogel finds that the matter revolves around two twin problems: women’s oppression, and women’s liberation, and finds that Marxism has addressed the first problem more than is acknowledged within socialist feminist writings, while the second problem was not addressed adequately. (Vogel, 2013, p.133)
The last chapter of this research begins with an attempt of defining the basics of feminist tendencies and resistance in the society, or rather what an ‘organic’ feminist is, and how feminists can be organized. Understanding patriarchal methodology so as to build a reverse methodology to combat it will be a starting point to putting together a “… structure of concepts, a theoretic framework [which] simply provides guidance may be, specific strategies, programmes, or tactics for change [which] cannot be deduced directly from theory.” (p. 142)
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The ending part of this research suggests expanding the argument of the ‘Feminist Platform’ to include live discussion within the immediate circle of women activists of the organization, and to involve the supporting socialist individuals and groups.
A critical position to the NGOization approach is visited repeatedly in the research, questioning it as a source of depoliticization of the women’s movement, while recognizing that the opinions which generalize the verdict over all the women’s organizations on the ground cannot be of someone who tried to organize women in real life premises.
Reasons and Motivation for Research
The experience of 15 years of political struggle within OWFI against patriarchy and capitalism faced challenges, confrontation, or deliberate neglect within circles and groups who sometimes succeeded to stigmatize the content of OWFI’s activism in ways which were demoralizing and frustrating. Our political and feminist positions were rarely supported by women’s or political organizations locally and internationally. It was imperative that a publication gets to document the marginalization and isolation which befell OWFI, had it not been for the progressive parts of the immediate political circle, and of the international women’s movement11. OWFI’s anti- imperialist and anti-patriarchal positions did not attract the attention of main feminist writers or political authors who wrote about post-war Iraq within the first many years following the occupation. The conclusion is that the writers either found OWFI positions too feminist, and understood them as rhetoric of liberal-feminism, which made authors like Klein ignore it altogether giving all her attention to patriarchal Islamic groups who in her opinion were the frontline challenge to the imperial occupation of Iraq (Klein, 2005), or that they -the feminist writers- were not interested in the ‘revolutionary and anti-imperialist’ positions, considering them to be part of the ‘cold war rhetoric’ of the past, considering OWFI as merely a facade of a leftist political party, albeit not the mainstream Leftist party which is the Iraqi Communist Party, which was documented heavily by writers, such as Al Ali and Pratt’s first book on women of Iraq (Al Ali, Pratt, 2009 ). For the reasons counted above, it was important that the story of OWFI’s frontline activism be written adequately in this research.
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3.1 Documenting OWFI’s Political Struggles: Denied in Leftist Western Writings of Post-war Iraq
Local and International media considered OWFI women the voice of radical feminists12 in Iraq and continued to request interviews with leading OWFI members about political issues at large and their effect on women; whereas the academic authors either avoided OWFI’s activism, or mentioned it albeit too briefly. Left-leaning authors such as Klein denied that existence probably for one of two reasons: the first one being that we were not affiliated to western left’s ‘favorite’ resistance, the Islamic armed resistance which assumedly fought the military occupation while killing more Iraqis than Americans. Those authors avoided in their writings the theoretic grounds of Islamist resistance groups which reject socialism or communism as thought or practice, proving to be pragmatic in their choice of allies inside Iraq. They were also impressed with the Islamic resistance’ ability to confront the US/UK army in arms and resources which got them to overlook their patriarchal and right-wing politics, a position which can be regarded as pragmatic at best, and opportunist or racist at its worst, as they choose to fight the bigger imperialist enemy, and were willing to ally with the extremist and notorious on the ground in order to defeat their immediate enemy, while disregarding how the Islamic factions can bring destruction to the Iraqi society. The second reason of their avoidance for OWFI was that we were not affiliated with the mainstream Leftist party who was their traditional ally and who continued a tradition of Stalinist ideological approach, and did not oppose the war on Iraq. The leftist feminists who wrote on Iraq continue to follow the traditional left positions, considering the Iraqi Communist Party their only reference inside Iraq. In one of the main international women’s conferences held in Bangkok in October 2005, a leading American leftist activist asked if I knew an Iraqi cleric by the name of Sheikh Al Khalisi, who in her opinion was the utmost revolutionary. I asked her: doesn’t it bother you that he is an Islamic cleric who promotes discrimination of women? And how is that revolutionary? Her response was that he was the one who led an armed resistance against the American occupation of Iraq. As an American leftist, she was in a mission to find the enemy of American imperialism, or rather the enemy of her enemy in order to ally with him. It did not matter to her or to the mainstream American left that they were knowingly becoming allies of the most reactionary forces in the Iraqi society, the Islamic-nationalist groups on the ground who were the majority of the armed Iraqi resistance. It did not matter to the American left that their Iraqi allies on the ground were the major enemies of all that stands for freedom and equality in
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Iraq. In that sense, the American and European left acted more like ideologues that followed an abstract text about anti-imperialism, partnering with local right-wing groups, thus empowering them against Iraqi revolutionaries, feminists, and against their traditional leftist allies.
3.2 Documenting OWFI’s Feminist Struggles: Denied in Feminist Writings and within NGO Feminism
It was a source of distress for many women in OWFI to find out that a western feminist would write a book about women in post-war Iraq with no mention, or rather minimal mention of our struggles, a matter which Iraqi political activists would find hard to believe. Mainstream feminist authors based their writing on women of post-war Iraq on individual experiences of victimized women, without giving importance to organized feminist resistance. Those who made an effort to take Iraqi women’s groups into consideration fell short at following the more ‘established’ organizations of the mainstream Left - affiliates of the Iraqi Communist Party - basing their findings on non-feminist work and position, while neglecting a radical feminist group such as OWFI. The mentioned above women’s NGOs which affiliated with the mainstream Left were mostly partners on the elections’ endeavours, with some effort against patriarchal legislation, while distancing themselves from women’s social rights and equality in the personal liberties or the right-to-life level. Moreover, the mainstream feminist authors collected interviews with a variety of women activists in the NGOs, only to conclude an analysis of post-war Iraq politics which was a combination of liberal-feminist views with a component of ‘identity politics’, touching on the surface of the social dilemma of imperialist division of the society. In reality, the conclusions did not step too far from the US/UK political blueprint for Iraq. Writings of Al Ali, Pratt and Enloe dealt with snapshots of Iraqi women’s dilemma, but did not include an in-depth analysis of feminist resistance in Iraq.
In a 2008 meeting with European NGO ‘feminists, some of whom were proud of their past activism within socialist parties, a Swedish ‘expert’ did not hesitate to criticize OWFI’s positions against religious ‘leaders’ and tribal heads, and rather suggested a collaboration with them, as they were “the strongest persons in the Iraqi social scene.” And it was common knowledge among women’s NGOs that any revolutionary position or speech meant that the NGO will not receive any funding, as the big funds come from governments, and governments will only support reform work which helps the local government to improve, while they will not support
18 any revolutionary initiative which will eventually challenge their ally Iraqi government in Baghdad. During the 2011 Arab Spring in Iraq, OWFI got known to be a persistent group in the Iraqi Tahrir square, organizing youth groups and individuals into a February 25 group13. In a routine meeting with the women’s task force of a European government which supported OWFI’s women’s shelters, I was surprised to see that they invited the ministry’s highest-ranking official to the meeting, in addition to their Ambassador in Iraq who asked whether OWFI was using their money for a revolution against the Iraqi government, starting from Tahrir Square. My answer was that OWFI will be present wherever the Iraqi society is rising against corruption and despotism, and that the ministry can decide whether they support revolutionary women, or not. The highest ranking official of the international aid agency intervened with a politically correct response that they are not against support of revolutionary women, trying to put an end to what began to sound like a colonial guardianship and power relation with receivers of their funding, where they can stop an organization from crossing the red lines.14 OWFI’s leading women had a political agenda of standing with the Iraqi people protecting them from military violence of the occupation, and from impositions of the a US/UK backed government.
3.3 OWFI’s Feminist and Anti-imperialist Positions Contested as a Small Women’s Group with too Much Rhetoric
We in OWFI were proud of defining the organization as opposing both the US/UK occupation, and against political Islamist parties which had confiscated our reality in Iraq15. We were the only Iraqi women’s NGO to stand behind a revolutionary position of defiance to both representatives of Imperialism and local right-wing local extremists. This position resulted in excluding our organization from the women’s meetings which were planned by the US/UK gender representatives in Iraq in the months after the occupation. In an autumn 2003 meeting in the Green Zone of Baghdad, where the US and UK gender experts invited women’s NGOs and listened to their outlook on women’s concerns, one of my colleagues and I expressed our dismay of the escalating practices of women’s oppression. The UK gender expert responded with a question: “Why don’t you raise the issue with your religious cleric or your tribal head?” When I told her that they were both the source of women’s oppression, she seemed to lose interest in pursuing the subject. My comrade agreed after the meeting that it was a mistake to participate in the meeting and speak with them in the first place, and we laughed our way out of the Green Zone. With such a secular and anti-imperialist political agenda, and a short history of
19 constituting and recruiting in Iraq, it proved to be difficult to gain the sizeable membership which would allow OWFI to function as a mass organization. With the smaller numbers of women, the gender experts and mainstream media would always remind us we were not representatives of all the women of Iraq, but rather represent ourselves only. It is needless to add that those were the responses of liberal feminists who did not agree with an anti-capitalist position, nor were vocal and public about anti-religious positions. A common occurrence was to compare OWFI with the women’s organization which was affiliated with the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), the Iraqi Women’s League, where big numbers of women would join - as a notion of loyalty to the history of their older family members’ affiliation in the ICP- but without questioning their feminist policies, or their anti-capitalist positions, which were taken for granted. Between 2003 and 2005, there were many interviews for leading OWFI women over the new TV stations on weekly basis, which attracted the attention of the seculars around Iraq, to which some leading members of the ICP reacted and began to actively discredit OWFI in demonstrations and public forums, using the description which Islamist parties typically use against communist women. They spread the rumour that the president of OWFI promoted polyandry -multiple husbands- for women in Iraq, attempting to character-assassinate a feminist and possibly motivate angry retribution against her. OWFI found itself in a challenging conflict with the ICP affiliate organizations who tried to keep up the discrimination until a recent time.16
One of these instances was during a historic moment in 2005 when an Islamic block within the parliament proposed that the constitution be based on fundamentals of Islam; which caused dismay among most of the women’s organizations, and there was an agreement among a few to call for a gathering in the central Al Firdawse square in dismay against the proposed legislation. When we headed to that location to show solidarity and further opposition to Islamic legislation, it was a surprise for us to see the leaflets printed by the Iraqi Women’s League to have a very moderate and minimal opposition to the Sharia proposal to re-write the laws- as if it were some governmental organization writing it. After a few women from OWFI, with the author included, stepped into Al Firdawse square, tens of media outlets left the organizers and rushed towards us, many of them asking simultaneously what OWFI’s position was against the new Islamic legislation proposals. Before I could respond to the questions, one of the organizing and leading ICP women, rushed into the circle and shouted to the cameras that I was not representing the gathering’s perspective, in a scene that was recorded by most media. She became afterwards a
20 member of the Iraqi Parliament. Many local women’s NGOs chose to follow in the footsteps of the ICP organizers for reasons connected to the sizeable membership of the party which provided more logistic support to the NGOs work, and also due to the fact that their agenda did not challenge the capitalists and the Islamist patriarchs making it a safe and risk-free agenda which did not criticize the patriarchs. Other examples of collaboration with right-wing agenda took place in the following years. It is a well-known fact locally that the Arab Spring demonstrations in the Iraqi Tahrir square were aborted due to the participation of a parliamentarian Islamist group -who already had tens of seats in the parliament, but were keen on getting a bigger share in power through gaining political popularity in Al Tahrir square. A group of leading individuals from the ICP collaborated with the Islamist group, which was a reason for the dismay of the ‘rank and file’ within the ICP; thus, resulting in group resignations from the party. Since 2015, OWFI withdrew from the general Friday demonstrations of the Tahrir square, and we decided to quietly focus on women’s dilemma under Daesh/ISIS and campaign to pressure the government to give importance to saving and protecting the women who were compromised by ISIS.
3.4 The Question of Women’s Right-to-life Altogether: Avoided by Both Mainstream Left and Women’s NGOs
Since OWFI started activism in 2003, one of our focal arguments was that women were being killed by patriarchal militias and family members on daily basis while the authorities and later the government would not take any measures against the crimes; and moreover, provide the legal cover-up for it. The US/UK “endeavours of building a democratic state” did not include an agenda of putting an end to the patriarchal violence against non-conforming women such as ‘honour-killing’ which had legislation to cover-up for it and make it legal with minimal punishment, or none17. This doesn’t mean that the occupation authorities did not get involved in changing Iraqi legislation, as they introduced political anti-Baath legislation, and puts plans into place for the right time to introduce their ‘free market’ economic policies (Klein 2005). The CPA even allowed Islamist factions in the Iraqi Governing Council to have the upper hand in writing the constitution in 2004, but they were not interested in intervening for women’s protection sake, which might have affected their ‘rapport’ with the main political partners: the extremist religious groups, and the tribal structures around the country with considerable armed man-power and no political positions other than self-interest and social status of Sheikhs. and Although both political partners, the Islamist extremists and the tribal heads, were different in appearance, they
21 were similar in the essence of patriarchal views, social patriarchal structure, and anti-freedom practices in general.
When OWFI spoke and campaigned against killings of women for ‘honour’ related reasons in 2003 and following years, the response from other women’s NGOs was that we only dwell on the negative, and that we defended ‘morally fallen’ women. It was implied that a ‘proper’ women’s NGOs, such as the ones affiliated with the ICP party and other liberal feminist ones, would speak only of women’s quota in the parliament-or rather elitist demands, while being in denial to the dire straits which befell the more vulnerable women in the country. An Iraqi female journalist who was an employee of the CNN office in Iraq in the fall of 2003 asked in a private conversation whether I was aware that OWFI “… was only defending prostitutes”. This was a personal encounter where she was expressing herself freely, while adopting the mainstream patriarchal position that “immoral women need to be disciplined, as the interests of the society come before the fallen women’s right to life” as Sanaa Al Khayat explains in her book Shame and Honour the local patriarchal perspective, where she interviewed Iraqi women from all walks of life in a previous decades (1992).
Participating in anti-imperialist political struggle within the WCPI which identifids as a Marxist- Leninist party for 15 years, and building a Marxist feminist women’s organization meanwhile which undertook the agenda of defending and saving hundreds of women from ‘honour killing’, violence and enslavement, was the core of the endeavours of OWFI. To document the Marxist feminist struggles so as not to be forgotten, is part of the reason for writing this research, while basing the study on personal experiences of founding and managing the organization to expand from a 3 women organization18 to one which gained thousands of members, opened a network of ten women’s shelters around Iraq including one LGBT shelter, and three branches in the other cities of the Arabic part of Iraq, a community radio station, and a newspaper.19
Despite a determined position on anti-capitalism and non-compromising feminism, it always felt that the feminist activism of OWFI did not have a clear-cut theory and agenda for organizing and for planning activities, which seems to be a common question among many of the socialist feminist writers since Zetkin, Mitchell, Dalla Costa (Vogel, 2013, p. 25,119) and later on Dorothy Smith (Smith, 1987, 2005). In OWFI activities, there was continuous bouncing back and forth between the liberal feminist agenda for legal reform, and between the general anti-
22 oppression agenda of the WCPI party and its general slogans of freedom and equality which did not automatically materialize into an agenda for achieving that equality. The general party line in response to the women’s inquiries was like most socialist parties: “if it is impossible to achieve equality in a capitalist society, why should the socialists enter the fight to defend and extend democratic rights?” (Vogel, 2013, p.124), or in other words, that women should take part in the socialist revolution which will provide them with full equality, with no middle grounds, transitions, or any specific feminist activity needed. An articulation as such may have been convincing before the Bolshevik revolution gained power in 1917, and still needed to organize women to progress efforts towards social equality, and not only formal legal equality (Marx, Engels, et al,1951, p.62). Although the uniqueness of WCPI was due to its prioritizing women’s freedom and equality, there was not much theoretic input in that direction. OWFI found itself alone in many of the dangerous undertakings of challenging patriarchs and saving women from dangerous threats, which was adopted by the women in OWFI and became a requirement for every woman and man who claimed to support the organization. The path which OWFI took for the political speeches, activities and organizing had to be based on basic concepts of Marxism, in addition to concepts of radical feminism and some demands of liberal feminists.
Background and Perspective of Researcher
My perspective is based on Marxist feminism, shaping views of understanding the world on critical scientific observation of the real circumstances, relations, and all surrounding matters, with consideration to the history from which they materialized, while anticipating their future. Having grown up in a religious culture of exaggerated respect to all that is male, it was hard to avoid questioning the reasons which make people kneel and whisper long unreasonable paragraphs to a non-existing being, which designates women as a home-servants, or objects of pleasure and child-birth. The discomfort towards what was idealist and patriarchal in religion took over my consciousness at an early age, and developed with the readings of the Egyptian feminist Nawal Al Saadawi, and took a stronger turn after being acquainted with friends of communist affiliation during graduate education in Baghdad. The time was the 1980s and Iraq was under the rule of the Arab Nationalist Baath regime with the full control of the dictator Saddam Husein over all aspects of life in the capital Baghdad. Although the Nationalists of the Baath encouraged women’s education, and eradicated illiteracy in those years, women’s social
23 freedoms were still a taboo that could not be addressed, and the objectification of females for male pleasure seemed to be the rule.
The critical feminist nature continued in my professional life within an engineering/architectural field, where I was usually designated as assistance to male ‘brilliance’. In spite of the creative and pleasant character of the field of work, problems of dealing with patriarchal authority and judgment seemed to follow me. Marriage life turned out to be mostly about indentured servitude and ‘white’20 slavery to gain the acceptance and gratitude of the husband, where I was expected to be a project of sacrificing oneself for the bigger and smaller needs and desires of others. A feminist understanding, and anger of the surrounding world developed a young woman’s consciousness to despise the patriarchal culture which was all against respect, freedoms, status, and comfort of females in the world surrounding me.
However, it was hard to formulate the anger and rejection of that reality into the right words and concepts until the opportunity came along of getting acquainted with a culture of critical observation of the world within the leftist political party, the WCPI, which I joined in 1998. The party identified itself as a feminist worker’s organization built on Marxist-Leninism. In those years, I felt that all the graduate and post-graduate education in sciences was useless for my empowerment in personal life as a woman, and within the immediate circle of social interactions. It was also an eye-opening experience to class differences which had existed in the surrounding environment without being questioned or criticized in any way, or even guessing whether they could be eradicated under a different political system. Prior to that, it was difficult, on the personal level, to understand the reason why a woman squatted in the next-door site to our house in Baghdad, with torn clothes and a bare-footed child, while the next-door neighbour had many cars in the garage. Being introduced to concepts as ‘human will power’ to change the world, ending ‘exploitation’ of workers, and ‘oppression’ of women, all sounded like a pleasant dream to my ears; a form of consciousness that came from without, and which elevated my understanding of the surrounding world to a higher level, with no myths of an ‘upper or a lower world’, or of a patriarch to fear in the real world or the afterlife.
It was quite liberating to get rid of the annoyance of ‘historic tales of superhumans’ told repeatedly over television by men with head-dresses and standing over high platforms as if they were above the rest of humanity. It was considerably empowering to connect to a knowledge
24 base which had surpassed idealist thought of religion, patriotism for the nation, or respect for the ‘pious’ patriarch, or rather the ‘hegemony of the spirit’ as explained by Marx and Lenin and quoted by Dorothy Smith (Carpenter, Mojab, 2017, p.96). Consciousness of these critical positions, and being organized around them with a supportive community was such a revolutionary and emancipatory transformation phase for me.
Between the years 1997-2003, I had stepped into what can be described as Marxist feminist epistemology, and had burnt all the bridges with idealist thought or identity, whether it originated in religious sources, or in the ethnic cultural historic stories of some ‘motherland’. The journey outside Iraq, and into a mixed Canadian scene exposed me to a cultural construct of racial variety and racist tension, which was an added eye-opening experience to develop anti-racist consciousness that was lacking in both of my personal feminist tendency, and in my organized leftist revolutionary education. Anti-racist and anti-ethnic/nationalist21 positions became part of a Marxist feminist consciousness which I took pride in during the activism against the extremely racist concepts in Iraq against Black Iraqis, or ‘other’ religions such as the Yazidi sect, a matter which was put to test during the ISIS enslavement of Yazidi Iraqi women. Some positions within Marxist feminist scholars in academia were eye-opening to the failures of the movement in Iraq, especially when these positions describe a Marxist group, which does not follow a feminist, anti- racist, and anti-ethnic/nationalist position as inadequate for confronting the social dilemma of modern times (Carpenter, Mojab, 2017, p.66).
In today’s world an added gender component is necessary to revolutionary feminist consciousness which is the inclusion of LGBTIQ rights to women’s rights, a matter which is still not being well-received by Marxist revolutionaries. For any movement which aims to criticize the relations of inequality, addressing gender and racial inequalities are a main area of social oppression which need close examination and confrontation.
A most critical perspective to add, and one which activist feminists may miss altogether is the awareness of the role of Imperialism in imposing destruction and poverty upon the people of the world, thus absorbing and confiscating all the resources which should be enjoyed by the people in the countries which suffered the Imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and others countries which were targeted by wars of ‘democracy’. And a last piece to add to this critical view, is that of recognizing what can be defined as Gendered Imperialism of the 21st century, which imposes
25 a components of gender-based sexual violence, sex-trafficking, women’s discrimination, and marginalization in the countries which were occupied by imperialist wars.
As this research is based on historic materialist understanding of the world, and aims to avoid abstractions and rhetoric of socialist parties’ political education- and in this case the author’s education, the investigation as Dorothy Smith describes “…will begin with ‘real premises’ and not with abstractions”. Smith’s studying of Marx’s writings about German ideologues in her article Ideology, Science, and Social Relations: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Epistemology gets her to follow his methodology of starting from real world premises instead of idealist thought (Carpenter, Mojab, 2011, p.19-24). This research begins with real premises of the historic moment of the occupation of Iraq, starting from the historic circumstances which lead to the military invasion, how it affected the society in the following years, how it shaped consciousness of political and militia groups, and the following years during which mass violence against women took place, and how it affected the consciousness of women and socialist political groups.
During two decades of political education and interaction within a working-class organization, the common practice was an otherwise ideologically informed position or thesis, to be proven throughout praxis, or writing. In other words, the research always started from an abstracted conceptualization of the actual world which may be inherent in a slogan, to be followed by proving it with every day experience. A scientific political approach as such, which follows ideas, or rather an idealist methodology of theorization, such as practised in the traditional social sciences, preserves ruling relations by design, rather than interrupt them as explained by Dorothy Smith in her book The Conceptual Practices of Power, A Feminist Sociology of Power (1990). In the case of our activism in Iraq, the practice although good-willed, confined us to an isolated area of thinking, concluding the same results every time, without digging deep into the ‘real premises’ of oppression surrounding us.
Studying real premises for a point of departure instead of ideological abstractions is in the core of Marxist dialectic method. A second rule is to search for the inner relations in these premises, and not for ‘things’ by themselves, in a dialectic manner where the inner relations of conflict and unity, transformations and negation are to be accounted for. The study will involve a set of relations for each case as applicable: women’s production and reproduction, women’s social
26 status, male-female relations, control of reproductivity, socially/culturally enabled practices of execution or enslavement, patriarchal hierarchy structures, culturally informed text, religious text as informing relations. The attempt may not achieve its purposes as far as planned, nevertheless the aim is to develop a dialectic method of investigation, and to diagnose abstracted and causal methods to be avoided as the author’s many years of political training have developed a perspective which is not used to this direction of thinking. It is time to turn this perspective upside down.
Relevant Literature Review
The sources which were necessary to conduct the study are divided into five categories. They are listed according to their relevance to the central arguments and development of the thesis to writings of: (a) Marxist feminist theorists who provide insight into methods of analysis, (b) political and feminist writers with critical positions from the war in Iraq and consequences, (c) Sociologist who developed concepts on sociology of Iraqi women, (d) Feminist historians of Iraqi women’s movement in modern history, and (e) OWFI statements written by researcher between 2003-2018.
The first category of Marxist feminist theorists’ sources was the most important for the development of methodology of investigation, and for resolving the main objective of the study which is a feminist Marxist agenda to lead women’s political struggles in Iraq. Himani Bannerji’s article Building from Marx: reflections of ‘race’, gender and class, written in 2005, is a contribution that comes after a series of writings on accommodating anti-racism and gender issues into Marxism and class struggle. Bannerji’s in-depth analysis of identity politics, and issues of ‘difference’ and violence which anti-capitalist approaches dwelled on for the past decades takes on a perspective which proves, albeit in Marxist methods, that excluding the mentioned above issues from Marxist theory will not help resolve the violence which is a result of their prevalence in Western communities (Bannerji, 1995; Mojab, 2015). She argues that ‘there is enough grounds in the work of Marx himself to create social movements which do not have to choose between culture, economy and society or ‘race’, class and gender in order to organize politics of social revolution” (Mojab, 2015, p.118). This position was central to many of the political activities which OWFI planned, such as organizing among Black-Iraqi women, or defending Yazidi women and community from discrimination which was not only under ISIS
27 rule, but also by all ‘Muslims’ of the Iraqi society which is the majority of the population. The debates within the WCPI political group rejected the initiative as unrelated to class identity, and as democratic rights to be demanded from the bourgeoisie, or in other words: wasted energy which would have been better spent if put towards a socialist revolution which achieves full equality for all. Bannerji’s debates open a door to make socialist struggles more inclusive and representative of all.
Dorothy Smith had a recurring theme in her writings: how to start an inquiry from the actualities, or rather the experiences of people instead of starting from theory, ideas or the experiences of those are higher in the institutions. Smith defines ‘the social’ from the standpoint of a woman, and investigates into the ruling relations which are mediated through institutional text (Smith, 2005). Smith’s Institutional Ethnography (IE) reflects dialectic methods of investigating a problematic starting from a woman’s standpoint, and addresses an issue which is central to this thesis: institutional violence against women which is mediated through language and institutional text, whereas language becomes integral to investigating the social and diagnosing the problematic (p.70). Although the main concepts and ontology of the IE method sound applicable to the problematic of this research, it nevertheless is a complex sociological exercise with multi- layered theoretic concepts, which may defeat the purpose of using it as a tool for analysis. The takeaway from this exercise is a basic understanding of ruling relations, investigating into institutional text and language, intersection of more than one institution, and coordinated activities in relation to the social and text. All the relations mentioned above can be investigated in the section of analyzing moments of committed mass violence on women in Iraq between 2003-2018.
Frigga Haug brings forward her articulation of a feminist agenda in 2009 for the new political Left Party in Germany DIE LINKE to be discussed in conferences of the women of the party, under the name The “Four in One perspective”: A Manifesto for a More Just Life, where she again, like Smith, “draws on lived experience as new sources for theory and knowledge” and aims to find the connection among fragmented struggles, similar to Bannerji:
The art of politics, as I learned from Rosa Luxemburg, is not about an a priori definition of the “right” goals and their implementation; the art of politics is about building connections among fragmented struggles, about creating a space of orientation which can re-contextualize the struggles and move them forward (Haug, 2009, p.120).
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Although women’s experiences around the world have similarities, yet conflict zones differ in the actual lived experience. Haug’s theorization for a just life for women and all is a good reference for the long-term objectives in the agenda which the research aims to draft.
Sara Carpenter and Shahrzad Mojab in their 2017 book: Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism and Knowledge explain a Marxist feminist approach as “an intellectual and political position that aims to cultivate feminist and anti-racist dialectical historical materialist analysis and revolutionary praxis” (p. 29). One of the main contributions of the book which is significant for this research, is the study of the relation between imperialism and the rise of fundamentalism/religious extremism, not as an opposition of forces in a ‘clash of civilizations’ kind of interaction, but as a relationship of ‘reinforcing’ each other in essence, while appearing to be opposing each other (p. 120).
In previous research on NGOs in Kurdistan of Iraq in 2000, Mojab criticizes women’s NGOs as the soft occupation which received training by conservative organizations in the US to promote American-style democracy, which in reality is submission to the imperialist conditions in Iraq and a social force to counteract the formation of anti-imperialist social movement (Mojab 2007). As true as the argument was about the main NGOs which were affiliate of the government, the same argument was used within the left political parties, such as the WCPI, to discredit and reject all feminist initiatives which were suggested by leading feminists in the party, causing demoralization and depoliticization for many of the women who felt they were failing their socialist values by being feminist22. Haifa Zangana had previously started the argument in describing the US occupation as ‘hardware’ while the local Iraqi woman groups as ‘software’ for serving and giving credibility to the imperialist endeavors in Iraq, and she goes further to say that “this software, which is also destroying the entire social structure of the society, can be considered another kind of violence against women” (Zangana 2007, as cited in Mojab 2007).
Many women got together in 2003 and founded OWFI according to anti-capitalist and feminist positions, and were interviewed intensively making the mandate as public as possible in the following years. We suffered from confrontations with women’s NGOs who defended the imperialist agenda, and were outspoken about it on public forums. Nevertheless, a women’s group had to legalize its existence after the Iraqi governments were constituted and began to crack down on leftist/communist groups, and the only way to be able to function, organize and
29 have a headquarters was to register as an NGO. It was hurtful for women of OWFI to be ‘disreputed’ by their own comrades in the party who took on the same position against our feminist activism. Generalizing the analysis to include all women’s NGOs in the argument was denying organizations like OWFI agency of political position, and did not express solidarity on the socialist or on the feminist side of the struggle. Another flaw in Zangana’s argument about Iraqi women’s position from Islam in Women of the New Iraq was that they do not have a problem with Islam but with imperialism, which is a generalization of a populist nature rather than a conclusion based on a study of local revolutionary feminist positions (Zangana, 2005, p.1). Positions as such deny agency to hundred of women activist who demonstrated against Sharia articles to be introduced to the Personal Status Law. It was true that women of less education, from villages, or from the newly rising class of ruling Islamic clans would defend their religion without asking about information regarding the application of the legislation, but when they would meet feminists to explain to them the matter and they gain the consciousness ‘from without’, their position would change. Working class women were too busy with details of survival in the post-war years to become part of any political debate at a large scale, which allowed claims and assumptions that they would not question their rights which would be aborted by Islamic legislation. Many Arab nationalist thinkers had stepped into the zone of tactics alliance with the Islamist opposition groups who opposed the occupation - namely the “Sunni” Islamist groups who were denied the control of the state. Similarly, Zangana had adopted the anti-occupation position, which was also shared by western anti-war and leftist groups’ who allied with Islamic parties in what appeared to be an anti-racist position in the West; nevertheless, it was nothing short of anti-feminist towards the women of Iraq who had suffered from the patriarchal blows of Islamic militias and attempts to legislate Sharia instead of, or into Iraqi laws. Zangana’s political positions which were compromising with Islamic groups (Zangana, 2005, p.2) were similar to anti-feminist western socialist groups who admired the resistance of Islamic factions to the US/UK military occupation, and those positions were shared by local ‘mainstream socialist group’ of the ICP who did not confront Islamic rulers of Iraq, hoping to get a share from power.
The last names in the list of Marxist feminist theorists which I referred to were Lise Vogel, for studying socialist feminists attempts to theorizing, and for providing activist related input (Vogel, 2013, p.14-15), and Silvia Federici. Federici articulates a historical analysis of the social
30 changes in Nigeria during the 1980s in connection to the restructuring of the economy and the imposing of neo-liberal measures, which in her opinion coincide with mass violence against women, just like its occurrence in Europe during the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the Spanish and French inquisition coinciding with primitive accumulation (Federici, 2004, p.19).
While I was searching for references and article about women’s situation in post-war Iraq, I ran into books of liberal feminists who had a critical position from the occupation of Iraq. Their research was done remotely, or through quick visits to Iraq. In Cynthia Enloe’s book of 2010: Nimo's war, Emma's war: making feminist sense of the Iraq War, Enloe bases her assessment of women’s situation on few factors deducted from interviews without placing them in the overall scene of interacting factors of politics in a quickly changing social environment. Caring to base feminism on women only, without sufficient context, gives an incomplete understanding of the issues at hand. Nadje Al-Ali and Nicole Pratt reported on Iraqi women’s activism in relation to the established post-war authorities in the book: What Kind of Liberation: Women and the occupation of Iraq (2009). Their scope of research did not go further than the list with whom the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authorities) dealt with, and preferred not to touch into the daring feminist work which other organizations did, while the main argument revolved around liberal feminist positions.
As for the ‘mainstream’ leftist literature on the same period in Iraq, Naomi Klein had many contributions, one of which was a book written in 2005 titled: No War: America’s Real Business in Iraq, analyzed the imperialist plan for the economy of Iraq, and described the main contenders on the ground. Nevertheless, in the endeavor to find a capable military enemy to the US occupation forces, Klein compromises her leftist secular positions while describing the religious Islamic militia of Muqtada Al Sadre, later known as Jaish Al Mahdi, as legitimate resistance and ‘legendary’ (Page 32). Supporting and admiring an Iraqi military resistance who aimed at gaining more shares in power, while pushing the society into a 21st century Medieval-style dark ages of fundamentalist sectarian bloodbath, could not have been a progressive position which was responsible of Iraqi human lives. A wave of killings of women by Jaish Al Mahdi militias had already begun in Baghdad, Basrah and Umara in the same time of the researcher’s visits, a fact which could not have been ignored unless a researcher’s priorities were somewhere else: in overcoming their own capitalist enemy which they could not overcome in their part of the world-
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North America; thus turning our cities and lives into battlefields where Iraqi lives and peaceful future were no priority.
Many of the mainstream Leftists in the US and in Europe such as Naom Chomsky and Tariq Ali, committed the same mistake, of being apologists for Islamist between 2003-2008, considering their attacks as a mere response to US imperialist terrorism, thereby setting the mainstream western leftist position to be in support of fundamentalist political religious groups of the Middle East, and allowing the Imams to be the spokespersons in the anti-war demonstrations in the west, while preventing the leftist Iraqis to speak or respond; thus supporting the Islamist forces in Iraq and the Middle East at large. In our experience in Baghdad, the South and the West of Iraq, the Islamist “resistance” turned the guns against the civilians whenever they found the battle field not levelled, and against their benefit. When unable to reach into the American military camps or the Green Zone, they unloaded their explosives against the biggest number of civilians in a market place almost on daily basis. These ‘resistance’ forces were the ones who caught the attention of the mainstream American left in the beginnings.
In general, the anti-imperialist political material which was written about the war on Iraq rarely considered the immediate well-being of the Iraqi population, preferring to look for the credible opponents of the US military, without considering that a fundamentalist Islamist rule of Iraq will abort centuries of hardly-won achievements in Iraq, and that generations of women will be victimized under such a rule.
Just like the political powers on the ground, the authors on post-war Iraq would be one of the following: either a liberal feminist who assimilates on the surface with the positions of the mainstream Left, but does not acknowledge non-compromising feminist positions against religion or capitalism, or a Western leftist political writer whose priority was not in feminist causes. The third category was that of writers who were under the influence of Arab Nationalist thought, regretting the loss of Iraq to the newly rising Islamic forces, and to whom the issue of women’s rights was a battlefield against the Islamists, albeit not a central concern. The book of Iraq in the twenty-first century: regime change and the making of a failed state for Tareq and Jaqueline Ismael follows this tradition (2015).
Positive literature review is usually achieved when a researcher studies the contextual social relations while connecting them to a feminist standpoint, and with a historic and dialectic
32 method. In order to offer the subject its fair share of inquiry, the surrounding social relations need to be studied locally and internationally, and can be done best from a local perspective which has a stake in Iraqi women’s liberation. Many of the authors who wrote about the women of Iraq covered some of the factors mentioned above albeit not all.
Sanaa’ Al Khayatt’s book: Shame and Honour, is a sociological study of women of Iraq in 1990s. It describes many aspects of Iraqi women’s socialization as non-equals to men. Her research digs into the ways in which Iraqi women perceive themselves as dependants on men, even if they were professional breadwinners. Al Khayatt analyzes women’s status from a cultural and sociological feminist perspective concluding that the withdrawal of women’s status is a cultural function which originates in ancient history. Although Al Khayatt’s analysis of women’s regress has historic background, it does not shed light upon the material social conditions and the status of women (Khayat, 1990). In ‘real life premises’, and after two decades of changes in social material conditions, Iraqi women’s status has plunged to an unprecedented low, to which the standards of the 1970s and 1980s are considerably high. Connecting the social relations whether political or economic is a key point to gaining a comprehensive understanding of the subject.
As for historian feminist writers, Noga Efrati’s had noteworthy views on leftist feminism of the twentieth century. Efrati reflects an extensive knowledge of the beginnings of the modern Iraqi women’s movement throughout the twentieth century. She explains the role of the Iraqi Communist Party in starting the premise altogether during their support of the first feminist committees (Efrati, 2012, p.114) which addressed the need for women’s education, and the attempts of minimizing religious and tribal control over women. Efrati finds that although the ICP supported the concept of women’s liberation and empowerment, it did not assign the task to women, but rather had a leading male party member managing their meetings and holding the decision-making role.
Iraqi Women’s Movement: A Chronology
A timeline of women’s movements in Iraq, not including the Kurdish part of Iraq, in the past 100 years can be itemised chronologically like the following:
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1920: Establishment of the first women’s organization in Iraq: The Women’s Awakening Club (Nadi Alnahda Alnisaiyya) headed by Asma Alzahawi, that was publicly in opposition to polygamy (mostly by elite affluent women)
1923: Paulina Hassoun launches “Layla” magazine; the first women’s publication
1945: establishment of Iraqi Women's Union (Alitihad Alnisa’I Aliraqi), the main legal women’s organization until 1958, sanctioned by the Baath regime.
1952: founding of underground League for the Defense of Women's Rights (Rabitat Aldifa’ ‘an Huquq Almar’a), headed by Naziha Aldulaimi who later became the Minister of Municipalities and the first women cabinet member in the Arab world after the coup that toppled the monarchy in 1958.
1953: Nazik Almala’ika wrote a poem describing and vocalizing women’s sense of loss in the child custody cases that always favoured men, saying that a father’s right to tear children away from their mother is the harshest and most unreasonable type of deprivation.
1958: The underground League received its official recognition in December as the Iraqi Women’s League (Rabitat Almar’a Aliraqiyya), many of its members were activists from the Communist Party. Rose Khadduri, head of Tahrir College for Girls and leaders of the Women’s League, as well as poet Lami’a Abbas were vocal about the inequality in divorce rights, this was part of the debate that lead up to the passing of the civil law
1959: passing of the Personal Status Law, which codified the legal age for marriage as 18 years old, banned forced marriages, restricted polygamy and eliminated differential religious treatment when it came to family matters. Legislation also let go of Islamic inheritance laws, according equal shares to men and women. The law was drafted by the Iraqi Women’s League, headed by Mubejel Baban and Bushra Perto, and submitted to the government. (Personal Status Law No. 88, published December 30, 1959).
1960: Conference held by the Iraqi Women’s League with the Committee on Women’s Problems called for more amendments on the Law.
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1963: The Ba’ath coup resulted in an amendment of the Personal Status Law, including the repeal of the far-reaching inheritance reforms
1968: Establishment of The General Federation of Iraqi Women as a branch of the Ba’ath Party.
1976: Article published by lawyer and women’s rights activists, Budur Zaki, in Althaqafa Aljadida (a communist publication) discussing the short-comings of the Personal Status Law following the work and debate of other women activists in the 50s and 70s, like Naziha Aldulaimi and Naima Alwakil. She recommended punishment for forcing a woman to marry.
1978: The General Federation of Iraqi Women pushed for a new law, regarding women’s rights. Nadje Al-Ali believes this signifies the kind of pressure activists and women in the Federation were putting on the government and party. Althaqafa Aljadida Symposium held by the Communist Party regarding the amendment, included Su’ad Khayri and Nasrin Nuri.
1980: Amendment to Law 188 allowed men to marry more than one wife without a judge’s permission if the woman was a widow.
1982: a resolution of the Revolutionary Command Council declared that a divorced man doesn’t need a judge’s permission to take back his wife.
1985: a paragraph added to article 39 stating that if a man divorced his wife and it appeared to the court that his divorce was arbitrary and harmful to his ex-wife, he would be required to pay compensation commensurate with his financial status and the extent of his abuse.
1987: an amendment to the Personal Status Law came as a result of the decades long debate by feminist activists and lawyers like Layla Husayn Ma’ruf, Nasrin Nuri and Budur Zaki, that allowed authority to judges to permit marriages of 15-year-old girls only if they found a compelling reason to do so.
2003: Founding the organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq in June 22nd in Al Hiwar Hall in Baghdad in the presence of Nasik Ahmad and Yanar Mohammed. The organization office was in a burnt bank building in Al Rasheed street, and the upper floor was turned into the first shelter for women in Iraq.
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2003: Resolution 137, under the Interim Governing Council of Abdelaziz Alhakim, abolished the Personal Status Law (December 29th, 2003). Women responded by organizing mass demonstrations and in Al Firdawse Square and a delegation of ICP women handed a petition to Paul Bremer demanding the repeal of the decree.
A chronology may paint parts of the picture based on the achievements of leading women, but it can hardly convey the essence of the changes which were brought forward by a women’s movement in connection to the rise of communism in the country as a whole. Our mothers’ generation witnessed a giant leap leaving their kitchens, taking off their hijab and Abaya, and becoming the first generation of university graduates, and even joining their husbands and brothers into the arena of political struggle in demonstrations and clandestine political activism, mostly in connection with the Iraqi Communist Party and other socialist and communist parties in Iraq.
The rise and popularity of Communism in Iraq introduced modernity and political-based feminism into a big part of the Iraqi society; thus, encouraging families to enroll their daughters into education, work, and allowing them to personal choice in marriage. Women’s situation and status in the modern times of Iraq were related to the prevailing politics: if the Nationalists/tribes had the upper hand, women would have limited rights and most probably be confined to their households, while the periods of strength of the Communists and Socialists albeit in opposition to power, meant progress in women’s rights, appearances in the public realm, access to education and work, and most importantly the weakening of tribal influence to lives of women who gained their independence also partly due to a rising economy and their access to jobs.
The victory of the Islamist political groups which were supported to power by the imperialist control over Iraq after 2003, was an unprecedented blow to the situation and status to women, turning the clocks back more than a century in time, and hijacking most of the hard-won privileges of the past seven decades. In a post-war period of 2003 -2018, Iraqi feminists always referred to the glorious victories of the leftist women’s movement over the patriarchs, whether in tribes, or in the mosques. The older generation of feminists continue to cling to the progress of the past while comparing the current tragic situation of their daughters to the past era.
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Chapter 2 Social and Political Context in Post-War Iraq: Challenges and Political Confrontations
The observations included in this chapter are mostly results of first-hand witnessing and experience of political feminist activism in Iraq during the period 2003-2018; whereas the political analysis is a result of discussions and writings among the WCPI leading members. This chapter starts with the bigger political picture, and then zooms into the parts which were affected by the Imperialist intervention of the CPA and partner forces. The chapter demonstrates the socio-political context with the internal and external relations of contradiction and unity; with the objective to construct a ‘moving picture’ of the society starting on the eve of occupation in March 21st 2003, and a walk-through of fifteen years of occupation and post occupation political, social and military scene, with special focus on the results of these changes on the relation of the state with women, and how it regulates systemic violence or disregards and allows other kind of systemic patriarchal violence.
After drawing the bigger social and political picture, the research reaches to a main part of the thesis, explaining how OWFI was founded, the circumstances, then challenges and confrontations. This Chapter will end with a demonstration of OWFI’s feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist/ethnist activities, in preparation for the main problematic of the thesis which is the explication of the intensification of patriarchal violence against women in post-war times to amount to mass killings, day-light enslavement and extremely misogynist legislation in post-war Iraq.
The Iraqi Political Context before the Occupation
OWFI statements were published over the organization’s website, newspaper issues, and sent to a list of email addresses of women’s groups around the world. The statements address the main political changes in Iraq, specifically in the area of women’s rights. Websites were new when the organization was founded, and so was the use of internet; which made it hard to keep full digital record of OWFI’s history. A list of the available translated OWFI statements are copied into Appendix A, while the newspaper issues of the Organization’s newspaper are copied into Appendix B.
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It is important to point out that when the 2003 military attack was launched on Iraq, the Iraqi society had already suffered from thirteen years of economic sanctions which were imposed by the UN as a punishment for the Iraq government’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. As I was living in Iraq in that time, I remember the day of August 2nd 1990. Within his daily airtime over television, Saddam Husein uttered considerable rhetoric about Kuwait, but nobody listened anymore as he had monopolized TV airtime from morning till evening. On that day, it was business as usual for most Iraqis who went about their work, study or families as if there was nothing new; nevertheless, we were surprised at the number of military tanks which passed in front of the houses which were on inter-city route. My family’s house was on such a street, and I was surprised at the endless hum of military tanks over the asphalt. I was used to hearing Radio Kuwait every evening as it had a pleasant series about Oum Kalthoum’s life23. In that evening, there was no signal for Radio Kuwait on the air, and I thought that my radio did not work well. Most Iraqis were as oblivious as I was when we heard the unbelievable news within two days that was: adding Kuwait to Iraq as the 19th governorate.
When the UN decided to impose the economic sanctions against Iraq, Saddam Husein and his family continued to live utmost prosperity in tens of palaces which were designed and built for him around the country. The punishment was against the people, depriving us from nutritious food, as they blocked all export of Iraqi oil and froze the economy, causing a high increase in currency inflation which turned the Iraqi dinar into useless paper which lost its purchasing power. After having lived for decades at a high life-standard which was similar to developed world countries, working class Iraqis could not afford nutritious meals anymore, and we had to watch our babies wither in front of us as we could not afford buying milk anymore. In the first year or two of the economic sanctions, women sold their jewellery/gold which they had as marriage gift, and families sold their vehicles or property in order to afford to have decent meals. Whoever had the financial ability to leave the country did not wait, as the consecutive wars and economic sanctions left no hope for most. By the year 1997, starvation caused high mortality rates, that of babies, whereas food deprivation reached to unprecedented levels, forcing many individuals to go through drastic measures such as sell their organs to feed their families or to travel outside Iraq.
It was in those years of the mid 1990s that the women of Iraq, and namely the widows of the war with Iran, had to suffer in a variety of ways in order to feed their children the bare minimum. I
38 was one of those mothers, and could not afford enough milk for my toddler baby although I was working as an architect and had a relatively good salary. It was only in the last years of the 1990s that starvation was slightly alleviated after the ‘Food for Oil’ program of the UN which allowed the state to sell a small part of its oil to get over the health crisis which the Iraqi people tolerated.
Those years made Iraqis lose their faith in the international community, which allied with Saddam Husein while he was strong and fighting with Iran - empowering him against the Iraqi people, and they supplied him with all the destruction tools which he purchased with oil money. The same international community with the leadership of the US government decided to impose UN sanctions after the invasion of Kuwait, which hurt and demoralized people, punishing them for the military decision of a ruthless dictator, as if suffering from the despotism of the regime was not enough punishment. If not for the economic sanctions which had rendered Iraqis helpless, deprived, and on the way to leaving the country, a revolt could have been the alternative as public anger began to materialize against Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds in the North of Iraq, and his consecutive wars had turned the masses against him.
The Iraqi society was living under tragic and deadly circumstances as such on the eve of the US/UK invasion of Iraq. Most Iraqis had first hand experience of deprivation, mal-nutrition, or death of an immediate relative throughout the consecutive wars on Iraq. Iraqis have had brutal lessons of how Imperialist powers can find ways for imposing starvation, deprivation and mass killing upon the people of occupied countries whenever the US decided it, and how little Iraqi life meant to those powers. And yet, the US government broadcast their celebration after each military attack that they had achieved democracy and liberated the men and women of Iraq.
When George Bush and his military commanders accused the Iraqi state of having weapons of destruction or having partnered in the planning of September 11 attacks of New York, they bullied the world into supporting and applauding their ‘heroic’ efforts to bring democracy to Iraq. After destroying Iraq’s infra-structure, and realizing the occupation of Iraq, all sorts of justifications were thrown in the air, such as ‘unfinished business by Bush the father’, or ‘liberating the women and men of Iraq’, or other kinds of lies and justifications.
While most of the world explained it as confiscation of an important source of oil, our political circle insisted that it was not about oil, and that the US wanted to show other imperialist competitors that it was the sole policeman of the world. Moreover, the project of invading Iraq is
39 a post-colonial phase of capitalism where capitalist expansion and imperialism become the main characteristic of this phase (Carpenter, Mojab, 2017, p.116).
7.1 Iraq during the 1980s: A Reckless Dictatorship with Incredible Wealth
Prior to all the international attention which Iraq received over western media, it was only one of the Middle-Eastern countries with a prevailing Arab Nationalist rule - the Baath Arab Socialist Party, with state-controlled economy which introduced considerable major economic reform such as heavy industrialization, and nationalization of education and health, creating material circumstances which were favorable in the Middle East. In appearance, it was a socialist system where means of production appeared to be social ownership, and not private property. In essence, the means of production were the property of the state, thus creating a state-capitalist system which offered some well-being to citizens through nationalization of most basic services. Living standards in Iraq before the consecutive wars were one of the highest standards of living in the Middle-East.
This description was hardly applicable to all of Iraq; as the Kurdish North - named Kurdistan after the 1990s when the UN decided it a no-fly zone - was deliberately kept poor and under- developed throughout the 1970s and 1980s of the past century. Nationalist Kurdish political groups had repeated attempts to gain self-determination going back as far as the modern history of the state of Iraq, and the rebel clashes with the central Iraqi government had excelled during the seventies, to which the Baath dictatorship responded with mass killings and eradication of thousands of villages24. During the 1980s, the Baath regime committed genocide against Kurds in the North where the numbers of killed rebels, people, women and children surpassed 180,000. In the Kurdish cities in the North of Iraq, the headquarters of the Baath Arab Socialist Party were regarded as symbols of Nationalist cruelty and oppression of those who did not succumb to the rule of the Arab Nationalist Party, and continue to be referred to as such. Although Arab Nationalist oppression against ‘others’ was shared by other ethnic groups such as Turkmen, Christian, and others, the main bulk of ethnic/nationalist discrimination was aimed at political Kurdish rebels and activists, some of whom were part of the main Kurdish Nationalist parties, while others were communist groups or different affiliations.
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When the Baath regime brought forward the leading figure of Saddam Husein in the seventies, he managed to climb his way up to the top of the Arab Nationalist political party through a mix of leadership abilities, charisma, assassinations and terrorizing of opponents. Husein established his position as the top figure of the ruling party. At that time the full brutality of the Arab Nationalist Baath party began to show in examples of butchery of political adversaries, a phenomenon which was common among the prevailing Arab Nationalist parties in the region.
Saddam Husein decided to defend a fabrication of idealist nationalist imagination, the ‘Eastern Gate of the Arab Nation’ by starting a war with the Islamic Republic of Iran - a country which is five times bigger than Iraq, and had historically invaded Iraq for long periods of time. Husein had plans to try his newly purchased military apparatus, practise military power in this war, and to crush Kurdish rebellion and non-rebellion in the North within a bloody military campaign of Al Anfal25, which amounted to ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish people (HRW,1993).
Sitting on an incredible wealth of oil which was estimated to be the second largest deposit in the world - of 112 billion barrels (Cohen, Efrati, 2011. p.49) - after Saudi Arabia, and only after years of nationalization of the Iraqi oil (61-73) which brought unprecedented revenue to the state26, the dictator and head of the state started his self-claimed leadership of the ‘Arab Nation’ with war on Iran, followed by genocide against the Kurdish population of Iraq or any other rebel group, only to end it with his disastrous military campaign of invading the neighbour in the South, Kuwait. That was when his allies in the West decided to take the opportunity for a new imperialist conquest that gives them back privileges to Iraqi oil which were lost only a couple of decades ago. It is noteworthy to mention here that during the 1980s the Iraqi state enjoyed some American economic and military supply support, and that although there was a declared ban on arming Iraq, many of the military imports to Iraq came from the American government. In Iraq, we always doubted the public anti-American position, and referred to Donald Rumsfeld’s27 quote of Iraq being an agent of stability in the region - even after Saddam had gassed Kurds with chemical agents. Moreover, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait increased the controlled oil deposit by another 104 billion barrels which would have rivaled Saudi production and gave the Iraqi state too much power. It didn’t take the US long to organize an international military campaign with UN support to undo the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and step into the region where Iraq was a potential country with rewarding resources.
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7.2 The First Gulf War on Iraq Followed by a Decade of Economic Sanctions
I was a student in Baghdad University preparing an essay for a philosophy class, when the American threats against Iraq were broadcast demanding immediate withdrawal from Kuwait. We heard the rhetoric over television in both directions-from Bush and his ‘men’ and Saddam and his ‘mouthpieces’. We were mostly in disbelief to the fact that great powers would level with Iraq and launch a military invasion against us. During the class of philosophy, we were asking questions of how to go about writing the essay, when the professor sounded preoccupied, and disinterested in our questions brushing them aside while saying: “lets see what happens in the coming days”. Most of us thought she is imagining things, as to how would it be possible that the whole world of 34 states to be unified in bombing Iraq, a small country with not much military ability left after a decade of war with Iran. We were wrong, and she was right!
At approximately 2:20 am of 17th of January 1991, the ground in Baghdad shook with many explosions, electricity went off, and so did the telephone lines. The telecommunications tower was bombed leaving the city in the dark. We had to find a corner of the house which was surrounded by solid walls, and waited until the morning, when we knew that the threat was real, and there was not much to do other than run away from targeted locations, find an air-raid shelter, and consume as little fuel and food as possible. We found out next day that the concrete underground shelters were too crowded, and the newer and stronger shelters were ‘reserved’ for the Baathist officials’ families. I took my immediate family and went to my parents’ house which had an underground basement, baking bread from bad quality flour, running to the basement whenever the sirens rang, and putting tape and cloth around windows in caution of chemical gas bombing. Being around one’s own family provided moral support, but did not last long, as all friends and family began to flee from Baghdad which was doomed for continuous bombing from the US/UK coalition.
My husband had not gone to his military post as a recently recruited soldier for almost a week, a matter for which the Baathists would punish with hanging. In order to avoid punishment, he dressed in military and left to his unit, while I stayed alone with my toddler baby. My parents had left Baghdad, making use of a full tank of gas, trying to reach to my father’s hometown Telafar in the far North-west of Iraq, where it was doubtful that the war could reach. I stayed
42 with a baby in a dark and empty house, waiting for the husband to come back from his unit, and I was meanwhile baking bread and cooking dry food which was available in the storage room. When the sirens rang, two young families from the neighbouring houses came and shared the family basement with me.
My son was a year old, but could not walk yet. In one of the cold mornings of January, we woke up, and I sat him on the pot, while I prepared some breakfast. An explosion shook the ground so hard and felt it was very close to us. With that startle, my son took his first steps and continued to walk, and I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or sad about it. It felts like that memory of terror and helplessness would stay alive for a lifetime.
It took my husband almost two weeks to be able to leave his unit and come back home. With no electricity or telephones, those days were very difficult. The oil fields around Baghdad were exploded, either by the Iraqi government so as to have fumes in the air obstruct vision for bombers, or by air raids of the coalition. We had to breathe the fumes and had black rings around the nose by the end of the day, and the fumes lasted for many months. Ground-shaking bombing continued for a month and a half, much stronger than those in the previous local wars, until we heard from neighbors that the military attack was almost over. In the last day, I woke up in an early hour of the morning, to the loudest noise I could ever bear hearing. It felt as if my heart beats stopped for many moments with that sound. It turned out to be a coalition jet fighter breaking the sound barrier, right on the top of our heads, at very low altitude. I had witnessed many regional wars in my lifetime, the war in Lebanon and the Iraq-Iran war to name a couple, but that moment was the most dreadful I had ever felt, leaving me with close-to-death terror.
During the week before the end of the military raids, we heard from the neighbours that there was an uprising in a working class neighborhood in Washash – in the western side of Baghdad, and in many other cities. There was no television or local radios yet, so it was all based on word- of-mouth. In spite of the extreme demoralization, we had still hoped that all the misery could have a good result to it, and maybe the hope of an uprising against Saddam. Later we found out that Saddam was given the freedom to crush the uprising brutally, while the American helicopters watched overhead.
Between dictatorship brutality and Imperialist high-tech terrorism, there was not much hope to life in Iraq. Once the Iraqi army was forced out of Kuwait, with so many young men killed or
43 wounded in the process, and the military air raids reaching to an end, we heard that the United Nations had prepared to punish the Iraqi people for Saddam’s military conquest. Next thing was the poverty and deprivation caused by the United Nations economic sanctions.
Between 1991 and 1995, we began to realize how brutal the UN can be in depriving us and our children from good food, and how they could make us poor, as the Iraqi Dinar went down in value from 3 dollars in 1980s to approximately 0.3 cent in the 1990s. The Iraqi government began to feel the pressure of the public, and therefore allowed individuals to travel outside Iraq, thus causing a heavy wave of Iraqi migration to neighbouring and western countries. I was among the 1995 travellers to Lebanon, and then applied to come through the immigration process to Canada.
In the years 1996 and 1997, starvation and non-treated illness in Iraq reached to epidemic rates due to lack of medicine which was not allowed as a result of the economic sanctions, causing the death of half a million Iraqi children in that decade, a question to which the notorious response of the American Secretary of State was that: it was worth the price28. When rhetoric of democracy and freedom is the appearance and the spoken word, while the reality and the essence of the plan was the ransacking of the resources of a people while imposing starvation, physical and moral torture on Iraqis, imperialist plans had prepared the ground for an offensive as a following chapter that was not possible to stop or avoid.
7.3 The Second Gulf War on Iraq 2003
At the end of a decade of economic sanctions of the 1990s, people had reached the end of their tolerance, which was only made possible with the Oil-for-Food program of the United Nations, allowing the state to sell part of its oil in exchange for food and medicine. The food rations which were provided with this program did not offer much nutrition, but were good enough to keep people alive, albeit malnourished.
As for the Iraqi army, it had reached its worst condition in decades, where supplies were minimal, and corruption affected its performance. Soldiers would not subject themselves to death after the many wars and military attacks which they endured.
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Civil life standards, especially life of women reached to their lowest point in the modern history of Iraq. Although women constituted a considerable part of the public sector employees29 and had been economically independent for many generations, the extreme inflation of the Iraqi Dinar made an average monthly salary enough to cover a few nutritious meals only, leaving more than a million widowed working mothers in a difficult position of not being able to feed their children. The Iraqi population relied on the food rations which were provided by the government for subsidized prices, for their meals which lacked protein and nutrition. These were the conditions of the people and the military at the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The ‘Hollywood production’ of bombing of the presidential palace in Baghdad was the following chapter. The launching of the ‘new’ Imperialist war on the night of March 20th /21st of 2003 was after millions of people around the world demonstrated, and especially in the US and the UK where the anti-war demonstrations took place, unprecedented in size. Forty eight countries allied in the international military attack against Iraq led by the US and the UK. Overwhelming and unprecedented demonstrations were organized within the countries of the allies with not much response from their governments, all of which revealed the essence of democratic political systems as imperialist capitalist states where capitalist gains and rulers are the sole decision makers.
7.4 Reasons behind the 2003 Occupation
According to an American governmental study of the National Defense University30, the official reasons for war on Iraq were: (a) the fight against terrorism in connection with Al Qaeda attack of September 11-2001, (b) the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, and (c) the need to arrest Saddam Husein and the abolishment of his regime in order to restore democracy (Bassil in JHSS, 2012, p.29-43)
In reality, it was unbelievable that the US intelligence were not aware of the hostility between Saddam Husein and the leaders of Al Qaeda, and the friendship between Bin Ladens - one of whom was the leader of Al Qaeda - and the Bushes. And as for the weapons of mass destruction, Iraq had many weapons which were purchased during the late seventies and early eighties. The US was aware of it because some of the purchases were from US companies. Many years of UN inspectors’ expeditions in Iraq during the 1990s could not retrieve any weapons of mass destruction. As for the last reason of ousting and arresting Saddam Husein, it went against the
45 mandate of the United Nations of maintaining peace and security among the nations of the world. The US took it upon itself to decide to take down the government of Iraq.
All of the arguments listed above were not legally justifiable or logical. Nevertheless, the US/UK attack was planned and implemented for reasons which were obviously not connected to the officially announced ones.
All the resistance from the UN Security Council permanent members did not defer the US plan which always had the support of the UK. The US/UK decision of launching war on Iraq without UN approval was an exercise in political hegemony among the big five, or rather the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council, as none of them could stop it in spite of objections.
It was also an imperialist endeavor of getting a secure source of oil to reduce the US dependence on Saudi Arabian oil. The first Gulf war which followed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait alarmed the US administration that Iraq will be in control of one of the biggest deposits of oil in the world, and therefore they responded within months to get the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. The second Gulf war was - according to many American officials - to complete unfinished business.
The last official reason mentioned in the research above mixes the ousting of the regime with words about democracy, which in reality means the opening of Iraq to become a ‘free market’ of international investment, selling the Iraqi public sector in addition to monopoly of extracting resources to foreign investors (Klein, 2005, p.28-29). Naomi Klein explains how the US invasion relied on ‘Shock therapy’ in order to make Iraqis accept all the conditions of restructuring and privatization which the CPA planned to impose on them. (p.8-11)
In 2003 and 2004, conditions of unemployment and poverty played a strong factor in people’s hopelessness, despair and surrendering to any new policies. Another factor was the lack of transparency in making decisions which were all made behind closed doors with individuals who were benefiting from the invasion. Klein praises an Iraqi top cleric calling him a “formidable opponent Grand [sic] Ayatollah….”for delaying the drafting of the constitution which could have given legality for restructuring and privatization, and Klein does not question the fact that the US administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, gave him (i.e. the top Shia cleric) the upper hand in running the Iraqi state, thus turning Iraq into a mosque-run state with no division of state and religious
46 institution, a matter which brought sectarian wars and theologian ruling ideology to Iraq, and caused years of sectarian massacre.
For most outsiders, the war on Iraq was one between Imperialist capitalism and the Islamic political movement in the region of the Middle East. In Iraq, the rhetoric of US defiance was preached over the mosques during Friday prayers, with no mention of the fact that Islamic parties could not have gained power without political and logistic support of the US/UK occupation of Iraq. The two parties’ common interest areas were more than their differences; and thus their cooperation happened in stages of empowerment to Islamic religious figures, turning them into ‘legal’ political parties, huge religious institutions with spokespersons, and eventually taking over the political Iraqi scene while implementing all of the changes in political economy towards the ‘free market’ and privatization, as described by Carpenter and Mojab (2017, p.120).
The dilemma of North American leftists’ analysis in 2003 was that they considered Islamist movements on the ground as the anti-imperialist forces, and they refused any opposition against the extremist religious parties in the West with the pretext that the opposition against religion falls under racism and hate culture. The North American left were fierce in fighting their own religious right-wing groups in the West, but denied Iraqi leftists and feminist the same right to oppose their own extremist religious groups – the political Islamic parties. OWFI women were accused of being racist when we criticized and confronted the religious Islamic right-wingers within our communities, and were not allowed to speak in anti-war gatherings in Canada and in UK. It is rare to find revolutionary literature in North America that recognizes the alignment of Islamism with the US/UK imperialist politics in Iraq and other invaded countries of our region. Carpenter and Mojab’s (2017) text Revolutionary Learning is one of the few publications to reveal the Imperialist and Islamist alliance.
7.5 Imperialist Politics of Division Based on Religion, Ethnicity and Gender: A Requirement to Confiscate Iraqi Oil
In his book: My year in Iraq, Paul Bremer the US administrator of post-occupation Iraq, describes his first days after arriving to the Iraqi capital in May 2003. In a visit to an Iraqi hospital, he describes newborn children in a children’s hospital as “…dispossessed Shiite children, whose families suffered the brunt of assassinations … by Saddam’s Intelligence services…” (Bremer, 2006, p.34). He had seen babies inside incubators who could not have
47 possibly given away their sectarian identity, but all that Bremer saw in that scene was his understanding of the only probable reason for the suffering Iraqi babies. The babies’ mothers had suffered from a decade of starvation during the economic sanctions which the US government was determined to maintain. Bremer and his provisional government, chose to build their plan for Iraq on that simplistic formula of an ‘oppressed Shia population’, thus inflicting on Iraqis more than a decade of sectarian strife. In his book, Bremer repeatedly mentions how he assured the Islamist Shia31 ‘clerics’ whom he met that there will be a majority of Shia in the assigned governing council.
He goes on about how all the religious and ethnic groups should be represented in the Iraqi Governing Council, and about how hard he had to work in order to make the council representative of all Iraqis. Bremer’s understanding and categorization of people was based on their religious sect and ethnicity, not on their political affiliation, which was expected from the administrator of a new colony where dividing the population at large was required to keep it under control.
It was also humiliating for the local political community, that the occupying top authority in Iraq viewed all as merely believers of a religion or another, or as speaking this language or the other; whereas assuring to have believers of all the religions, sects and ethnic identities as representation of Iraqis. Bremer’s reductionist interpretation of people’s affiliation as a mere religion or ethnicity corresponds with the content of ‘identity’ politics which is one of the methods to replacing class awareness and class representation with religious and ethnic representation, which works perfectly for a capitalist Imperialist project. Identifying by the ‘god’ a person prays for, or a historic idol to give the nation’s name to, is a relic of European Medieval thinking, when individuals identified as belonging to a religious sect or an ethnic group. In those centuries, when all that prevailed was idealist thought of religious identity, or primitive materialist thought of family lineage as an evaluation and classification of human beings, such a representation would have been valid; one which Bremer bestows on Iraqis in the 21st century, and describes in his book that it could have a better chance of being accepted. In essence, the Imperialist project needed to paralyze and negate all possibilities of working class opposition to the US/UK projects, and have therefore imposed an agenda of political ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ as explained by Bannerji in her recent writings (Bannerji et al, 2001). And as a result, the ‘medieval-style’ new rulers of Iraq will prioritize their sectarian religious dominance and battles,
48 giving the imperialist forces all the comfort of controlling Iraqi oil in order to reap the fruits of the military conquest.
With a political plan of religious, sectarian and ethnic representation, identity politics were introduced into Iraq for the first time in its modern history; thus resulting in a government of apolitical blocks of sectarian bigotry fight against each other, starting with words, and continuing with bombing, assassination squads, and armed militias which decide who had the upper hand in different parts of Iraq. Sectarian differences did not exist in politics before the US occupation. The sort of sectarianism which existed in Iraq previously was a social sectarianism which was stronger in the rural areas than in the cities, and had almost disappeared in urban areas which amounted to 70% in modern Iraq, and to 80%32 at the end of the 1980s. What was left of it in the big cities was no more than cross-sectarian folklore jokes (Ismael, Ismael,2015).
As a direct result of the sectarian representation which Bremer brought upon Iraq, the country became a conglomerate of areas of influence of Islamic Shia War Lords, some of whose ‘leaders’ were appointed to the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003, while others climbed their way up to power through building sectarian militias which took control of big parts of central and south of Iraq, and performed campaigns of hunting down and ‘signature killing’33 of Sunni individuals. As a direct consequence, the Sunni population organized their own armed militias where the dismay and rejection of a despotic Islamist Shia rule made them fertile ground for global Islamist movements such as Al Qaeda, and later ISIS/Daesh.
When Bremer suggested his formula of representation, he needed to give it one last ornament to make it look better in front of an observing international community; and that was the addition of three women to the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). He does not explain in his book though the interactions which brought forward the three women, and fails to mention that one of them was a high-level Baathist official.
In that same period, a women’s event was planned in a downtown prestigious social club of Alwiya, by the NGOs who were affiliated with the Coalition Provisional Authorities (CPA) and their partners. Thousands of dollars were spent on this event in the time when the general public was suffering a deep financial crisis with conditions close to starvation again, due to the dismantling of a 700,000 soldiers Iraqi army, and many other ministries which the Baath Party had controlled such as the Ministry of Information, oil and finance. Millions were deprived of
49 their only income for more than a year. The huge and expensive women’s event in the Alwiya Club - built by the British during colonialism – was organized by professional female organizers, who were assuming that all the participant women were happy with the new democracy of Iraq, and they announced that the audience will get to meet the first woman to be assigned to the IGC. I was curious to see what their activities looked like, so I stepped into the hall. On a high stage, and in the middle, they seated a woman with full veil, from head to toe. She did not speak or utter a single word, or do anything at all, which was strange. We were told that she was Dr. Rajaa Al Khuza’i, a physician, and a new member of the Iraqi Governing Council, someone who did not see it necessary to address the hundreds of women who attended with a single word.
The persons and political Islamist groups who were supported into becoming the ruling class of Iraq, have all become the wealthiest and most corrupt politicians of the Middle East region. Many of them continue to win in every round of elections as they came to control outlets of mass media and resources, and had learnt how to manipulate general public opinion before voting, only to keep the public suffering from bitterness of the victory of criminal, sectarian corrupt groups who have endless ways of reproduction of political figures for every election.
In the following month, the US and UK gender ‘experts’ held a meeting for women’s NGO in the Green Zone in order to address concerns of women in general. As the leading women activists had all learnt about each others’ affiliations by then, the organizers made sure that OWFI activists would not be invited. Behind closed doors, they planned for the future of Iraqi women with no transparency or open invitation. Until this day, we do not know what they spoke. Many of the Iraqi women who participated had become members of parliament later. The women who collaborated with the political endeavors of the CPA were not privileged or willing to resist the patriarchy brought forward by the Islamic parliamentary groups, as they had accepted partnership with the Islamic Shia parties since the beginnings of the IGC. Although some of those women were members of the Iraqi Communist Party or the Allawi secular political block, their partnership with the Islamic Shia block since the IGC founding put them in an awkward position of accepting the ‘beliefs’ of the religious groups as a result and condition of this kind of democracy; and thus, resulted in the sacrifice of women’s rights to religious and ethnic identities and rights.
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It is noteworthy to mention that Paul Bremer accepted to appoint the Secretary General of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) at the advice of the British Ambassador. Nevertheless, he put a condition that the appointed person should not stress on socialist economic planning for the future of Iraq; thus reaching to a decision of appointing the secretary of the ICP Hamid Moussa (Bremer, 2006, p.95). Moussa was always mentioned as filling a Shia seat, in spite of his being the head of the ICP at that time. He proved to be one of Bremer’s favorite candidates for the lip service he gave to privatization and the passing of The Oil Law in the latter years.
In the months following May 2003, the streets of the capital Baghdad became dangerous for women as a result of having no Iraqi police or security institutions. In times of extreme poverty and starvation, sex-trafficking gangs began to organize a local and cross-border trafficking of women to Syria, and United Arab Emirates, in addition to other neighboring countries. I wrote an open letter to Paul Bremer reminding him of his duties, as per Rome Statute, of occupying forces to keep the safety and security of citizens (see Appendix A). Bremer was aware of the security problem facing women in those days as explained to him in his visit to the children’s’ hospital in his book, and yet the safety of thousands of women was not a priority to be addressed as it never came up again in his book (p.33)
Post-war politics in Iraq as planned and orchestrated by the US administrator began to give its results in 2004, and more so in 2005. Women were being kidnapped on the streets by organized trafficking gangs, while sectors of the Public Ministerial Enterprises were shut down leaving a huge population unemployed, and Sunni individuals and neighborhoods began to get attacked by Islamist Shia militias. Systemic attacks against the majority had just begun, all of which were pieces of a tri-fold oppression of gender, ethno-sectarian groups, and working class, as Himani Bannerji explicates the social construct of types of oppression as planned by capitalistic illiberal democracies (Bannerji et al., 2001), (Bannerji,1995), and in this case in a state which was built through Imperialist intervention.
Another result of the meeting of Bremer with the members of the IGC was that the Kurdish members set a condition of federalism to be stated by the constitution as they no longer trusted that a central government in Baghdad would grant them safety, or prosperity. Adding the definition of a federal republic to the constitution left the chance available to regions to demand independence and separation in the future. Most Iraqis of the center and the south objected to this
51 provision. It was not clear at that time what the consequences of a Kurdish Independence could entail. Most revolutionaries would usually support nations’ or people’s right to self- determination, nevertheless many changed their minds into a more in-depth position after the events of the fall of 2017 when Mas’oud Barzani34, the head of the Kurdish Regional Authorities (KRG) started a process for voting/referendum towards the Independence of Kurdistan, the consequences of which almost amounted to an ethnic/nationalist conflict in the city of Kirkuk, which connects the Arabic part to the Kurdish zone. The ethnic/nationalist part of the tri-fold oppression materialized and escalated to unprecedented heights. The ethnic representation and division of power led to tensions subjecting the borderline cities’ population to extreme danger. Between the Arab government’s hostility and the KRG’s determination on referendum and future Independence, more than 3 million Iraqis of other ethnicities live on the bordering lines, not knowing their destiny, including Turkmen, Christian, Assyrian, Yazidi, and Shabak. (Appendix A)
7.6 Privatization and Restructuring Economy: A Blow to the Working Class
When the war was declared by the US government on Iraq, an international dismay and debate circulated as to what was the reason for launching a US military strike on Iraq. A simple, or rather simplistic way of addressing such a question would be to search for a singular, or rather one and only one reason for starting a never-ending war of more than a decade, such as oil, or world hegemony, or cultural hegemony of West over East. All these reasons are part of the full picture, and all of them are related to each other within a capitalist system which is the more inclusive answer to the question. For a capitalist system which undergoes economic crises at home, expansionism, imperialist domination and export of capital into new spheres of influence around the world is the answer. Carpenter and Mojab (2017) explain this stage of capitalist development in interaction with other conditions relevant to this stage:
Imperialism is the stage of capitalist development, beginning in the late nineteenth century, characterized by the ride of monopolies, the formation of financial capital, and a constant division and re-division of the world into spheres of influence. This stage of capitalism recognizes no borders and engages in war and other forms of violence in order to allow the movement of capital. Neoliberalism means the absolute rule of the market, reductions in social spending, a vast array of deregulations and privatizations, and the transformation of the idea of public good and community. The ‘liberal’ component of the term hides the harsh reality of the last three decades - wars, genocides, crimes against
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humanity, trafficking of women and girls, the rise of a new slavery, violence against women, the resurgence of neofascism and fundamentalism, ecocide, growth of the military-industrial complex, increasing poverty, de-industrialization and starvation. (Carpenter, Mojab, 2017, 131)
In an appearance of ‘saving’ Iraq from dictatorship, the US occupation was in essence gaining a new sphere of influence over the second biggest deposit of oil in the world (Cohen, Efrati, 2011, p.149), one of the highest potential sources for accumulation of capital, and in a strategic location where US imperialism can expand to surrounding countries and territories, and possibly change the mapping of the region in order to exploit further territory and population in the plans of monopoly and financial capitalism.
In Iraq, Bremer was assigned to run the new ‘business’ of liquidation of public sector or rather ‘selling’ state enterprise to individuals, for which he needed the change of economical policies of Iraq, eventually embedding the content into the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), attempting to make those provisions abiding for at least 40 years. Klein describes the KPMG35 financial institution young employees whose job was to negotiate “structural adjustments” in return for giving loans to governments, with one difference, that in Iraq, they were the government (Klein,2005, p.16). It is noteworthy to say here that the de-Baathification order with which Bremer signed to dismantle an army of 400,000 combatant, and 100,000 civilian left half a million man and their families with no source of income. Other ministries such as Ministry of Defence, of Interior, of Information, were all disbanded also by Bremer as their top-ranking employees were members of the Baath party. (Ismael, Ismael, 2015, p.61)
In the years 2003 and 2004, most of the population had absolutely no income and no job. Our political Party called for a demonstration in front of the presidential palace, to which hundreds of jobless workers came on July 29, 2003. We decided to hold slogans of ‘Secure a job, or give social security payments’. I stood with some of OWFI’s women in the front row, and raised our hands in peace so that the American soldiers do not shoot the demonstrating jobless workers. They detained two of our comrades into a compartment in the Green Zone. After two days, the Americans called on a delegate for negotiation, I was part of the delegate. We were taken into a meeting which was surprisingly with a privately hired American officer, who listened to some of what we said, but seemed to talk about subjects which were very different from what we had in mind. They released our two comrades afterwards.
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The US/UK strategists of privatization and restructuring continued to work throughout the years, always proposing new legislation many of which the parliament members did not dare to sign on as they were destructive to Iraqi economy, and they did not want to endure anger of protestors and unionists. In a recent unionist conference in Baghdad in November 2017, the economic consultant of the Prime Minister, Mr. Medher Saleh, participated in an attempt to promote a governmental shift of economic policies. Unionists had their representative on the same panel, Falah Alwan, the president of the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI) who made a presentation against the governmental shift in policies clarifying the following: (a) That the state initiative named ‘Economic Reform’ was in reality the conditions set by the International Monitory Fund and World Bank in order to hand loans to the state of Iraq and get the government bonded into foreign debt, (b) That the ‘Economic Reform’ implements re- structuring of the economy, which is in reality the sale of state enterprise to individuals (privatization), cuts to public spending in education and health care, taxation and financial reform, and (c) That the decrease of state-controlled economy to a minimum is required, and ‘free market’ dynamics to be encouraged by the reform (Alwan, 2017, p. 13-25).
Alwan explained in his paper presented for the conference that the foreign debt could have been paid from part of the oil revenue of the first two years after the occupation. He also stated that state corruption is part and parcel of the economic policies of the occupation, where the corrupt politicians of Iraq confiscated a considerable amount of oil revenues for their own privilege, moving this surplus to European and Western banks, where it enters into the capitalist production cycle of the countries which started the occupation (Alwan, 2017, part 1). Alwan elaborated that the Iraqi economist experts were fully supportive of the occupation economic plans, thereby liquidating enterprise for billions of dollars, in the past 14 years, but can show no proof of positive results against the great losses of social property (Alwan, 2017, part 2). Alwan finished his exposition by demonstrating positive models of re-structuring in Japan, Brazil and India, where the population had to undergo measures of austerity; nevertheless, the state-control over the economy had to be increased in order to reach to the point of capital accumulation leading to industrialization and increasing production which can be measured by exports. Alwan argued that the ‘economic reform’ which was imposed on Iraq mentioned growth and development as abstract objectives without elaboration on indicators of measuring economic development.
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The governmental economic expert’s response was apologetic about some short-coming of Gross Development Product, which he blamed on “lazy Iraqi workers”. While explaining the debt bondage, he assured us not to worry because the foreign debt lenders may reschedule or discount the debt to a lesser amount, and he mentioned numbers which I was unable to comprehend as it was in billions of dollars, most of which was interest on the previous government’s debt or political fines for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. I asked the governmental official why is it that Iraq is invaded, impoverished, and so many killed, only to sell the governmental enterprise, and then Iraqi people pay so much money in foreign debt? I continued to say that if he wanted to assure any Iraqi not to worry, then his slogan should be: ‘Cancel all foreign debt, and demand compensation for the war’36.
In 2018, more than 250,000 workers of the industrial sector were threatened by mass lay-off due to the scheduling of privatization, even for the factories which were strongly productive and needed by the local market such as the Fertilizers Production Industry. Workers’ demonstration of 2016 and 2017 were able to stop the privatization of this enterprise for those years.
OWFI’s collaboration with a working-class organization, worker activists, unionists and party strengthened our consciousness of class struggles, and kept the organization well-grounded within its revolutionary community of allies. While joining into their struggles against the imperialist forces, and their struggles for reform, OWFI’s activism built bridges with the leading working-class activists in Iraq, sharing with them the need to include women’s demands in their struggle, and encouraging that they contribute to women’s struggles against patriarchy in all its forms. OWFI’s presence within unionist campaigns and organizations was partially accountable for the fact that they did not surrender totally to the counter-revolutionary Islamic factions. Surrounded with rapid political changes, Imperialist attacks on the society’s resources, and increasing social divisions due to the newly imposed identity politics, were the circumstances surrounding the women of OWFI when they founded the organization and started their political and feminist activism.
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Chapter 3 The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq: Circumstances, Statements, Activities, Struggle against Patriarchy
When the war started in 2003, women of my generation had already witnessed the breakout of two previous wars: the 1980s war between Iraq and Iran which killed at least a million soldiers, and the 1990-1991 US/UK attack on Iraq as a result of the Baath regime’s invasion of Kuwait. The United Nations’ economic embargo over the state of Iraq which followed the invasion of Kuwait was a systemic and ‘legal’ starvation of 25 million civilians for a war they did not have a say about. The state of Iraq was no longer allowed to sell its oil, thus losing its major revenue and unable to feed its people. The currency deflated to unprecedented levels, where a public employee’s monthly salary could not buy more than a few nutritious meals. When the Iraqi citizens were allowed to travel abroad, a big wave of immigration took place in the mid-1990s, as we were unable to endure the starvation of the economic sanctions anymore, or afford eating nutritious food, or feed our children properly. I was among that wave and was able to reach to Canada in 1995 to a safer life.
It was during the 1990s, when the devastating measures of starving the people under the UN Economic Sanctions, that Iraqis went through a reactionary conservative transformation in consciousness, and submitted to religion as practice and awareness, an idealist consciousness which allows one to escape from the inhumane conditions of the ‘real world premises’ to a safe non-existing world in ideals, as a form of revolt against the never-ending wars of starvation and mass-killing imposed on Iraq. Marx expressed the thought eloquently in his book: A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as such: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”. Marx further describes the consciousness of the people who submit to religion as “an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are in an inverted world” (Marx, 1843). The majority who stayed inside the country witnessed extreme poverty and poor food quality through the governmental distributed rations. The people’s devastation under a brutal dictatorship was only topped by systemic starvation as implemented and monitored by the imperialist plans of the US/UK governments, and applied by the United Nations. It was during this decade when the majority of Iraqi people surrendered to religion, as hopelessness left no other window open for most.
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Starvation, hopelessness, and continuous military attacks were also a harsh lesson of the intentions of the US/UK Imperialist powers towards the people of Iraq, and of how brutal imperialism can be for people of the under-developed world. Poverty and deprivation which were witnessed in the 1990s, coupled with widowhood of almost half a million Iraqi women in the Iraq-Iran war, resulted in epidemic prostitution, and consequently unprecedented rise in numbers of ‘honour-killings’37.
It is noteworthy to mention here that there was no count of the numbers of ‘honour-killings’ of women in Iraq although it had sky-rocketed in that decade, neither was it thought of as news or concern even by human rights groups. In the city of Erbil which was comparable to Iraqi cities and shares similar culture and social tension, Mojab recounts the numbers of 60 women killed in the first 6 months of 2001, however the number rose in the first 6 months of the following year to 80 (Mojab, Abdo, 2004, p.16). Although the UN sanctions did not target the economy of the Kurdish zone, the social circumstances were still dismal for women. In Iraq, the mass death of babies always came up within anti-war groups, but not a word against the gendered mass killings of thousands of women, whose right-to-life was compromised by rising patriarchal violence in the society. There was mention of a wave of political killings of almost two hundred women by a pro-government militia of Feda’yin Saddam in the Fall of 1999, while the daily killings of women by their own families and tribes were not considered news.
During the decade of UN Economic sanctions, medication was not allowed within imports, coupled with lack of nutritious food, resulted in the highest rates of child mortality in Iraq’s modern history. The response of US State Secretary Madeleine Albright will never be forgotten in the memory of Iraqis; that the war on Iraq was worth the price of half a million babies dying. The suffering of half a million mothers who watched their babies dying of illness was due to the imperialist preparation for war on Iraq. Iraqi People were already devastated and impoverished by the time the third war was announced, or rather orchestrated over the media for the whole world to witness the might and brutality of the US military machine. The moments of the military attack, and namely the bombing of Baghdad which was shown repeatedly over CNN on March 21st of 2003 was a historic moment which challenged the revolutionary and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist consciousness of so many Iraqis, myself included. That image will never be forgotten however hard we try.
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Founding the Organization: Conditions and Event of the First Year
When the military attack on Iraq started in March 2003, I was in living in Toronto, following the news over the television every day and night, and could no longer feel meaning to life while living on the same side of the world where the military attacks were being launched. After having met the WCPI group in Toronto, I attended a few years of meetings, in which the talk about freedom and equality began to convince me to step out of a professional life, into one with purpose and meaning to become part of a revolutionary working-class organization which prioritizes women’s equality. I felt that the time has come where I should follow a new path in life, and a new form of consciousness; one to understand the analysis of the hegemonic imperialist attacks and military crimes committed against people of Iraq, and to act on liberating women towards an inclusive social revolution: from patriarchy, religion and also from capitalism. Desperation and escape to a meaningless professional life was no longer a choice I could live with anymore. I took the trip to Iraq by the end of May 2003, alongside many of the comrades, and the discussions began in Baghdad about the need to start a women’s organization, one which can challenge patriarchy and capitalism, but mainly the atrocities which were committed daily against women.
A comrade found us an abandoned building on Al Rasheed street, in the heart of Baghdad, close to Tahrir square. The building used to be a governmental bank, but was empty, burnt and abandoned now. In the previous months, and after the invasion of Baghdad on April 9th, the streets were mostly empty, and people were not sure what would happen, as the shadow of Saddam Husein kept on haunting everybody’s imagination. There was much anticipation in the air. Some of the comrades who were originally from the Kurdish North had the experience of political activism in times of the withdrawal of the Iraqi government during the span of their lifetime. They simply stepped into empty building and claimed them as headquarters for the Party38. Many of us lived in the same residence, went in the morning to the Party headquarters, and resided in the same location at night, having continuous political debates, and collaborating in writing articles or statements. On a day towards the end of June 2003, I told the comrades that I needed a space for the women’s organization, in a prominent part of the building, and chose a room with a façade to the Rashid street. I then wrote the name of the Organization on card board and hung it on the door of the room. We kept the doors open, and continued to receive people
58 from all walks of life, to whom revolutionary parties and organizations were a dream that could not have been realized under the dictatorship of Saddam Husein.
In the next many weeks, we held back-to-back meetings discussing how to administer ourselves as a revolutionary political party working openly for the first time in Iraq. There were many years when the Party worked openly in Kurdistan during the nineties, until the Kurdish Nationalist parties established full control of political power, and cracked down against the WCPI, as reported on the Arabic website of BBC (BBC, 2003). The Party’s community radio was too critical of the ruling party in Sulaimaniyah - the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)- which resulted in a PUK military attack on the radio station building, leading to the killing of four of the comrades and banning our Party in Kurdistan, eventually causing the immigration of many of the leading members to the UK, Europe, and Canada.
In the first three weeks of June 2003, we began to discuss the whereabouts of the women’s Organization. In an evening visit to the family of one of our comrades, I had a night chat with a leading female comrade who was the head of the Independent Women’s Organization in Kurdistan of Iraq in the 1990s, and a graduate of Medical School. We were discussing the name of the organization, and I expressed my discomfort with the word of liberation as it made me feel that women were locked in a cage waiting to be liberated by male revolutionaries, or in other words, it felt too ideological and not pertaining to women’s lived experiences and yearning for freedom. She asked: what would be a better word? and I suggested Women’s Freedom - as it is the goal which we seek. She responded positively right away, that we should use that title, and the name was decided to be: Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI).
Around mid-June, we met with comrades coming from other countries abroad, and began debates to draft the founding statement of the organization. In those days I was spending most of my time over my laptop writing the contents of the organization’s newspaper Al Mousawat (Equality) trying to finish the second issue, as I had written and published the first issue in four pages of A4 while in Toronto in mid-April39. My input into the founding statement was limited as the comrades – including the female leading comrade - were more experienced politically. Their clandestine and later non-clandestine work in Kurdistan with Iranian communist leadership qualified them for higher political abilities in those days. The late leader of the Worker Communist Party of Iran, Mansour Hekmat, influenced many Iraqi-Kurdish communist groups,
59 some of whom were popular mass organizations such as the Rout Communist (Communist Current) which had membership over Kurdistan and part of Iraq, while other organizations were small and consisted of a few members. Hekmat unified them into a newly founded Worker Communist Party of Iraq, and his main contribution to the newly established party and to communism in the region was to distance them theoretically from Kurdish Nationalist groups, and other communist groups of Maoist, Stalinist, or other bourgeois tendencies. His theoretic analysis of state-capitalism in the Soviet Union was new in the region. He succeeded in attracting and influencing the leading members of five communist groups in Kurdistan, thereby holding the first conference of the WCPI in Sulaimaniyah in 1993. From Kurdistan to the UK, Europe and Canada the membership met on regular basis all throughout the following years, until there was a split in the Iranian party in 2005, and followed by a recent one as mentioned in the introduction which I was part of. The comrades’ mentorship and guidance were of utmost importance to me in the first many years after founding OWFI.
On June 22nd, we held the founding event for OWFI in Al Hiwar Hall where we invited an Al Jazeera reporter. It was a small event where not more than 50 youth and women attended. The speakers were the female comrade from Kurdistan and me40. She had a written speech about the mass killing of women in Kurdistan for honour reasons, and she emphasized on a crime of mutilating a female victim. I was always uncomfortable with written speeches and just spoke that women of Iraq should be free and should be ready to struggle for their freedom as it would not be handed to them easily. The founding event, statements, and revolutionary speeches were all great, but once all of that was done, I had to start with the real work of how to organize women? based on which agenda? and do what? We did not have a written manual to follow, study and share. The WCPI had a few articles about abortion, Hijab, and about the role of religion in subjugating women. And I personally had some differences with the way they treated the concept of abortion and of prostitution in a perspective which was not supportive of women’s life, freedom and choices41.
The staunch secular position of the Party had its attraction in a country where people were for the first time able to explore into intellectual options with no dictatorship watching over them, detaining, and torturing them. Our Headquarters which were in Al Rasheed street became a popular place which people would visit and end up either with the comrades, or in the rooms on the left-hand side where the women’s organization was. It is noteworthy to mention that the
60 society did not feel much of the American occupation presence in those days, as they were residing in the Green Zone, and meeting with their ‘select’ collaborators only (Bremer, 2006).
Going back to the question of how to organize women after the first half an hour of talking about freedom and equality: I thought that I treat it as any other job I had in my previous professional life, that is to go every day from nine to five, meet women, discuss their concerns, and work in my free time on writing articles of feminist importance for Al Mousawat newspaper. To my surprise, the talks with women opened some unexpected doors. Two of the women who began to visit weekly shared their concerns of insecurity: that women in their part of town were being kidnapped, locked up, trafficked and prostituted, or in the least be raped for a few days, and then get thrown from a moving vehicle to the side of a street. One of the two women was younger, and she described her ordeal when an aggressive bearded man – which usually means an Islamist militia man - started to chase her in the market place in broad daylight. Trying to run away from the man, she ran into an American soldier who was fully armed and explained to him that she was being chased and may be kidnapped. The soldier just shrugged his shoulders and explained that it was none of his business. This interaction took place in Baghdad Aljedida district, in early July 2003.
When reports of kidnaping began to become a daily matter, it was clear that we needed to create a fuss about this ordeal. That was when we suggested that we plan a women’s gathering to protest the failure of the occupying authorities to protect women from a wave of kidnappings, which we learnt later would be a growing sex-trafficking industry. We planned a gathering to be on August 24, in Al Firdawse square where Saddam’s statue was pulled down a few months ago. We knocked the doors of houses in the neighbourhood of our headquarters to ask women to join us in the protest. Most of them took our flyers, but were doubtful of our motives, and did not come, a response which was not strange in the months which followed the occupation. Street robberies became common, and families would not let their daughters out in fear of being kidnapped or scolded by a militia member for not wearing the Hijab. On the 24th of August 2003, the number of women protesting was barely twenty with some thirty comrades, while the media persons and reporters where double that number. I wrote an open letter to the US administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, explaining the wave of kidnappings of women, and demanding that he comply with his obligations as the head of the occupying powers to protect the women of Iraq. A copy of the statement is included in Appendix A. As small as the protest was, it was reported in
61 hundreds of media outlets and circulated to thousands of outlets around the world publicizing that women of Iraq were not liberated as the US propaganda promised before the war, and that they are in more danger than they ever were. Before we started the gathering a fully armed American soldier came up to me asking whether we had obtained a permit for demonstrating, a question which sounded funny. I told him that there was no government to get the permit from, thinking of talking some common sense into him. When he insisted to play the role of the ruling authorities and tell me that I could not have a protest in the square without a permit, I began to get angry and ask him whether he had a permit when he stepped into this city. We were both yelling for a couple of minutes, when his senior officer asked him to step down and let us have the square42.
In spite of the small size of the gathering, we were able to use media outreach to announce to the world that Iraqi women were jeopardized because of the occupation, and that the women were not supportive of the military attack which was forced on Iraq. In a trip of activism to New York in 2006, an American feminist supporter took me for an interview with an alternative community radio station. While waiting for access to the building, I stood next to the entrance lobby guard, a Black-American security guard who was busy cutting a picture from a newspaper. When I looked closer, I found out it was my picture from the anti-trafficking demonstration of August 2003 blowing a whistle telling Iraqi women that we have to protect ourselves after the occupation, as there will be no other protection for us. When I asked the guard who this woman was, he spoke in awe and high respect, which made me feel how the American public, and specifically the working class were feeling about our suffering under the occupation, and that the capitalist powers in the US government and the military are the enemy, and not the people.
There was another demonstration after the anti-trafficking protest in January 2004 that had a major effect on our role in the coming years. It was also in Al Firdawse square, and was against the attempts of forcing Sharia on the Personal Status Law, or in other words an attempt at the Islamization of our matrimonial law in Iraq. The gathering was planned by a well-funded organization, an affiliate of a ruling group. In hindsight, I would think it was an affiliate to an American supported group who were competing with the Islamists over power -- a group like Ayad Allawi’s or Chalabi’s-- but that detail did not matter as it turned to our benefit. There were microphones and a podium for whichever woman who wanted to speak. After a couple of women spoke, I had my turn and spoke, rejecting the attempts of Islamizing Iraq. When the
62 speeches were finished, there was nothing to do. I suggested that we march around the Firdawse square and chant slogans, which the women found a bit strange as they had not done such a thing before, but were too polite to say no. When we started the march in a big circle around the huge round, I ventured into shouting into the microphone: Mousawat - hurreya (Equality - Freedom). A few repeated in a low voice, and while looking and smiling at each other, as it was a first time for them. In a minute or two, we were all chanting together and in a very loud voice that was louder than the megaphone. We kept on chanting and marching for almost ten minutes, with a feeling of voicing out our demands in a unified group - a first time feeling for me and many of the women, of euphoric empowerment of a unified togetherness. No words could fairly describe it (Appendix C).
A young couple with a baby came to visit OWFI office after they heard about the founding event and opening of an office. They had previous acquaintance with the party in Kurdistan, and they disclosed that they were eloping from their families as they were not allowed to marry. The comrades from the party suggested that we let them live on the upper floor of the abandoned bank, as there were empty rooms that we did not need. The party membership was growing, especially within working-class and displaced complexes areas43, and they spread the word that the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq works with women to overcome their social problems. When two other women came in the following week, escaping an abusive male relative, it was only normal to give them the room which was next to the first one. I was unaware that I had just started a first women’s shelter in Baghdad in a most chaotic way, albeit a way which worked perfectly for the three women who gained their safety and had a supportive small community around them. Whether the beginning was chaotic or not, it did not prevent us from studying the task and developing it into a first-time safe haven for women escaping honour killing and domestic abuse in Iraq. One of the sheltered women, Hadeel, began to learn more about revolutionary feminism, and eventually became the organizer of OWFI’s demonstration for our first celebration of the International Women’s Day.
The word had already spread around Iraq that there was a women’s organization that challenges political Islamists, tribal patriarchal forces, and American occupation powers, all at once. It was only a matter of days before the media began to line up in front of our office in order to get an interview. There were many days when I had to do a few interviews in a row, some of which were international media. There was much political and media attention to the feminist aspects of
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OWFI’s work: the sheltering, press releases, anti-trafficking campaigning, and challenges against the tribal and religious patriarchs, all of which put me personally in the midst of an overwhelming political debate as a representative of the secular voice, albeit from a women’s perspective -- a voice which stands against both of Islamist parties and pro-American liberals. Another feminist comrade, from within the UK organization of the party, joined into OWFI in early 2004 while residing in the UK, and we joined efforts in confronting the Islamists and Imperialists over media; my interviews were done in Iraq and hers were for a British and European audience. It was not too difficult to handle the debates and intense exposure over local and international media, but the actual pressure came from within. They came from the criticism of some of the comrades saying that the leading women of OWFI got sidelined to a feminist agenda, one which does not seem to relate to communist class struggles anymore, and one which has turned us into ‘celebrity’ persons who lost touch with the arena of struggle. None of the critics sympathized with the fact that we were endangering ourselves in debates with individuals who had armed militias to back them and were disdainful of women, and that we committed to this part of the work, letting go of our privacy and safety in order to start a political debate of conflict with the patriarchal Islamists whom nobody else dared to challenge for their misogyny. The anti-feminist position of the critics was not shared by all comrades, although the two other founders of OWFI, began to drift into the chorus, and distanced themselves from OWFI within one year. It was only a matter of time before I found myself in a corner where the majority of the party was not in agreement with the ‘feminist’ and ‘celebrity’ ways of running the Organization. I found myself in a tough situation where I had to either submit, admit to my mistakes and follow the party’s majority and let them choose the best work methods for a women’s organization, or to insist to defend my position and let go of most of the Party support that I previously had. Among the many definitions of feminists, one of them is that they are the ones to eye the world through critical lenses which result in criticizing and challenging prevailing positions and power relations, and that they are unable to submit to circumstances which others dictate on them, and that their criticism becomes their agency and who they are. It was clear I will have many years of trouble due to choosing to resolve the situation and run the organization in the feminist way which I know and understand, taking into consideration that I will lose the support of the majority of the party, a support which was crucial to found and launch OWFI44. I was convinced that there was no other way, and that I needed to be ready to isolate myself from the mainstream
64 of the Party, and keep those who had the essence of Marxism in their vision to see beyond the commands of the ideologues of the Party.
8.1 An NGO, or a Political Mass Organization for Women: On the Co-opting of the Movement
When we founded the organization, the plan was to raise the consciousness of women into an anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal one, to strive towards achieving freedom and equality for all, within the guidelines of the political party, and had succeeded within some of those areas in the first months of launching, mostly with the new-comers who had feminist or political curiosity, or through the party membership. Nevertheless, the insecurity which befell women throughout the country, and specifically in the capital Baghdad began to restrict women into the confines of their houses, and their hijabs, distancing themselves from all that is social and political.
Within a few months of founding, it was becoming clear to the public that OWFI was an organization to stand in opposition to both US occupation, and to political Islam, demanding full equality without compromise for ‘culture’ or religion. In an atmosphere of lawlessness, insecurity, and rising poverty, women did not have the luxury of leaving their families unattended, their houses not provided for, to prioritize education, or their claims to social justice, as physical survival was their first concern (Zangana, 2008, para. 4) to come and discuss feminist politics. It began to get harder to influence a female public into anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist positions.
In one of our early events of activism, when we were able to convince a major public employer to let us speak to their female workers in the Railways Establishment in Baghdad, a late female comrade and I took turns promoting feminist and anti-imperialist struggle for women’s rights to more than a hundred women in the assembly hall of the establishment. When the talk began to touch critically upon the role of political Islamist groups, a veiled woman rose and announced that her choice was to follow her religion and her religious cleric, and that she did not agree with us. From almost one hundred women seated, she had two women supporting her, but that was enough to sabotage our argument, and to create a noise which began to feel negative and agitating for all45.
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When the late comrade and I planned another activist trip to a major working place in August 2003, the Leather and Shoe production public company in Baghdad, the confrontation became more intimidating, and even threatening. We were invited by a female worker who complained that the administration which openly expressed Islamic affiliation asked the women to follow the Islamic dress code, and not to take breaks from work and step out during working hours. The employee and her colleagues complained that the long dresses and sleeves get caught in the leather sewing machinery subjecting them to fatal accidents, and that they wanted to get breaks when needed, just like their fellow male employees. Our meeting with them was in the middle of the factory workshop, where we had already exchanged opinions and started to plan an agenda for supporting their complaint, when two male workers approached us with hostile questions as they were not comfortable with our talk about women’s freedoms. They began to dig into our formal approvals and permissions for being in their company, which made us wrap up and rush to leave the place before it turned violent46. A similar reaction happened when we organized to celebrate the International Women’s Day in an educational facility, The Technology University, in March 8th 2008. One of the Islamist militias, which had become strong by then and worked as security guards, asked that the event begin with a recitation of Quran. This request was turned down by OWFI’s organizers. While we were able to perform our activities and speeches, they told the organizers that we would not be welcome in that university any more.
When work places and educational facilities’ doors were closed in our faces, we were forced to shrink our operations bit by bit, until the month of May 2009, when we had a major clash with the public Iraqi television administration, we had to take a moment of thinking of what we could do afterwards. We had started in 2008 to study the numbers and situations of women in prostitution, and those who were trafficked to Syria for the huge sex industry which took place mostly in Damascus, and we began to publicize the results of our study, speaking over Iraqi and other Arabic televisions. When the Saudi Arabian MBC television interviewed an OWFI colleague, an older feminist activist, she said it loud and clear, that Iraqi women were being sexually exploited in the sex industry in Damascus. Following that disclosure, the Iraqi public television Al Iraqia held a two-day campaign over their screens against “those who humiliate Iraqi women”. They showed my colleague’s face circled in black and kept on stigmatizing OWFI as a woman’s group who “had a suspicious agenda.” After a short meeting in our headquarters, which was now in a rented premise in downtown Baghdad, we decided to write a statement
66 which conveyed our point of view47, but also to close our doors until it was safer for us. During those days following May 9th of 2008, the armed Shia Islamist militias attacked and killed men and abused women in a close-by Sunni neighborhoods, which caused a population to leave their Sunni neighborhood of Al Fadhl and march while carrying their guns and shooting in frenzy in Al Saadoun street - in a walking distance from our headquarters. Watching the society around us divide and fight upon fabricated sectarian lines, my older colleague who was the subject of the smearing campaign against OWFI called me and said that she can no longer stay and hide at home, and that we need to continue the struggle and go to work every day.
Those were the circumstances of the years in which we launched the organization, and worked hard to attract a leadership of feminist women to it, albeit not all Marxist. We began to see that building a mass organization around feminist, secular and anti-imperialist politics in those days was almost impossible. We were content with the NGO legal framework which allowed us to exist, legally speaking, in the political scene, as a front-line feminist resistance to a new government which was becoming increasingly Islamic and fundamentalist.
When I was later aware of feminist writings that were critical of NGOization, blaming it for the weakening of a women’s movement or of a revolutionary tendency, I was surprised. Our experience in a post-war Iraq was that being registered as an NGO was for mere legal cover-up reasons so as to be able to rent premises, or have a bank account, without being regarded as illegal or accountable by the authorities. In those years in Iraq, you could have had an NGO and organize around any political agenda, be it communist, Islamist, or pro-imperialist agenda activities and events. Although the NGO position provided huge financial support for some NGOs, but those were usually international NGOs mostly residing in the Green Zone or affiliated with ruling political parties. In the following years, a few Iraqi NGOs received considerable funding for supporting the UN agenda of collaboration with the Iraqi government. Nevertheless, those NGOs were not the reason for weakening the women’s movement, or diverting it from its revolutionary agenda. The source of the problem was a political one, which resulted from the positions of the ‘regressive Left’48 within the ICP who had made the compromises with the Islamists who were chosen by the Imperialist US/UK occupation powers as main partners. The actual Co-opting of the women’s movement and the diverting of the agenda from a secular, anti-imperialist, and feminist one to a moderate, apologetic for religion, and cooperating with the imperialists originated from the mainstream Leftist party, the Iraqi
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Communist Party. The ICP started partnering with the CPA and reduced their criticism of the occupation after June 2003. When they opened an office in Baghdad, and received the visits of US officials in it, thus changing their position from opposition to occupation to a negotiable position, their formal position was to high-light American inability to control the situation. When the Iraqi Governing Council members were selected by Bremer, including the Secretary General of the ICP, most Marxist positions faded, giving way to compromise on the oil companies and other economic issues. (Ismael, 2008, 300-303). Bremer clarified in his book that he had the choice between two persons from the ICP, and that he had a condition that whoever comes should not impose a communist economic agenda, so his choice was on the Secretary General Hamid Mousa (Bremer, 2006, p.95). The ICP was in silent cooperation with the occupation authorities, giving credibility to their policies and befriending the Islamist partners in return for becoming partners in the government. Tareq Ismael expands on this turn of their political position in his book The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Iraq in Chapter seven of the book, titled “From Vanguard Activism to Rearguard Opportunism.” (2008).
The mainstream Leftist party was going through a transitional time, similar to many mainstream Leftist parties around the world, who had lost their political and logistic support from the Soviet Union which had disintegrated due to ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Glasnost’49- translated as policy reform and restructuring of the political-economic system during the 1990s. The ICP leadership did not oppose to the imperialist attack of the US/UK imperialism on Iraq.50 They began meetings with the CPA administration immediately after the occupation. The secretary of the party accepted a seat in the Iraqi Governing Council to whom Paul Bremer assigned his choice of persons (Bremer, 2006, p.95), and it was no problem for the secretary of the biggest secular party in Iraq to be assigned to a parliament seat of Muslim/Shia designation. In fact, he began to promote the proposed Iraq Oil Law as early as 2007, a law which allowed private companies - mostly American - to ‘profit-sharing’ contracts which offered a high share of the Iraqi oil revenue to the foreign companies. It is noteworthy to mention that the Iraq National Oil Company was responsible of all the parts of extraction of the oil since 1966, and that no foreign oil companies were needed to extract oil in spite of all the argument which the imperialists had written in their publications. Fuad Kassim Al Amir, who is an expert on oil extraction law, advises the need to reject the Iraq Oil Law as it allowed foreign companies to extract oil for a share of its revenue, a
68 matter which opposes Iraqi sovereignty and ability to control the revenues of Iraqi oil (Al Amir, 2012, p.57-58).
The mainstream Left party had a long history in Iraq of seven decades, during which the formal membership of the party exceeded half a million persons. It had an anti-capitalist and anti- imperialist history in addition to supporting the first and foremost feminist initiatives in the state of Iraq. A considerable part of the Iraqi public takes pride in affiliating to this party without questioning its current change of politics. When their women’s organization, the Iraqi Women’s League, calls for a demonstration, hundreds of women used to show up in the first years after the occupation. Their loyalty to the history of their fathers and mothers motivated them to support such initiatives without questioning their political orientation. Nevertheless, that popularity was no longer consistent throughout the years.
Although the mainstream Leftist party had in its membership thousands of revolutionary women, none of them could challenge Islamist legislative provisions in public for the mere reason that their party line was accepting of Islamist religious ‘practices’. Their statements tried not to mention full equality for women, but rather replace it with ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’, as full equality claims would raise Islamic concern.
Going back to the argument that NGOization had ruined a revolutionary women’s movement, the response would be that the source of depoliticization of the revolutionary women’s movement was the drift and change in the political position of the mainstream Leftist party, and not the NGO mechanism.
The veteran revolutionary feminists who had a role in the previous decades have changed now, as they mainly talk about reforming laws, as if legislation was the enemy, and not the Islamic legislators. The farthest their criticism could reach was while referring to the ‘wrong application of religion by a few clerics’. Most of them are unable to turn against the opportunist leadership of their party, while a few have. The existence of the NGOs could not have been a strong enough reason to dismantle the mass movement of the previous century, but the compromises of the mainstream Leftist political party had confiscated the critical and revolutionary positions of the women’s movement, leaving their affiliated activists with a timid and compromising agenda.
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8.2 Combating Violence Against Women: An Activity of Providing Services or a Revolutionary Agenda
In addition to the argument of NGOization, there is another one which stands out in writings of socialist feminists. It is a position which is critical of women’s groups in Iraq, Kurdistan or in the Middle East that focus their work on violence against women without having a conceptual understanding of the patriarchal and capitalist background. (Mojab, in Al Ali, Pratt, 2009, p.110- 113). The question to ask is whether choosing an agenda of protecting and saving women from atrocities is specific only to liberal feminists. Although we were aware and vocal of the analysis that the hands of capitalism, with the support of local patriarchy whether tribal or religious, are the root reason behind the escalation of violence against women, we would still worry that our work in defending women from violence falls under liberal feminist method of work. At many interactions with women from the mainstream Left party, we were told that a revolutionary should not described women as victim, but as political activists or even leaders of this society. After the meeting, they would go back to their organization which was in agreement with the occupation of Iraq and the misogynist Islamist rulers, justifying it all under the pretext of: “how else would we have gotten rid of Saddam?”51
The other criticism as mentioned in the first chapter, came from within the WCPI, from some of the close comrades who felt that OWFI women’s efforts are wasted with ‘victimized women’; a position which was not too different from the members of the mainstream Left party. After hearing the rhetoric of ideologues, who did not want to bother with women’s suffering in ‘real world premises’, and some of whom were our comrades, OWFI women had to make a decision whether it is a Marxist women’s endeavor to address violence and suffering of dispossessed women or not. Women who escaped patriarchal tribal cruelty, or were threatened by ‘honour- killing’ had nowhere to go other than a growing sex-industry which exploits them sexually and locks them into drug addiction and violence. While exploring into the ‘notorious’ neighborhood of Battaween in central Baghdad, we were surprised to find a considerable number of Black-Iraqi women52 who had absolutely no prospects in life; no education, or possession, and sometimes even no identification papers. The numbers of women who live a daily violence of discrimination, sexual exploitation, and lack of basic services was not news to a society which is deeply entrenched in patriarchal and racist thought. It was time to recognize a triple-fold oppression against gender, race/ethnicity and class, and to have activities which address it, while
70 building a theoretic analysis based on studying ‘real life premises’ of women who are escaping violence of as ‘honour-killing’, trafficking’ and added discrimination and stigmatization of racialized women.
In a recent visit from a comrade53 who supported OWFI since its inception, he met with women who reside in our shelters, and watched them come to the headquarters in the mornings to take lessons in literacy and in Marxist feminism. His response was that women’s sheltering as such is an initiative of empowerment for proletarian women whom the bourgeois system fully dispossessed and disempowered, and is an endeavor which a Marxist political party should support as none of the political parties empowered women in ways and methods which this initiative did.
Political and Social Challenges
Some of the challenges were explained briefly in Chapter one in an attempt of having an entry point to defining OWFI’s feminism. In order to explicate the type of activism which reflects the researcher’s understanding of Marxist feminist, the repetition or cross-over among chapters is hard to avoid. Among theoretic political anti-capitalist guidelines, responses to actualities lived by women, and challenges required against patriarchal Islamist/tribal rule, there is a matrix of analysis, articulation of objectives, and immediate confrontations which need to be planned into a Marxist feminist agenda for women’s struggles. Every step of the writing process is meant to clarify the utmost objective of this thesis, which is to draft a first feminist agenda for OWFI’s struggles.
9.1 Struggle against Imperialist Policies and Internal Conflict
In the modern history of anti-Imperialist political struggle, armed military struggle is the usual case for resistance against colonialists, especially during the periods of ending colonization in the Middle East between the 1920s and 1950s. In a 21st century Imperialist invasion, like the one of Iraq, where a gigantic US/UK military arsenal was carpet-bombing Iraqi cities, the case of armed struggle brought different results; the one which Iraqis felt very clearly on the ground was a huge death toll on daily basis, while the numbers of killed American military was little. Although the Western left was glorifying the Iraqi resistance confrontation to the American military, they ignored the fact that most of the death casualties were civilian Iraqi life, or youth who were
71 recruited to the Iraqi army because there were no other jobs. The high number of Iraqi casualties may have also been due to the fact that what was thought of as Iraqi resistance was mostly foreign Islamist fighters who came to establish their Islamic state and who considered non- fighting Iraqis in agreement with the occupation. In fact, the number of political groups that received arms and roamed the street were so many that the society did not need another armed group to further threaten security and peace in Iraq. Hamid Taghvaie, one of the leading members of the WCPI of Iran, described the situation as a dark scenario where there was no state to fight against yet: “The political and social situation in Iraq is an immense human catastrophe, bleak, chaotic with total social disintegration. It is a dark scenario…”. (Taghvaie, 2004).
In situations as such, anti-imperialist political struggle cannot be resolved in military resistance which swamps the society in further chaos and bloodbath, but in building a political community of socialists, feminist, and human rights supporters who profoundly believe in values of freedom and equality to defend the society from the attacks of the armed militias as well as the attacks of the US/UK military. It is rare that a feminist organization take on arms to fight against imperialism; therefore, OWFI chose to confront and challenge in the political arena, with publicly announced positions.
As mentioned earlier in this research, the occupation had ousted all governmental institutions in 2003, and there was no state to control the security, and therefore gangs roamed the streets kidnapping women in ways and numbers which had no precedent in Iraqi history. OWFI women started to follow up on it and make informed estimation of the numbers in other parts of Baghdad. As a result, I drafted a statement to Paul Bremer telling him that it is his duty as an occupying force to be responsible of the security of women in Iraq (Appendix A, p.143). And OWFI followed up on it in August 2003 in a demonstration.
OWFI’s struggle against the US military occupation of Iraq was in publicizing an anti- occupation position in debates, statements, and interviews. We also participated in workers’ demonstrations for working class demands under the slogan of ‘Jobs or Social Security’ as early as July 2003. In the first two years of activism, our demonstrations were joined with the workers political organization; nevertheless, we began to grow apart after we noticed that they did not feel the same commitment to join into the women’s demonstrations and struggles. For many years our struggles went in different directions, but OWFI and the party began to get closer and
72 unify political activities after 2012. Three matters brought the class and feminist struggle closer; the first one being the matured governmental neoliberal plans of privatization and re-structuring the economy of Iraq, the second one was the extreme systemic violence which befell women throughout a decade of occupation taking catastrophic scale and therefore compelling many of the comrades to have an adequate response to the dilemma, the third one was a change in the Secretary General person of the WCPI, bringing forward a leading member who was supportive to OWFI’s feminism since its inception. OWFI’s intervention in party debates insisted that no leftist can claim to be revolutionary without addressing human beings’ enslavement and oppression, with the pretext that sexual violence is a ‘personal’ matter. OWFI was occupied with debates and responses to both party politics and to the arising circumstances in the society.
In 2011, the US administration announced that they withdrew their military troops out of Iraq, and yet they kept the Iraqi representatives of the US interests strongly supported and in full control of the resources of the society, and that was the Iraqi parliament who had received every kind of support from the US governments and experts to be elected in a sham election-taking place among explosions and military conflict. The US withdrawal was only for the military troops which were not needed anymore, as the imperialist project was in its second phase of imposing political domination. The biggest American Embassy in the world had occupied the central and best part of Baghdad, in the middle of the Green Zone, which was called previously the presidential palace, and later the International Zone. In a recent trip to part of the Embassy, a vehicle drove us for five minutes around a high concrete wall which was known to surround the US Embassy, which was not one building, but a huge complex of buildings that are continuing their expansion to surrounding sites until the recent months, as we noticed that there was further digging for the foundation of a bigger building to be built. It didn’t look like their thousands of employees were planning to move anytime soon, and we neither saw a sheet or a copy of a building permit anywhere.
As mentioned in chapter two regarding the unionists’ conference of November 28-2017, the economist consultant of the prime minister, Mr. Mudhir Muhamad Saleh explained the need for restructuring the public-sector industry, and complained that the laziness and unproductivity of Iraqi workers is to blame for the economic crisis. The high-light of his speech though was that Iraq has drowned in a huge debt of tens of billions of dollars, but that we should not worry, as the Western governments and international financial institutions should find some way of making
73 those debts less. There was an outrage among the unionists against him in the hall, which caused the organizers to end the meeting earlier than anticipated. Restructuring the economy and privatization - or rather selling the public-sector piece by piece was not as easy as the US administrator of Iraq Paul Bremer had planned it in 2003 (Klein, 2005, p.10). There was major resistance to it, which even the biggest supporters of the US occupation dare not tamper with.
9.2 Struggle against Islamic Provisions and Groups
The women of my generation, who were born in the 1960s, have witnessed and endured the consequences of three horrific political phases in Iraq. The first was the Arab Nationalist rule of the Baathists who nationalized Iraqi oil, modernized life-style, and provided social welfare combatting homelessness and unemployment, but with no tolerance for political dissent. The Baath regime came around when the region was undergoing a rise in socialist movements, influenced by revolutions and socialist governments around the world. Arab Nationalists had an unprecedented opportunity of controlling the resources of the society, and clung onto power in brutal ways, cracking down on opposition and intellectuals who could have any ‘other’ political affiliation or opinion with imprisonment, or forced travel. They imposed forcefully an Arab ‘identity’ and language on all other ethnicities in Iraq, and showed their heavy handedness while dealing with Kurdish rebellion, whether it be nationalist or communist. While we were suffering from extreme dictatorship measures of surveillance in the capital Baghdad, the wars against the Kurdish North had not stopped during the seventies, but later escalated into a campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Kurds in the second half of the eighties.
The second phase of beginnings of Islamist affiliation started in the early 1980s. It influenced the deprived proletariat of the South who were geographically close to Iran, and intellectually hungry for an ideology of opposition to the ruling bourgeois Baathists who originated from central and western Iraq. It was in those days that a Shia Islamist tendency began to define itself as such, and with the help of the huge neighbouring country of Iran, which is four times the size of Iraq. As for the ruling Baath Arab Nationalist Party, the response was to seek the support and alliance with the other Islamist power in the region, Saudi-Arabia, with its archaic Islamist Sunni rule. It was in the early 1980s when a few young women began to veil in the universities, as rebellion or political/social opposition to the secular rule of the Arab Nationalist Baath regime.
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Saddam Husein’s crack down on rebellion in 1990 in the Kurdish North, and the impoverished South gave strength to the Shia Islamist parties to influence and organize.
That was a hard time for women who opposed the brutality of the Arab Nationalist dictatorship, but were appalled by the ‘official’ resistance which took on an Islamist position. For revolutionary women who wanted to fight for the freedom of the society - their own freedom included –veiling and imposed praying, and submitting to Sharia’s patriarchal provisions was hardly a solution. When our generation was young, our mothers took off the veil in the 1950s while taking part in a revolutionary movement which was supported by the Iraqi Communist Party in 1940s to 1950s. For many of them the process of taking off the traditional veil and Abaya54 to wear modern fashionable urban clothing was not an easy one. For our generation, to undo the revolutionary transformation of stepping out of traditional veils and body covers meant that we should also let go of the social women’s empowerment that accompanied the unveiling, including education, work, and having personal freedoms. The new regressive transformation meant that we accept to go back in time and reverse all progress, while stepping voluntarily into patriarchal relations, restriction, and the appearances of our grandmothers. Such a regressive transformation was hardly any source of empowerment for women, although it made women as individuals more acceptable within the new patriarchal Islamist environment and movement; which provided the new concept of defending veiling as a ‘choice’ for women. The debate had spread and reached all the way to Toronto, where many of the Iraqi new-comers were surprised to find out how prevailing the Islamist political influence was, and how well-supported it was by the Canadian and North American governments, under the pretext of freedom of religion.
After I went back to Iraq in 2003, and within the OWFI women, we planned to publicize the struggle against the Islamic provisions of the newly established political Islamic rule, their patriarchal life-style, and even against the veil as a symbol of Islamic patriarchal victory over women’s freedoms. We chose to publicize our positions against the Islamization of the society, thus making the position an important keystone of our Marxist feminist struggle, as an attempt of keeping humans living in ‘real world premises’ and not in continuous submission to stories of the past. We stated the position in our founding statement, and posted slogans against the veil as a “symbol of women’s oppression” in most issues of the newspaper Al Mousawat (Equality).
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In later years of 2013-2018, OWFI took on a hardline position against the legislative attempts of imposing Sharia instead of, or into the Personal Status Law, in a proposal named the Jaafari Law. When the international community was in dismay against ISIS treatment of women, there was not much mention that the Jaafari proposed law would have imposed extreme abuse of women and female children in ways which were similar to ISIS abuses.
9.3 Struggle against NGO/Civil Society Culture
When we first founded the Organization in 2003, we based it on our understanding of what a mass organization should be like, in terms of political objectives, social changes, or in short, revolutionary vision and method of work. While we received huge media attention, local and international, due to the revolutionary position on occupation, patriarchy and religion, while also rejecting the previous Arab Nationalist regime of Saddam Husein, nevertheless the success in organizing women and becoming a mass organization as we had foreseen it was not easy. The general public had been influenced by political Islamist tendencies, mistaking them for anti- occupation resistance. The organization’s secular, anti-occupation, and anti-capitalist positions were not all adopted by OWFI’s membership. Surprisingly, more males than females became members and promised to attract the female members of their families; however, the results of getting the female membership were slow.
The mainstream Leftist party with its leading female figure/s had taken an early decision of detaching their women’s organization’s55 work from the political party, to make the organization’s work only about issues which were allowed in the NGO funding conditions. The organization addressed violence against women in general, but refused to address issues such as ‘honour killing’ or ‘sex-trafficking of women’, considering them taboo issues. Therefore, they stuck to their traditional speeches of women’s right to work, or right to education, with no mention of women’s free choice of spouse, for personal freedoms, or to urban modern clothing. Therefore, the mainstream Left organizations chose to accept Islamic rule over the society and the state, as explained in Chapter one. They even adopted the position of supporting the pre- mature elections of 2005, which brought forward the most reactionary government Iraq have had in its modern history. The mainstream Left did not only collaborate with religious Islamic parties, but it also played a critical role in supporting and implementing imperialist politics of premature elections, and imperialist policies of drafting and promoting for The Oil Law which
76 opened the gateways of Iraq widely for the foreign oil companies which kept most (65-75%) of the oil revenue to themselves and outside Iraq. The regressive political position of the ICP was in alignment with the imperialist forces to promote Islamist rule and control of the society and the resources, abandoning an anti-capitalist and secular class struggle of seventy years, and becoming an undesired partner to the occupation powers and their Islamist partners.
The people of Iraq live in a country with one of the highest quantities of oil extraction and deposit, which brings incredible wealth, but not for them. Between the Foreign companies which extracted the oil since 2003, the military forces of the US/UK, and the political coalition who are in control of everything in Iraq, the resources are controlled, and with a ‘legal’ process of hiring Western oil companies which confiscate most of the resources through tailored contracts. Since 2003, the country continues to live in financial crisis with lack of basic services and one of the highest rates of corruption in the world. These changes happened in Iraq under the US/UK’s political watch, and they continue to be controlled by American ‘experts’ who supervise governmental and military processes from the Green Zone.
The important question to ask in the midst of all of this organized theft is: What is the most convenient political form and content of governance that can gain the approval of the majority of Iraqis, but one which allows the imperialist powers and companies to the theft of the main resource of the country, the oil? The required political content needs to be one which cannot be questionable by any opposition, one which has ‘pre-authorized’ acceptance, as it represents divine powers, and states for its followers what to think, practice and believe in. The Islamist religious content is the best facilitator of a rule as such, as the Islamic institutions are the best partner for the imperialist confiscation of the wealth of Iraq. Nevertheless, such a political partnership denotes a choice of one of the two prevailing Islamic institutions, the Sunni or the Shia institution, a choice which was decided early on before the occupation.
The US administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer explains in his book: My year in Iraq, how he waited for all the partnering political parties to visit him in the Green Zone but made the effort to take the trip himself and ask for a meeting with the top cleric of the Shia Islamic Institution. An international community which watched the events of September 11 unfold would wonder why was the US/UK occupation partnering with the Islamist political groups, when those were the motivation behind the bombing of the tower buildings in New York? Was it that the US
77 administration was seeking a ‘credible and acceptable’ representative of Iraqi people or is it that such a local partner would provide the best control of people’s choices as advised from deities above and be the best cover for the plundering of Iraqi oil and a reason for a continued stay of military bases of the US/UK. With the control of the Islamist Institution over the Iraqi state and the empowerment of their militias that became above the law, Iraqi women were subject to one of the most dangerous periods in their modern history, while suffering from lack of resources and basic services.
One of the cornerstones of Islamic rule is the implementation of Sharia as written before 14 centuries, in text which deals mostly with idealist formulations of life and death, but with some practical regulation of civil life as understood in that era, when theft was punished by cutting off the palm, crime by beheading, and men were rewarded by the right to four wives and many concubines, a practice which proved to be practical for military leaders to gain the loyalty of their fighters, a practice which ISIS applied in the Islamic State. Going back to the fact that the US/UK political plan was to empower Islamic rule meant full negation of women’s rights, which the imperialists public statements tried to avoid by praising Islam and promoting veiled women to the forefront in order to prove that their religion was not a barrier to their capabilities.
Meanwhile, the actual happenings on the ground, and specifically for the working class women and deprived female population of women included: poverty, demoralization, searching in the garbage for means of living, trafficking, and being coerced into prostitution to feed their children. All of these are dilemma requiring bigger economic and political solutions, and which can come into place through a social revolution to bring forward a socialist state that takes care of its citizens and grants equality to all regardless of gender or ethnicity/religion. For a women’s organization to address all the grievances of women, we found it best to start from combatting patriarchal violence and the state’s abandonment of the protection of its female citizens. On media debates, OWFI was mostly criticized for not submitting to religious rules and for challenging local patriarchs for restraining women’s freedom and for applying death penalty against women who do not succumb to their rules, and for challenging the state which allows the patriarchs to kill women as punishment, and furthermore draft legislation to preserve the patriarchs’ rights to discipline and kill women. I insisted to keep on talking about it repeatedly in 2003 – 2005 over local televisions until I became a house-hold name and face to a non- compromising feminist position to be supported or despised, but mostly addressed.
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While trying to get funding for OWFI’s feminist activities between 2003 and 2008, the main criticism was against the secular position, the anti-occupation position, and for pursuing taboo social issues which no organized Iraqi group had tackled throughout the ages, such as ‘honour killing’ or ‘sex-trafficking of women’. I found out in those years that a revolutionary position will not be supported by any funding unless we tone down our anti-imperialist and secular language while addressing money sources. OWFI refused any money earmarked for support of election - which was most of the funding. Meanwhile, the NGO groups that met with the US/UK administrators -which was mainly the NGOs of the mainstream Left, of Shia Islamist groups, and organizations affiliated to Kurdish Nationalists groups, had become the favorite and ‘intimate’ NGO club to meet with the gender experts of the CPA and the UN agencies.
In 2004 an Islamic newspaper, Al Bayena, accused OWFI and specifically me of being immoral, promoting promiscuity of women who want to have multiple husbands, and described me as a ‘beastly cow who promotes the marriage of women to each other’.56 Such a speech was equivalent of a fatwa that encouraged the assassination of women who were thought of as ‘immoral’ and a public enemy to belief and tradition. As for the mainstream Left party and affiliate NGOs, they were pleased to offer lip service to such an anti-feminist endeavour, and took on the task of publicizing the story that I personally promote polygyny, a story which satisfied the misogynist tendencies of a political group which had not yet adopted feminism into its political demands. It took OWFI years of political struggle, including the demonstrations of the Iraqi Tahrir square, and sheltering hundreds of jeopardized women, in order to get over the stigma which was started by a collaboration of a local Islamist group and the mainstream Left patriarchal propaganda.
9.4 Dismay at Leftist Indifference to Women’s Dilemma: Women’s Right-to-Life as a Central Demand
Our differences with the mainstream Leftist party began to surface within months after the occupation, when they would avoid addressing the issue of religious groups confiscation of the political scene, and also grew when we found out that feminist demands of dignity, equality and right-to-life were not high on their agenda, The ICP and its affiliated women’s NGOs avoided the demand of women’s right-to-life altogether.
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During a 2005 demonstration on the drafted constitution, there were two women’s statements in Al Firdawse square: one by the affiliated women’s organization of the mainstream Left which demanded a just constitution which treats women fairly giving them more rights to education and work, and another which was by OWFI demanding a secular egalitarian non-Nationalist constitution which respects women’s rights and provides full equality in the political, social, and legal realm. The organizer of the mainstream Left announced to the media that OWFI’s position was not adopted by the demonstration.
During and after the mass social demonstrations of February 25th 2011- which came as a response to the Arab Spring in North Africa - the mainstream Left had a heavy existence in the demonstration, as did OWFI and most political groups on the ground. The mainstream Left insisted that the demonstrations be ‘peaceful’ and were ready to control any youth anger against the army, SWAT groups, and to stop the rebel crowd from crossing the bridge and going into the Green Zone where the heads of the state were. Moreover, the coordinated efforts of the ICP organizations raised the slogan of reform of the Iraqi government, and were defiant to any group which calls for revolution, in a position which cannot be described as other than a regressive Left.
The Friday demonstrations of the Tahrir square were not continuous or steady, but would rise again during events of corruption or governmental failure of providing services. During the following years, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or Daesh57) political group have risen to power in June 10, 2014 after they invaded Mosul, the second biggest city in Iraq. Stories of ISIS’ mass killing of the males of Yazidi faith, and the enslavement of Yazidi females and other faith groups shocked the Iraqi conscience which never believed that mass rapes or sales of women can happen in broad daylight in an Iraqi city. In those day OWFI decided to publicize women’s sufferings, written into a statement following June 10, 201458. The mainstream Leftist NGOs which gathered in the Baghdad Tahrir square raised their slogans against the government’s corruption, and demanded adequate basic services, nevertheless they never wrote a slogan in defense of thousands of Iraqi women who were kidnapped by ISIS into the misery of serial rapes, forced marriages, impregnation and humiliation; neither did the Islamic government in Baghdad speak anything regarding the mass rapes against Yazidi women, in a position which can only be described as disdainful of women, ‘othered’ minority and religion.
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In a debate over one of the most popular Arabic leftist websites, Al Hewar Al Mutamadin (Modern Discussion), which interviews a feminist every March for the occasion of International Women’s Day, this issue came up. In March 2015 the website organizers invited me to submit an issue over which the political leftist circles should debate. I raised the question of how can any Iraqi leftist group consider themselves revolutionary or even humane when they had not addressed the issue of women’s enslavement under ISIS? 59 And would the mainstream Left even think that women should support their political and social demands in the Tahrir square demonstration when this same Left does not feel responsible or dismayed at the unprecedented crimes and humiliation against Iraqi women under ISIS, especially those of Yazidi faith?
In a recent turn of events in the summer of 2017, the ICP decided to ally with a mainstream Islamist group (Al Sadre60 group) who have more than 25% of the seats in the parliament. The ICP joined efforts in utmost narrow-mindedness, aiming to empower themselves through this alliance, and joining their supporters together into the same election slate of Sa’eroun (Marching). The ICP has a huge membership of seculars who were disappointed with the alliance with the Sadrists, and the disappointment of women was unspoken and silent. For members who follow a socialist agenda of liberation for working class and women, and take pride in a long history of communist struggles, this turn of events was a major blow causing a considerable number of the membership to distance themselves from the party which turned its anti-capitalist and feminist history upside down.
Throughout the years 2003 – 2018 OWFI managed to stand firm on a position of anti-capitalism and anti-patriarchy in spite of how vague and confusing some interactions within the NGO society were. Conflict with the imperialist powers and Islamic government, and confrontations with the mainstream Left and within our party, in addition to differences within the women’s organizations, made the feminist political struggle a difficult one. Nevertheless, we found much moral compensation in our internal community of feminist women which we had created throughout the years, most of whom were ‘graduates’ of OWFI’s women’s shelters.
Main Activities and Campaigns of the Organization
The plan for founding the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq had an objective of building a revolutionary feminist mass organization to organize and mobilize a female membership to confront and combat the patriarchs, but also to base our struggle on anti-
81 capitalism, anti-racism, and to defend the freedoms of all marginalized groups in the community. The founding statement of the Organization states an anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal position, while the other positions were a result of years of activism and involvement in defending oppressed community groups who were treated as ‘minorities’.
In the month of June in 2003, after going back to Iraq, I realized that the task at hand was a complex one. Other groups had indulged in struggle against imperialist invasion before, yet the circumstances and politics of the new millennium prove to be challenging in their constant changes towards further class differences, poverty, political instability, and specificity of attacks against women in what can be described as gendered imperialism. A credible and long-lasting project of activism calls for a clear mandate and strategy, while being flexible to real life circumstances resulting from the inhumane policies of the US occupation. While our political group was writing a founding statement for the organization to identify the political position against the US imperialist occupation and against the Iraqi collaborators of the occupation, the Islamist forces, it was important to have an understanding of the role of such an organization, and whether it will be: (a) a women's - human rights group which advocates for social and economic equality within an NGO setting and media spokesperson or rather feminist spokesperson/celebrity style61, or (b) becomes a modern-looking and secular thinking group of women calling for equality and freedom within a Marxist ideological agenda, or (c) to organize the women's ranks as part of a socialist party/movement in order to grow a political body which could become the political alternative whether through organizing a hard-line opposition or election or preparation for revolution, or (d) to suffice as a project of women's protection, and empowerment through rejecting tribal and Islamist misogyny and to run shelters as hubs of revolutionary education and empowerment in a variety of political and social methods, and a surrounding community of revolutionary women and men who organize social activities for creating consciousness.
Looking back at the eleven years in retrospect, I can say that all of the above was attempted. The political mass organization of women was the most difficult of all, nevertheless brought brilliant results materialized in revolutionary women who departed with a past of victimization, to become leaders of the community in the political turning points. It would only be fair to say that the surrounding hostile environment immensely limited the mass organizing task, and managed to confine us into smaller circles, media, and into our premises. Therefore, the role of OWFI
82 became an outspoken secular feminist group which challenged both occupation and the systemic Islamization of the society through campaigns of defending women's social, economic and safety rights according to universal human rights standards.
The following section is a walk-through into main landmarks of 15 years of feminist activism which reflected a Marxist position in our understanding. The activities were mostly in response to events, mass violence, or attempts to establish a secular socialist tradition of International Women’s Day or other similar events. A list of the corresponding OWFI’s statements are listed in Appendix A, and were referred to within the exposition of the activities. Another venue for documenting activities of 15 years was OWFI’s Al Mousawat (Equality) Newspaper, which was the only feminist newspaper in Iraq after 2003. There were a few attempts of other women’s groups to publish periodicals which were discontinued after a few issues. Al Mousawat is currently in its 36th issue and has become OWFI’s platform in the Iraqi society. Appendix B illustrates some issues of the newspaper, albeit recent issues as the early archive was hard to retrieve. The conclusions of this section will open the argument of the fourth and last chapter which builds the theoretic framework of a Marxist feminist political struggle in Iraq which aims to undo the degradation, marginalization, and informal enslavement which was imposed on the women of the society at large.
The following section is a reflection on fifteen years of activism of OWFI organization following the occupation of 2003. In all entries, the vision, objectives and methods of feminist work are considered as guidelines, while simultaneously influencing the objectives and methods in a higher level of consciousness. It is noteworthy to mention that the main activities of the struggle addressed major blows of violence against Iraqi women, drowning them into unprecedented dispossession, precarity, and enslavement at later times. While the first ten years entailed dispossession at a large scale, the latter five years witnessed the rise of Islamic political groups to impose slavery, precarity and insecurity upon one third of the society which fell under the rule of the recently formed and ousted "Islamic State", where the community suffered a mass refugee crisis, street battles, sectarian massacres and enslavement of women.
As Marxist feminists, we founded the organization to respond to all the crises imposed on women in Iraq, to empower the vulnerable against their perpetrators, and to organize an anti- capitalist and secular feminist group of women to become factors of change, and social
83 revolution. Our main public activities in defense of women in Iraq against patriarchal attacks, and towards revolutionizing a group of women to resist the wave of Islamist misogynist politics and tribal retribution, were the following:
• 2003, 24th of August: OWFI called for an anti-trafficking demonstration in Al Firdawse square in Baghdad. After holding weekly meetings in OWFI office in Baghdad for three months, for raising awareness on women's rights and inquiring about cases of violence against women, reports began to accumulate about kidnapping women in some neighborhoods on weekly basis. We began to ask the membership about the numbers of Figure 1. Discussing with US soldier about victims in some neighborhoods of Baghdad, and holding demonstration made an informed estimation of the scope of the abductions. On the morning of 24th August 2003, we held a demonstration in Al Firdawse square, the same location where Saddam's statue was pulled down. We were not more than 60 woman and man, while the media covering the demonstration where almost the same number, if not more. The demonstration was disrupted by fully-armed American soldiers/officers stepping into the square, asking in a hostile tone: "Do you have a permission to demonstrate?" The officer acted as if the US army was already the government, and he had no instructions to being polite or showing respect. When he started swearing, his senior whispered in his ear and pulled him away. They did not want a scene in front of the media cameras, and decided to step out of Al Firdawse square, leaving it for the demonstrating women. On that day, OWFI announced to the media that hundreds of Iraqi women were kidnapped into a newly thriving sex-trafficking industry during a few months after occupation62. The report was published over hundreds of news and anti-war media outlets world-wide. OWFI’s statement held the US administration responsible for the abductions in a statement delivered to the gateway of the Green Zone, as we were not allowed to step inside (Appendix A, p.143).
In the following years, between 2005 - 2007, OWFI acquired better understanding of the results of sex-trafficking because our women’s shelters had received many young women
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who left their family while in love with a young man, but eventually ended up in brothels. Some of those women implemented the required visits and questionnaires. It was in those years when we decided to study prostitution and trafficking patterns.
Figure 4. Speeches to the gathering in Figure 3. Speeches and banners for secular Firdawse square – Baghdad on IWD 2004 constitution
Figure 2. OWFI members march from residential complexes – Images are taken from my personal archive.
• 2004, 8th of March, International Women's Day (IWD) demonstration: organized by OWFI in Al Firdawse square, demanding a secular constitution to grant equality under a non-nationalist government. More than a thousand women, men and their children participated in the IWD demonstration/celebration, mostly from Al Salam Complex who were demanding their right to housing, as they were squatting in deserted governmental building. OWFI organized women and men in that quarter, among the dispossessed and who would rally behind class demands. The intent was to introduce a culture of observing socialist/secular events.
• 2003 30 April – 2018 25 June: Al Mousawat (Equality) Newspaper. OWFI continued to publish Al Mousawat newspaper, 2 – 4 times every year, reaching to issue number 36
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in June 2018, and continuing afterwards. Al Mousawat addressed arising political dilemma from a Marxist feminist perspective, and is written in simple language to be comprehended by basic education level. The main feminist themes of the newspaper were: (a) denouncing forced veil, Islamic dress, polygamy, and other practices which are degrading of women; (b) publicizing the connections between the occupation’s capitalist policies, women’s poverty, and sex-trafficking which became epidemic between 2004 – 2009; (c) demanding the repeal of ‘honor killing’ legislation, unequal inheritance,
and demanding a secular personal status law Figure 5. Front page of Al Mousawat - based on full equality; (d) confronting patriarchal Issue 35 and racist mass crimes, such as the enslavement of Yazidi women, discrimination against Black Iraqi women, and demanding the return of the jailed sons of ‘Sunni” women (Appendix B). • 2010 October 18, Al Mousawat Radio airing in Baghdad: It took OWFI's leading activists many years of alliances with Western progressive women and organizations before it was possible to receive financial support for OWFI’s secular and outspoken feminism to have live communication with the community, such as a radio station. OWFI went through many difficulties of managing Figure 6. Community Radio station Al Mousawat the radio in which comrades from the 103.8 FM WCPI helped us. From close-by explosions, to controlling male domination, to a governmental order to shut down the broadcasting equipment, were all problem which OWFI had to deal with between 2010 and 2018, and still continue to broadcast on the internet waves currently 63. Special
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programs were preserved for victimized women from OWFI’s shelters, or threatened LGBT persons who had the knowledge and ability to educate the community about issues of homosexuality, trans-sexuality, and sexual orientation. OWFI’s international supporters, and namely Dutch feminists, convinced the Dutch government to support these endeavors.
• 2011 February Arab Spring - Baghdad Tahrir square demonstrations: When the Arab Spring demonstrations broke out in Tunisia and Egypt, Iraqis were glued to TV screens, and wondering if the same uprising can be done in Iraq. The Iraqi government, which was backed and protected by the US/UK military, had imposed unprecedented class differences. Government officials were living in extreme prosperity and wealth, while the working class and the unemployed were living ongoing crises, with huge lack of basic services such as water and electricity. When crowds of demonstrators agreed on Facebook and coordinated meeting to have a unified demonstration on February 25, OWFI was in the front lines with the slogan of women's right to wealth: "Where is my share of the oil?" in addition to other slogans of freedom and equality. The Tahrir square activity assisted OWFI to gain recognition for the ability to organize youth groups for the demonstration, and helped us step out of the backlash stigma which the Islamists had locked us into for a few years. On February 25, the demonstrators began to push their way towards the bridge which connected the Tahrir square to the Green Zone, pushing the concrete wall-blocks with their bare hands and bodies, until the blocks began to fall. Helicopters appeared above us, Swat teams brought dirty hot water tanks and sprayed us, while snipers began to shoot on us from the top of buildings. While making our way away from the shooting, one of our comrades was shot in the leg. It should have been clear from the beginning; that crossing of the bridge towards the Green Zone would have one meaning only, that the demonstrators would be in direct confrontation with the 130,000 armed fighters of the US/UK army, backed with jet fighters and tanks. Another lesson learnt from Tahrir square was that the women who dared to demonstrate and confront most were those who had burnt all bridges with their patriarchs, and namely, shelter graduates and anti-trafficked women. Some of them were still in prostitution, our Black-Iraqi colleague’s girlfriends, but were happy to feel a day of freedom and challenge. This conclusion gave us more motivation to treat our women’s shelters as
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schools for revolutionary education, and consider the sheltering work as a political push towards social transformation in consciousness, despite the "advice" which some comrades gave us, "not to waste our energy with the so-called, victimized women”. In March 10, 2014 Al Sharqiya TV announced me and Ms. Maamouri64 as the spokespersons of Tahrir square, which established OWFI’s position in the epicenter of political event. Nevertheless, the following army raids of our headquarters, the repeated detainment of the affiliated youth, and the beatings/sexual molestations of the OWFI's female demonstrators in the following demonstrations put a stop to this activity.
Figure 7. Tahrir square demonstration on February 25, 2011, in Baghdad and in Samarra -Images are taken from my personal archive.
• 2012 March – May, Mass-killings of LGBT: in the year following the Tahrir square demonstrations, the government-affiliated Islamist militias of Assayeb Ahl Alhaq65 posted listings of gay men's names in the Sadre city ghetto in Baghdad and in other districts of Baghdad, threatening that gay men should either repent, or be killed. Dead bodies of young men were thrown on the streets, after the murderers smashed their skulls by concrete blocks, alarming the society at large; however, nobody defended the murdered and threatened gay men, or dared to say any criticism against the killers, in fear
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of being thought of as encouraging homosexuality. The numbers of killed gay men passed 35 when OWFI women decided to respond to the crimes, write a statement, and shelter gay men from honour killing. I held a meeting with two threatened LGBT activists: (Ruby), a gay young man, and with (Madi Al Iraq)66, an activist lesbian who was in our shelter, for an hour, with an intensive debate of how to write a first statement in the defense of a safe future for the LGBT of Iraq. Another result of the meeting was the decision to choose February 6th as the day of commemoration of the victimized gays of Iraq, as one of the first killings, that of a well-known gay man, nicknamed Aarousa67, occured on that day. Our comrades in the party were not convinced that the LGBT struggle for respect and pride was a priority, but issued a statement after all the discussions, albeit reluctantly. OWFI's immediately issued a statement publicizing the killing of 44 gay men (Appendix A), and no other NGO dared to declare any public position. The rest of the year was difficult for OWFI due to the security raids on our offices, either in search of sheltered women, or meetings of demonstrators of Tahrir square, thus terrorizing the women and youth into a situation of submission.
• 2013 International activism of holding US government accountable for the occupation: Right to Heal Initiative68: during one of OWFI's trips to the town of Hawija, 2 hours drive to the North-West of Baghdad, OWFI activists witnessed the ordeal of dozens of children of 10 years old or younger, crippled or with limbs which are folded, and with mental disabilities. When we asked why, we found out that the US army was practicing shooting and bombing in an ammunition training field which was next-door to their town's houses. In conjunction with the American Civil Rights groups of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Madre Organization, OWFI and FWCUI filed a court suit against the US government for the harm which was done against the Iraqi people. The filed complaint was accepted by the court of the Inter American Commission of Human Rights. OWFI presented the documentation of more than 350 children who had similar disability cases in the proximity of the town of Hawija with the population of 110,000. In a second trip of fact-finding, more families came forward with their children’s cases, and the numbers of disabilities rose to more than 600 children.
• 2014 March 8 – 10, Jaafari Law Crisis: At the end of 2013, local news announced a newly proposed Jaafari law, forwarded by the Minister of Justice, which imposes a Shia
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version of Sharia provisions on women and girls of Iraq. Minister of Justice Hassan Al Shammary, of the Islamist Fadhila party, forwarded to the Prime Minister’s office a law which allowed the marriage of a nine year old girl, and humiliated women in describing their sexuality in ways which objectify them into mere objects for sexual use or for Figure 8. OWFI demonstrates against Jaafari reproduction, and not as human beings Law. with right to dignity or respect. The news angered all women’s organizations including OWFI who took to the streets again. On a BBC Arabic television talk show69 on March 12th 2014, I had a debate with Hassan Al Shammary Minister of Justice about the Jaafari Law where I described the law as legalization for pedophilia, whereas Al Shammary accused all who reject the Jaafari Law as politically motivated and supportive of the ousted Baath regime. On March 10, the religious head of Al Fadhila Islamic group had a televised talk where he described me and OWFI women, including others who spoke against Jaafari Law as “fallen women … following their desires … sexually promiscuous, etc …”70. In such times, activists with dual citizenship can do much more and still stay safe, as I left the country for a couple of months in Canada until Al Ya’coubi’s fatwa was forgotten.
• 2014 - June 10, ISIS Refugee Crisis: Precarity and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women. On June 10 - 2014, the country was shocked to find out that the second biggest city of Iraq had fallen into the hands of the ISIS forces with no resistance from the Iraqi army. The US/UK had trained and equipped the Iraqi army to be ready for military conflict; however, the seeds of sectarian divisions which the CPA had planted into the Iraqi government would not allow national unity, neither was it planned for the Iraqi state, as the state of conflict and chaos allows further confiscation of Iraqi oil, and lengthening the stay of US/UK military bases in Iraq. The tension between the fundamentalist militias on the Shia governmental-affiliated forces and the Sunni side in opposition who eventually joined efforts with ISIS, made millions of Iraqis
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fall victims to the newly established medieval-like rule of ISIS, where dispossessing everybody from their wellbeing, beheading adversaries, and enslaving women and children became ordinary matters of daily life. OWFI wrote statements addressing ISIS’ crimes and contempt of women, kidnapping them as concubines and forced wives of the fighters within days after the fall of the city of Mosul, and we broadcast the issues which shocked the consciousness of the society on Al Mousawat Radio, to be surprised with an order from the governmental Communication and Media Commission (CMC) shutting down OWFI's radio, with the pretext that the radio’s ‘registration papers were not complete’. Meanwhile, thousands of Yazidi women71 and many hundreds of Turkmen Shia and Christians women were bused and shuffled among ISIS cities, sold as slaves, in a precedent which shocked the society. The religious/ethnic conflict began to persistently demonstrate a gender component which caused unprecedented oppression and precarity on women in systemic ways. OWFI continued to voice feminist resistance against the extremist patriarchal practices connecting them theoretically to their political root, and denouncing them, while giving hope and determination to the victimized women as in the statement directed to female surviving victims of ISIS (Appendix A). The statements and debates of this historic moment aimed at a shift in the community consciousness from patriarchal to feminist perspectives, humanizing female victims and revealing the ideological patriarchal position against women, which oppresses females in times of peace also.
• 2003 - 2018 Women’s Shelters: from one room in Baghdad to 11 houses in 5 cities. In 2003 OWFI offered one, and then two rooms to women who were escaping honour killing and domestic abuse on the second floor of the first office in Al Rashid street. The decision was taken casually with the comrades while learning about the dangers which threaten each woman. While organizing for the International Women’s Day, it became clear that the same women who resided in the shelters were the main organizers, and sometimes gave speeches in spite of the threat of being exposed to their patriarchs. One fact became obvious, that women who burnt the bridges with their patriarchs were more motivated and able to challenge systemic patriarchy whether originating from the government, tribal heads, political Islamists, or from patriarchal individuals. Another fact began to unfold; that the women who were assigned by the party to represent OWFI in
91 activities and platforms had the political analysis, but not the feminist tendency which was crucial for assisting and empowering the vulnerable women. During the years 2003 – 2006, most of the women who needed the shelters had run away from tribal control to be with the men they chose as life-partners. When the male would not marry the woman/girl, and after she had left the family for more than 24 hours, she would become a potential victim of honour killing. After 2005 OWFI noticed that the traffickers would recruit young males to lure young females and promise them marriage, while after the female escapes her home she is delivered to a compromising and violent situation of rape and prostitution. With the election of the first government in 2005, and the increase of class differences into a political elite with incredible wealth, a growing demand on ‘entertainment clubs’ and back-door brothels dwelled on vulnerable female orphans of war, and women who ran away from their tribes. OWFI started with one sheltering house in 2004 in the Hay Philistine neighbourhood in Baghdad, while expanding later in 2008 to two houses, after one of the ‘graduates’ of the shelter became committed to OWFI’s socialist feminism and asked to run her own shelter for younger women. In 2013, a third house was necessary for Black Iraqi women who had lived lifetime deprivation, and had absolutely no prospects. One of the previous year’s ‘graduates’ of the first shelter was a Black Iraqi who showed interest in becoming a party member and received political training in spite of being illiterate. She became committed to opening a shelter for Black- Iraqi women who want to escape sex-trafficking, but have no other options. In 2017 the numbers of women’s shelters became 10 houses, and later 11 in 2018, part of which were opened in the cities that were liberated from ISIS. OWFI had a shelter for LGBT after 2012, but maintaining and continuing it proved to be harder than women’s shelters which jeopardized the continuity from time to time.
It is noteworthy to mention that Iraqi laws had a legislative vacuum around the legal status of NGO-run women’s shelters, as there were no shelters as such in Iraq’s history. OWFI used this fact to explain that the shelters were not illegal because there was no article in the law to prevent them, while patriarchal official position was that OWFI’s shelters were illegal because there was no article in the laws to give them legal status. For 15 years, OWFI continued to challenge the patriarchal positions of the officials and run its women’s shelters in secret location, while receiving vulnerable women and doing the
92 intake in the formal offices of OWFI. While in the first year, a few individual women needed sheltering and found her way to OWFI, the numbers grew between 2008 – 2014 to become twenty or thirty annually. After the ISIS control of Mosul, and the displacement of whole populations including women who were compromised by ISIS, OWFI had to open new locations and houses whereas sheltering more than 90 woman and girls every year, including Yazidis, Turkmen Shia, and Black Iraqis. OWFI leading activists counted an approximate figure of numbers of women who passed through our shelters throughout the past 15 years, and the number was more than 800 women during the days of finalizing this research. The colleagues in OWFI - graduates of our shelters - with the leading positions in OWFI, have all experienced a revolutionary social transformation after escaping ‘honour killing/trafficking’ and finding safety and feminist education within OWFI’s shelters. Challenging the patriarchs in the government subjected us to many raids72, intimidation, and defamation, and still it was worth the price: 800 women having an opportunity to a better life, while dozens of them had become OWFI’s leading activists, eyes and ears in the community, and staff in the NGO to help the expansion of the organization in resources and physical existence as women’s centers in the community. After the last raid, OWFI’s allies within the international women’s movement, namely the progressive and feminist Madre organization, suggested that we issue a complaint to the UN Women regarding this matter which took place on October 27th of 2017. UN personnel demanded that the Iraqi Commission on Human Rights investigate into the matter that governmental security forces raided OWFI headquarters without a search warrant (Appendix A, p.164).
Figure 9. One of the first women's shelter in Baghdad 2005
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Figure 10. OWFI shelters in 2017: 10 shelters
Figure 11. 2017 shelter in Mosul During the years of the Yazidi women’s enslavement – which had not ended during writing these words, a new form of consciousness forced itself into the Iraqi community; the first one was of being shocked with the level of criminality of the ISIS perpetrators who committed the crimes of mass enslavement against the women, and the second one was a form of humane feminist consciousness which expressed itself as resistance to the criminal patriarchal acts and in search of
94 ways to undo the oppression which befell Yazidi and other women, while combatting and dismantling a criminally extremist patriarchy, one which the modern Iraqi society had not witnessed before at this scale. The last chapter of this research will further explicate the mass crimes against women, analyzing the patriarchal conceptual framework which motivated and justified them, and finally conclude methods to combatting and dismantling such prevailing patriarchy, and articulate on a theoretic basis for a feminist agenda for feminist struggle in Iraq.
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Chapter 4 Analyzing Patriarchal Violence to Shape Conceptual Framework of Dismantling it: A Feminist Platform for OWFI
When referring to the kinds of consciousness in relation to oppression of women, it is detrimental to differentiate revolutionary consciousness of criticizing for the purpose of changing a ‘bad reality’ from non-revolutionary consciousness which pacifies and accepts some kinds of oppression while justifying them with a cover of religion, tradition, or nationalism in order to accept the status quo. Paula Allman describes two divergent ways of praxis: the first of which is to reproduce the violence and exploitation of capitalism, while the second one is through critical revolutionary praxis which digs below the appearance of capitalism into its essence (Carpenter, Mojab, 2017, p.51). The first section of this chapter will explore into the forms of reproduction of the violence of occupation and sectarian governmental oppression into sectarian, ethnic and gender oppression; while the latter section will be the conclusion from the first section, and will be a study into conceptual framework for revolutionary feminist consciousness to resist the formerly explained patriarchal tendencies, to be explored as a tool for feminist resistance and building a Marxist feminist platform for women’s struggles as informed albeit conceptually in Revolutionary Learning (Carpenter, Mojab, 2017, p.88).
The problematic of this inquiry is a long-lasting feminist question within the Marxist Left: what is the root reason and motivation to the oppression of women, and what is the strategy to overcome it and to achieve women’s liberation and equality? If we start from ‘real life premises’ and look into the mass crimes committed against women, and analyze internal and external relations, and the changes which were imposed on those relations with the occupation and ethno- sectarian conflict, the target will be to resolve the main concepts which materialized with those changes. Building a conceptual framework of how patriarchy grew and prevailed, how it manifested itself, and the contradictions it created is one of the starting points which can lead us to results. It is important to acknowledge that this theorization is work in progress attempting to pave the ground for a full theoretic framework to combat growing war-time patriarchies. While it is clear that patriarchy is a cornerstone of the imperialist control of Iraq to divide and conquer, and that patriarchy’s demise is structurally connected to confronting and defeating Imperialist capitalism, it is still relevant to understand how patriarchy manifests itself, and therefore how to build feminist struggle against it. In this specific moment in history when mass crimes of
96 systemic ‘honour-killing’ and daytime enslavement of women became ‘legal’ practices, the question to ask would be: What is it in the Iraqi social context that drives to the implementation of such crimes of hatred against Iraqi women, such as systemic ‘honour-killing’, sex-trafficking of war orphans, enslavement of women under ISIS, legislating for infant female ‘marriage’?
Analysis of Systemic Patriarchal Violence: Investigation of Practices, Concepts and Tools of Patriarchal Dominance
Silvia Federici studies the change in gender relations in countries which were subject to political changes and ‘economic restructuring’ during a period of primitive accumulation of capital, such as Nigerian economy after undergoing structural economic adjustments by the International Monitory Fund and the World Bank as a solution for foreign debt crisis in the 1980s. Federici finds a sharp rise in the violence against women, and what she describes as an “attack on the female body” simultaneous with the economic interventions and the primitive accumulation of capital (Federici, 2003, p.9). Federici takes one step further to compare the escalated violence against women within the phenomenon of ‘witch hunting’ which took place in Europe in the 16th century during the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism, which led to more intense forms of labour exploitation; noting that the violence decreases once capitalism had established the means to a constant profit. Going back to the case of Nigeria, Federici quotes Samir Amin who describes the transition to capitalism as an “unequal exchange between the ‘First’ world and the ‘Third’ world” (p.18), and she elaborates on the consequences which usually include an intensification of violence against women in what is similar to ‘witch hunting’ (p.11). A scenario as such sounds like the economic restructuring policies which Iraq is currently subject to, allowing primitive accumulation of capital, and requiring series of social crises of gender and ethnic nature shocking the society, and rendering it helpless against the economical Imperialist changes.
In Basra, the oil-rich southern city of Iraq, the production of oil did not stop since the invasion in 2003. In a 2005 unionist strike, the administration of the oil company told workers that stopping the production one work day will cost them penalties which were equivalent to what the workers earn during a lifetime. A leading oil unionist in Basra, narrated to the conferring unionists of the FWCUI that their strike was demanding a minor raise in salary which they were denied, while it
97 turned out that every day of work brought revenue which could not be compared with their lifetime salaries73. In the same city of Basra, unveiled women began to get killed in side streets in 2005, with their numbers increasing gradually to reach to catastrophic levels in 2007. The killings had the signature of torture and mutilations of parts of female body. And the numbers did not decrease until after 2007, while slogans ordering women to be disciplined and decent were all over the walls of the city (Khalaf, 2010, para. 18-21)74. In the following years, when foreign oil companies established oil extraction locations and recruitment of workers, killings of women decreased to lower numbers. In order to study the cases of mass violence against women, a dialectic understanding of the bigger picture and internal social relations and contradictions will be the guidelines to concluded concepts and theoretic framework.
In a description of dialectic method of inquiry, Bertell Ollman suggests that while studying and focusing on a specific problematic, there is need to start from the system of relations surrounding that problematic, in order to absorb the concrete reality of the problematic, to be followed by an exposition of the history which led to that specific problematic (Ollman, 2003, p.15). From the system, understanding the inner relations, the difference/similarities, relation of opposites, Quality/quantity transformations, and contradictions. The standpoint of a woman is what’s required to understand the ‘real life premises’, and the ‘before’ and ‘after’ aspect while studying moments of violence on women in Iraq in this period of 2003-2018. The method of inquiry will be a dialectic one, which starts with the bigger picture, or rather the system and its ruling relations with the parts, and then zoom into the part which is the problematic of this study. The historic dimension will be visited throughout the study of the system and the part as described by (Ollman, 2003, p.12-17), it includes history of the dilemma and its surrounding context.
Mapping patriarchal violence against women will be a matrix of investigation to include some or all the following areas of inquiry, while considering the changes which these areas were subject to during the period of the research 2003 – 2008, changes which resulted directly or indirectly from Imperialist political and military intervention:
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Areas of investigation Perspective of investigation
Patriarchal Social concepts Official Patriarchal Ethno-sectarian Class practices Social relations response structures/ political and Gender of and historic institutions/ military Ruling violence/ insight system of conflict text/ laws Race/ethnicity crimes relations
Social consequences and Resistance of Women
Figure 12. Mapping patriarchal violence through areas of investigation and through a variety of perspectives
The main landmarks of Violence against Women, in chronological order, were the following:
2003 onward Sex - trafficking of women and girls to neighbouring countries
2007-2008 Individual ‘honour-killings’ and systemic killings in the South, and continuous killings in Kurdistan (Kurdish North). Tens of thousands escaping honour killing: no identification papers – living as stateless persons
2005 onward Regulations on forcing Islamic Clothing in educational institutions and workplaces
2007 onward Women in Western Iraq losing their reproductive health: giving birth to disabled children in Falluja, Hawija, and surrounding cities.
2013-2017 Al Jaafari Legislation proposals allowing marriage of female children
2014 -2017 ISIS enslavement of women with focus on non-Muslim women of the Yazidi minority
2018 After defeat of ISIS, liberated women in fear of tribal ‘honour-killing’
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Some of these crimes will be analysed according to the steps of the matrix indicated above. The section will analyse different kinds of violence against women and the patriarchal concepts and practices behind them. Attempts of concluding a patriarchal system of methodological disempowerment of women is the objective of the section. Quotes from OWFI statements will be used to explain the extent of the violence, provide facts, and conclude a feminist position of resistance to patriarchal violence.
11.1 Mass Killings of Women in the Center and South: Systemic ‘Honour-Killing’
The Southern city of Basra witnessed a surge in systemic killings of women between 2005 – 2008 by self-claimed vigilantes riding motorcycles. An article on The Independent newspaper, titled “'Westernised' women being killed in Basra” reported that ‘Religious extremists have killed at least 40 women this year [2007] in Basra because of their "un-Islamic" dress, according to Iraqi police.’ (Salaheddin, 2007, par.1) According to Safaa Khalaf, an activist and journalist from Basra, an average of 15 women were killed every month in Basra by squads of ‘Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice’ without getting a considerable response from local police or government (Khalaf, 2007, section 2). The practice of individuals killing of women due to not observing Islamic dress code continued till 2008, as explained above (sections 5 -7).
The social concept behind killing an unveiled woman is that women who do not observe the teachings of Islam regarding clothing and do not cover their body from the eyes of stranger males, are promiscuous women with no respect for their husbands’ right to the woman’s body as private property, not to be seen or desired by anyone else. Judging women as ‘bad’ or ‘immoral’ was enough justification for any questions; thus, implying that gender relations as such portray women as private property for one man. Although males are allowed to a multitude of relations with other women, whether formal marriages, or informal ‘mut’a’/pleasure marriages, women’s interactions with other males are punishable by death. The patriarchal violent practice of ‘honour killing’ is of ancient origin and is usually used as punishment for ‘adultery’, without allowing the accused any benefit of doubt. As the social and economic fabric of life has been seriously disrupted, this has unleashed extensive tension, especially in gender relations, where war set off extreme male violence in the form of ‘honour killing’ (Mojab, Abdo, 2004, p.16). Although ‘honour killings’ are known historically in Iraq, however the practice had diminished in the
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1970s during the times of rapid economic growth, and governmental policies for women’s participation in public life (HRW, 2003, par.2). Nevertheless, the 1990s decade of UN economic sanctions overturned the situations, and so have the years of lawlessness and poverty following the US/UK occupation of Iraq. Male – female gender relations of domination resort to violence in order to force subordination on women and consequently maintain a status of supremacy for the males. A patriarchal political and justice system provides the tools of subjugation to males through laws which allow ‘honour killing’, through media which promotes violence to women to keep them inline under patriarchal supervision, and through security institutions that treat women as ‘male possessions’ when performing virginity tests on detained young women, and while investigating with them.
Although ‘honour killing’ originates from patriarchal violence, or in other words, tribal violence, the religious text of Islam supports the habit of heavy discipline against ‘adultery’, thus joining efforts with tribal cruelty to discipline women. Preserving the blood lineage of the male is the utmost objective; moreover, changing the blood lineage by wives or daughters’ sexual relationships are practices punishable by killing. Feminist epistemic privilege provides critical perspective of a conceptual framework of patriarchy based on idealist or rather non-material concepts, whereas defending bloodline, male dominance, and regarding wife and children as private property, or as in the German Ideology’s Chapter one, where the wife is described to be as ‘the proletarian who is exploited by the bourgeois husband.’ As for the political changes in Iraq during and after the occupation, the CPA did not change the articles which allow ‘honour killing’ in the criminal code75, although they meddled with most of the laws which served their imperialist interest. Militia forces of uneducated armed youth with patriarchal sectarian perspective continued ‘honour killing’ practice throughout the whole period of the research albeit in less numbers than the peak period of 2005 – 2008.
11.2 Sex Trafficking of War Widows and Orphans 2003 Onward
OWFI’s activists background or political training was not sufficient to have a comprehensive understanding of the reasons, context, and results of a rising wave of sex-trafficking in Iraq. In a report prepared in 2008-2009 and published in 2010, the first steps of investigating into this dilemma is expressed.
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In spite of OWFI’s background on women's rights, we did not expect nor comprehend the extent of the problem when we received reports of the kidnapping of women and girls in Baghdad in May 2003. When we started to gather reports from Baghdad neighborhoods the following summer, the numbers were shocking. We expressed our dismay to the media and our fear that a new and vicious era has attacked the women of Iraq. OWFI learned that trafficking of women is the hidden face of war, insecurity and chaos.
In those days, we sympathized with women who were forced or maybe sold into prostitution. We did not have the same consideration for women who were already prostituted in brothels. We thought of them as the unfortunate margins of the society. It was only in 2006, that we noticed an epidemic rise in the number of women who prostituted for a living, whether in formal brothels, in regular working places, or in a hidden neighborhood hideaway. The numbers were obviously no longer something we could consider an unfortunate marginal minority. It was only then that we, in OWFI, decided to investigate into the extent of prostitution in Iraq, in order to better understand the underground industry of trafficking which thrives on the exploitation of women's flesh.
We also needed to gather some background information about the history of prostitution and trafficking in Iraq. Our efforts started with documenting kidnappings in the first years, but gradually expanded into searching for places where girls and women are sold. We found ourselves documenting prostitution houses where the actual buying and selling take place. Eventually, it was impossible to separate one issue from the other. After confronting officials throughout 2008 and 2009 about the issue of trafficking, OWFI developed a reputation of a fierce defendant of women's integrity against the war-time disasters. As a result, eye-witnesses and the victims of trafficking began contacting OWFI with their stories. Some reports were of incidents too big for OWFI to handle. For example, distressed witnesses reported the kidnapping and trafficking 128 women from the city of Diyala in 200776.
Prior to an advertised interview with OWFI activist77 on MBC TV, the government campaigned against OWFI starting in May 2009 with active attacks over the public Al Iraqia television, and intervened to stop the airing of televised broadcasts where OWFI sought to tell the trafficking story. Frankly, we were intimidated and scared. Moreover, OWFI was advised by allies that publishing these facts may jeopardize our lives as we are touching onto one of the biggest trafficking gangs in the world, and a new and thriving one in Iraq. We decided to be silent, stay safe, and keep our information to ourselves. OWFI could not maintain that position for long.
A visit to the female juvenile prison in Baghdad in January 2010 reminded us that OWFI served an important mission that required courage, but also facing our fears. It was the faces of 12-year-old Mena and her sister that reminded us of our responsibilities. They were imprisoned after being sent back from the Arab Emirates as "prostitutes." Meeting those two children and hearing their stories was a heavy experience for the activists of OWFI. Some rushed out crying, some promised to help, while others hardened their resolve to document and reveal these crimes against the women of Iraq, including innocent young girls. Innocent girls who should still be enjoying childhood under the
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protection of their mothers were being incarcerated for the crime of prostitution, an ordeal in which they were the modern-day slaves.
At this point, we do not know if the numbers of Iraqi teenaged trafficking victims of the recent years are in the thousands, or tens of thousands. We do know that the Iraqi government does not want to hear the facts, nor acknowledge the sufferings. Lawmakers do not feel an urgency to eradicate the crime of trafficking. (OWFI, 2010, 3-4)
OWFI’s report Prostitution and Trafficking of Women and Girls in Iraq included results of interviews with 72 females, out of which 65% were underage, most of whom were subject to physical abuse and addiction. The report also included some of “health problems of prostituted women: venereal diseases, forced miscarriages, work after abortion, and torture in case of gang- rape.” (OWFI, 2010, p.22)
The practice of commodification of girls and women was mostly due to the poverty of already war-torn families who could no longer take care of their children. Few of the women/girls originated from gypsy or rather Roma background. While some women were aware of the trafficking and money exchange in return for their ‘possession’, most of them were not aware that they were sold, but rather believed a story of promised marriage, or going to a better home. Once they were sold in the first time, the buy-and-sell continued as the brothels looked for new women while they got rid of the ones which they did not make profit out of. When I explained the issue among the comrades, the debates boiled down to one point: If a wife is treated as the proletarian or the private property in the house where the husband is the bourgeois capitalist, then a ‘prostituted woman’ is treated as a commodity which is bought for one-time use, or for temporary rent, thus objectified and easily abused.
During the meetings and interviews with the trafficked women, we also found out that some of them had run away from tribal abusive environments with a man whom she wished to marry, but when the promise of marriage fell through, she would be surprised by gang rape from the man’s friends, and then ended up in a brothel. In other words, what pushed them into trafficking was patriarchal violence in their homes where they were treated literally as domestic serving slaves, with no right to meet or mix with males, or have their own private lives; and what anguished them during prostitution was the fact that they had no control over their bodies from sexual predators who regarded them as tools for pleasure and treated them as shameful creatures not to be associated with. Patriarchal disgust with women who are not ‘owned’ by a man, or can be protected by a relative man, weighed heavily on women who lived in the margins of the society,
103 unable to regain a normal life. OWFI expressed dismay at the imperialists who supported the tribes and let go of women’s well-being in the 2007 IWD statement: “The occupation forces have chosen to support and empower the enemies of women and freedoms in Iraq. Their relentless efforts of weakening and destroying women of Iraq have hit the highest point of inhumanity and barbarism.” (Appendix A, p.153-154)
OWFI kept on challenging the legislators and their supporting international community upon dealing with this matter until a proposed law no. 28 in 2012, a law which was not enacted, and no traffickers were persecuted on it yet. In a training of Iraqi judges by a female European Union legal specialist who invited OWFI activist, many judges expressed their dismay at the request that they respect the humanity of ‘prostitutes’ as victimized persons. This incident took place in the same year that Law no. 28 was passed. The legal system did not need written text to exile ‘prostituted’ women on moral basis, as their patriarchal positions were entrenched stronger and deeper than to be changed by any legal amendments or legal training.
When investigating the issue of sex trafficking of women and girls in Iraq, there were some added layers of information to be aware of: that trafficking was exclusive to women who were dispossessed as a result of sectarian conflict, or patriarchal violence. In a latter mass trafficking of ISIS to Yazidi women in 2014 - 2017, an added component of race/ethnicity was central. OWFI activists continued to explain over Al Mousawat newspaper that ‘prostituted’ or trafficked women were victims of violence of patriarchy or conflict, and that it was the responsibility of the society at large to defend and empower them.
11.3 Jaafari Legislation of Female Child Marriage and Objectification of Women
The attempts of imposing Sharia law as a proof of the victory of Islamist political parties over other political groups had started since December of 2003 when Abdul Aziz Hakim, member of Iraqi Governing Council, proposed resolution 137 in an IGC session, and got the majority of the votes on it. Although the society was still in shock from the military occupation, there was sufficient opposition to the proposed resolution which forced the US Administrator of Iraq Paul Bremer to veto the proposal. However, the threats of a second attempt were haunting the Iraqi Parliament at all times, and they materialized on February 25 – 2014”
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On 25 February, the Iraqi council of ministers approved a new personal status law called Ja'fari law, named after the sixth Shi'ite imam Ja'afar al-Sadiq, who founded his own school of jurisprudence (Shi'ite). It was submitted to parliament for a vote. The draft was put forward by the justice minister Hassan al-Shimari, a member of the Shi'ite Islamist Fadhila (Virtue) party to deal with issues of marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption. (Zangana, 2014, par.1)
The Imperialist plan of political representation according to religion, sect, and ethnicity began to bear its disastrous consequences since the first elections in 2005. Nevertheless, its legal consequences against women were fully realized when the extremist Shia-Islamist political party of Fadhila won 6 seats in the 2014 elections, and was assigned to the Ministry of Justice, a position which leaves the whole society under the mercy of the extremist legislators of Fadhila party. Fadhila Party’s proposal was not publicly announced while acquiring a first stage approval in a cabinet meeting, and it took women’s organization more than a week to be aware of its ancient and misogynist provisions, some of which are:
Article 16 sets the legal age of marriage for females as nine and males as 15, although it could be even lower with the consent of a guardian, father or a grandfather. Article 104 permits unconditional polygamy. Article 101 says men have the right to "enjoy" sex with their wives any time they want, and wives cannot leave their marital home without their husband's permission. (Zangana, 2014, par.3)
In one meeting of the Iraqi Council of Ministers, they decided to start a new era of ancient patriarchal violence on the females of Iraq, an era where pedophilia, unrestrained polygamy, marital rape, and home restraint are legal rights which men can practice over women. Other articles of the proposed law confiscate women’s legal right to alimony in connection with ‘being too young or old for providing sexual pleasure to a husband’, while using text which is deeply humiliating of women. Another provision of the law is the degradation of non-Muslim women by preventing their marriage to Muslim men, and ‘downgrading’ it to a Mut’a/pleasure marriage, which is a legal cover for a temporary relationship, similar to prostitution.
Article 126 says husbands are not required to pay financial support (nafaqah) when their wife is either a minor or a senior and hence unable to sexually satisfy them. Article 63 prevents Muslim males from permanently marrying non-Muslim females, which means a Shi'ite Muslim male is allowed to marry non-Muslim females temporarily in what is called mut'a marriage. Mut'a is when a man who wants to have sex with a woman "marries" her in the presence of a religious figure, who acts as a mut'a broker. The man will specify how long the marriage will last, ranging from a few hours to many years. A small mehr (dowry) will then be paid to the woman. Such marriages have no protection or guarantees for women and/or their offspring in Iraq (Zangana, last section).
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Iraqi women and men opposed the proposal with continuous demonstrations, writings, and media talk shows for the following months. OWFI raised the slogans of “We will not allow you to rape our daughters”. OWFI’s International Women’s Day’s statement of March 8-2014 mainly addressed the Jaafari law attack on women’s social and economic rights: “Feminization of economic oppression is part of the Jaafari Jurisprudence and [Jaafari] personal status law, which incorporate articles that violate women and young girls’ rights by treating them as objects for men’s sexual pleasure. Jaafari Jurisprudence guarantees women’s losing freedom of movement and property ownership (Appendix A, p. 154). Had these legislative crimes against women succeeded, generations of females would turn into slaves within their own homes.
11.4 ISIS Enslavement of Women of ‘Other’ Religion/Ethnicity
According to Amy L. Beam, an activist who had many fact-finding trips to the Yazidi villages and towns of Kurdistan between 2015 – 2018 following the genocide, “5270 Yazidi women and children were abducted by Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] in 2014” (Beam, 2018, p.72). Her book: The Last Yezidi Genocide documents extensive details of ISIS attacks, the mass killing of Yazidi men, and the abduction of thousands of Yazidi women as slaves to be sold in slave market in Mosul where the sales were registered at the Islamic State court. After hundreds of interviews with Yazidi women, Beam concluded that an ISIS fighter would be more concerned about following his twisted teachings of Islam, than to care for the life of a female child whom he raped, and that the rapists would pray before and after the rape, considering it a service to his god (p. 75). Beam also adds that while ISIS fighters would forcefully marry Christian or Muslim women, they were allowed to two Yazidi female slaves, and were instructed that the female Yazidi slaves are their property, to be disposed of or offered as they pleased (72-75). According to OWFI’s reports from ISIS-controlled cities, especially the city of Hawija, some of the sex slaves detained and abused in the fighters ‘entertainment houses’ were Muslim, and were being punished for refusing the rules of ISIS and attempting to run away.
In the case of ISIS enslavement of women in Mosul and other cities, heinous patriarchal violence was only part of the reaction of the Islamic resistance to the occupation, a resistance which transformed in monstrous ways from Al Qaeda to ISIS, to become a regional organization to jeopardize Iraq and the whole region. In the process of establishing ISIS rule in Mosul, women were the rewards to be offered to fighters, however women of ‘other’ religion and ‘other’
106 ethnicity were treated as Sabaya (concubines), and the extreme case of violence befell Yazidi women, whose community was uprooted, demoralized, and broken, in what amounted to a genocide78 which was not recognized by the UN until September 2017. The fact that the Yazidi women were from an impoverished community that lived on farming, and that the were not Muslim, or considered a monotheistic religion by both ISIS and the ruling Islamists in Baghdad, in addition to the fact that the ruling Nationalist Kurds did not consider them Kurdish, and that they were women, were all factors that directed a blow of gigantic scale against their villages, their communities, and their bodies. Class, race/ethnicity, religion, and gender were all filters which placed Yazidi women in the epicenter of the rupture of sectarian patriarchal violence in a post-occupation conflict zone.
11.5 Theoretic Analysis of Patriarchal Practices and Relations: Marxist Feminist Responses to Concepts and Methods
If we look for the common motive behind all the systemic crimes demonstrated above, it is patriarchal domination where males use force against females to maintain privilege and status of male-superiority, for which a supportive conceptual framework is needed, and is usually entrenched in themes of social consciousness, supported with historic stories of glorious men who lead nations to imaginary victories. The practice of systemic honour killing, although partly connected with the need to establish imperialist interests of extracting oil in Basrah, needed local acts of rupture to the fabric of the society, to which a disruption of gender relations would serve best. Militia members of extremist Islamist parties were clearly instructed to exercise patriarchal violence, killing and mutilation against women who did not abide to full Islamic dress code; thus, rewarded later with financial and political support to gain governmental positions. In other words, the exercise of violence over vulnerable women - usually working class women - and killing hundreds of them was a stepping stone to gain political dominance over other political groups, and to establish an extremist culture revolving around idealist thought, where all the knowledge required and allowed is that of the imaginary religious heroes and imams, around whom history revolves. Under an idealist ontology that lies in the ‘heavens’, based on religious epistemology and tribal social interpretations of social relations of gender, class and race, women are the property of males, and they are the ‘means’ of reproducing the bloodline of the patriarchs, which is another layer of idealist thought and mechanical way of understanding female humans as possessed ‘things’, and not as free members of a community with gender relations.
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Patriarchal control over minds and bodies of women need a conceptual framework of religious impositions to define women’s role as serving the husband, father, brother and family, in addition to a tribal patriarchal structure of male superiority and dominance which had a serious come-back to the Iraqi society in the past decade. In a tribal dispute in the city of Basrah in June 2015, heavy machine guns were used, however the final solution of the dispute was the offering of 50 women from one tribe to the other. Although spokespersons in the government tried to down-tone the facts, they could not deny them. (ICSSI, 2015, par. 7)
The religious and tribal impositions are both built upon male supremacy, strength, and mental brilliance which cannot be disputed or equaled by females. Social constructs as such program females’ consciousness to a submissive role so as to internalize the inferiority, adopt it, and impose it on daughters and sisters. Some honour killings were implemented by women who became strong believers in patriarchal ‘honour’ and killed their own daughters.
In such a social structure, children belong to their father, and in case of divorce, the mother can only keep them until they are strong enough to live with the father. A woman who steps out of the premises of marriage and defies her patriarch gets the utmost punishment which is a violent killing that may include mutilation or suffocation in order that the woman become an example for other non-abiding females. From thereupon comes the practice of honour killing.
In case all the social construct and punishment were not enough, patriarchal ‘leaders’ of Iraq - similar to many illiberal states – legislate detailed laws and executive order for women’s inferior status and dependence on men in marriage, divorce, inheritance, and right to travel. Iraqi laws had gone further in the past to legislate for honour killings and justifying them as rights for men to keep the ‘honour’ of the family79. The governmental institutions such as police and hospitals follow written laws and unwritten patriarchal norms of checking virginity of detained young women, while insulting them for having left their patriarchs’ vicinity. Young women in one of OWFI’s shelter shared the story of how they were detained, and their virginity checked after they ran away from their homes, and were jailed in an interaction with the police. J. said that she can never forget the humiliation she had when the nurse asked her to spread her legs for the doctor, to which J. was reluctant and felt shamed, while the nurse cracked a joke about J.’s being happy to have done the same thing for many men before. Shame, honour, morality, bad origin, virginity, disobedience, disrespect, and adultery are some of the ‘concepts of patriarchal
108 terrorization of women’; while they are concrete grounds for males to order, master, scold, enjoy services, and also punish women. Although the husband, father or brother are responsible of setting the record right and killing a disobedient or an adulterous wife or daughter, however any male relative or stranger can volunteer to punish a woman who did not abide to patriarchal rules. When class, religion or ethnicity is an added factor, women find themselves all alone, with no state institutions of police or laws to defend her, such was the case of Yazidi women, or black Iraqi women in case of sex-trafficking.
For a strong feminist endeavor that plans to combat deeply entrenched patriarchy as such, there is need to address the practice at many levels, starting from the ontological one, and ending with debating the concepts of patriarchal terrorization of women. A Marxist platform of feminism starts with negating the ontological argument of idealist thought, pulling down the realm of knowledge from the skies above to the ‘real premises’. Dorothy Smith addressed this point in one of her early books Feminism and Marxism (Smith 1977), where she debated her position as a Marxist who looked for the reasons for women’s oppression, establishing the point of entry: that she is a Marxist because she understands the world based on materialist philosophy of analyzing the objective social, economic and political relations which shape and determine women’s oppression” (Smith, 1977, p.12).
Dorothy Smith acknowledges that she understood oppression better while working within the women’s movement; that what was seen by women as a ‘biological inferiority’ about themselves was in reality an objective organization of a society, i.e. features external to women and not personal feelings of self-oppression. She explains further that the more women think and act in groups of solidarity, the better they understand that ‘female defectiveness or backwardness’ originates from objective social organization, and will have to be confronted as group effort, and not as individuals who want to ‘overcome inner weakness’. She continues to focus on three main points which are that: “(1) Our reference and point of entry is in the fact that we are women, (2) That we reject the oppression of women, and (3) That we adopt female Solidarity” (Smith, 1977, p10-12).
In her later writings Smith deliberated further on the oppression of women by studying ruling relations, and concluding a method of inquiry through an indulgence in the epistemological background, text, and practices of institutions, named Institutional Ethnography (IE). A general
109 knowledge of IE method of inquiry can only strengthen a Marxist feminist inquiry, but will not be followed in this research, as the attempts of analysis of the last chapter had similarly resorted to a materialist historic method of analysis.
In some of the evening chats which we have in OWFI shelters, the chat gets intense when each remembers her own struggle in escaping imminent honour killing, but after an hour each of them stares into her cell phone waiting desperately for a text message from a boyfriend, a matter which takes most of their effort and attention, and can be quite frustrating when OWFI’s activists train them over issues of Marxist feminism. According to Friga Haug, a Marxist feminist sociologist, women should work on their own liberation from socialized misogyny and incompetence. Haug criticizes the extensive energy wasted on private relationships, in an argument reminiscent of Lenin’s talk to Clara Zetkin on sex and marriage (Lenin,1969). Haug lays out daily routine tasks which a Marxist feminist should indulge in such as: (a) Interest in economy: and to inform oneself or discuss in groups laws of profit, class issues, exploitation and unemployment ; (b) Awareness of social news: resisting the notion that news are ‘boring’, or for men only; (c)Indulge in critical views about extreme wealth practices and appearances; or (d) Understand production as a determinant of laws of capital (Haug, 1980, p.26).
Haug continues to explain how women need to see the connections between the private and the public, between their personal lives and the political or economical public sphere. Moreover, they need to understand why the oppression of women is substantial for capitalism, and how pointless it is to have a workers’ revolution which does not recognize the oppression of women. Haug attempts to dig into the sociology of women’s acceptance of an imposed and socialized inferiority which exists in our daily life in the form of jokes, sayings, and assumptions. She deliberates on the priority of rejecting every-day misogynistic practices as a first step towards women’s liberation (p.8-16).
A Platform for Marxist Feminist Organizing: Conclusion, Concepts and Guidelines
For a clear understanding of what a Marxist feminist platform should look like, I collected a variety of Marxist and feminist ways of looking at fundamentals of Marxist and feminist organizing by prominent theoreticians in Marxism and Marxist feminist thinkers/activist of the past decades.
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12.1 Kinds of Feminist Consciousness
According to Lenin, there are two kinds of working class consciousness: the first is a spontaneous one which come as a form of individual worker’s resistance and revolt against exploitation, and the second one is an organized working-class struggle form of consciousness (Carpenter, Mojab, 2017, p,54). Lenin stressed on the need to develop the second form of consciousness and build a workers’ movement based on it. According to Lenin, there is need for socialist consciousness to move beyond reformist programs, and to base itself on dialectical and historical analysis.
Feminist consciousness likewise exists in similar two forms of consciousness: an individual consciousness of a woman rejecting and rebelling against patriarchal control, brutality and oppression; and the second one is an organized feminist struggle involving groups of women developing a form of consciousness to plan the demise of patriarchy. And similarly, it is the second form of consciousness that we need for organizing feminist struggle. In order to understand both forms of feminist consciousness as they happen in post-war Iraq, we need to dig into a historic and dialectic investigation of both, which may be beyond the scope of this research. For any Marxist feminism to call itself revolutionary, it needs to move beyond attempts to reform patriarchal sources, and rather to organize for the demise of patriarchal and anti-racist capitalist ruling relations.
● Individual feminist consciousness: Spontaneous consciousness of individual women related to everyday experience: Young women’s escape from the brutality of the tribal environment in Iraq falls under this category and amounts -in the current decade- to numbers unprecedented in Iraq’s modern history.
● Organized feminist consciousness and struggle: has its difficulties when compared to workers organized struggle, as women do not have a factory to bring them together, while post-war NGOs in Iraq were mostly set up and registered for the purpose of financial support. In order for the organized feminist consciousness to bear fruit in times of Imperialist occupation and prevailing religious politics, there needs to be a serious endeavor of educating a feminist membership into Marxist analysis and understanding of the world.
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● A feminist consciousness for the Society at large: For a feminist organization to bring forward an effective change through reform, there is a need to a shift in the consciousness of the society at large, which means possession of a media outlet to reach to all homes, such as a radio or television.
Although Iraq had waves of women’s movement which affected the society at large, they were within the ICP and had not progressed towards a feminist perspective which combines the feminist with the anti-racist/ethnist and the class struggle. The demands of a movement as such are restricted to patriarchal allowances.
12.2 A Marxist Feminist Platform for Liberation: Organizing Towards the Demise of Patriarchy, Capitalism and Politics of Division
Unlike classical ideological Marxist literature which fails to confront women’s oppression, liberation and anti-racist struggle in a systematic manner, this section aims at building a Marxist feminist vision of theoretic guidelines and a comprehensive praxis platform for women’s empowerment and liberation. The agenda will set up foundations of organizing and activities to achieve the objectives of a revolutionary women’s movement in Iraq to undo the entrenched misogynist concepts and practices of a tribal and Islamic post-war imperialist era, and will also address and dismantle the social construct of gender relations shaped by a patriarchal culture, a capitalistic/imperialistic rule, and a militarized reality of modern post-war Iraq. Such an agenda will consist of three main parts of (a) Vision, which analyzes real life oppression against women and shapes the form of liberation to struggle for, either through revolution or through reform; (b) Objectives, which start with main principles of freedom and equality, but extend to detail the demise of patriarchy and capitalism with all their representative social institutions, structures, and practices; and (c) Methods of organizing and doing activities to empower women and build a strong feminist anti-capitalist and anti-racist movement.
For the full articulation a Marxist feminist platform, the research needs to expand on studying of the analysis of women’s oppression, objectives of feminist struggle, methods of work, in addition to means of organizing. The following section is a brief articulation based on the conclusions of the analysis, and yet can only be considered a work in progress at this time. It sets the ground
112 work and main guidelines which will need debates among the organization before taking it to a higher level.
Vision
Women in Iraq and the Middle East have become the victims of rising patriarchal political powers that based their social organizing on oppressing women, and turning them into mere tools of pleasure, reproductivity, and domestic labour. Women’s positions within the social and administrative realm were decreased to a bare minimum, while their status within the existing social structures diminished due to the rebirth of tribal patriarchy, empowered by the imperialist military occupation of Iraq.
The rise of religious ideology as an opponent to the US occupation in appearance paved the way for the growth of local political movement of Islamism whereas manifesting itself by covering women and encouraging their reverse migration into the domestic realm, thus reversing the progress of Iraqi women’s status throughout a whole century.
Patriarchal tribal political forces although not in full agreement with Islamic Ideology, build their social construct on the leadership and power of leading males, a power relation which would not have existed if not taken from the ‘othered’ and subjugated females, youth and other males of less hierarchical positions. The patriarchal positions glorify strength, genius, and ‘essential goodness’ of the male patriarch and also his lineage and offspring who ‘reflect the same essential goodness’ whereas using women for reproduction, child rearing, and domestic labor, for the benefit of preserving patriarchal lineage. Women’s bodies, lives and social freedom get compromised for the benefit of the patriarchs who gains their social benefits of privilege through religiously supported habits of male priority in marriage, and family upbringing, which were introduced by the patriarchal legal institutions into laws, practices, social constructs, and norms which turned women into appropriated belonging ‘objects’ of families where the older males decide their destiny, their access to socialization, and get the right to keep-or-end their lives when the patriarchal lineage gets threatened by female sexuality. The fact that our bodies became vessels for pleasure and production of the children of the males -with laws and practices to emphasize those privileges- aims to turn Iraqi women to legally owned and religiously brainwashed objects and rather slaves of a patriarchal system which was further empowered by the political instability of Iraq in the past five decades. Furthermore, the US occupation of Iraq
113 had deliberately chosen to empower and assign tribal and Islamic figures to the upper governing bodies of Iraq since 2003, in order to bond women to decades of slavery, violence, and serfdom; and to keep the society in state of distress, in order to unleash the capitalist machine’s plundering of the resources of the society.
Objectives
For a feminist movement to combat patriarchal practice, social construct and attacks on women, the root cause and the supporting systems of Imperialist political manipulation, and archaic religious social constructs have to be confronted and dismantled by methods which are relative to the movement of social conditions and events, but also to the internal strength and position of the feminist movement within other parts of the progressive movement: class struggle and anti-racist struggles.
Demise of capitalism will continue to be a main objective, as it stands behind patriarchy and supports it to divide the society based on gender. Achieving socialism and equality for all through revolution is the only solution for the current chaotic political situation which the occupation subjected Iraq to, however planning daily activities for reform and empowerment of women legally, economically and socially is a short-term goal. Achieving women’s freedom and equality is not possible while submitting to the religious, tribal and Nationalist pressures which the Imperialist powers placed us under. A women’s movement which is apologetic for religion and for tradition does not aim at full equality, but would rather benefit from the charity of capitalists while getting minor reform for women, if any at all. Re-writing the constitution into an egalitarian, non-Nationalist and secular one is the first step, but the major change will be in the transformation of the class content of the state to make it a working-class state of no compromise for gender or race oppression. Although the change of the property of means of production through a social revolution is an utmost goal, under which equality can be acquired in theory; still the main feminist demands of a revolutionary change will need to materialize and shape the social relations which do not allow the subsuming of inequal gender relations. A main feminist demand will be the end of any state support to tribal and religious institutions which have devastated Iraqi people for the last 15 years, represented imperialist interests, and established social discrimination and economic impoverization of women.
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Methods of work and activities
1. Educating the society over a materialist historic ‘real world’ ontology as a precaution and anecdote to help the society step out of the medieval-style monstrous political Islamic movements in Iraq and the Middle East
2. Basing analysis, concepts, and references on Marxist feminist understanding, with added vision on anti-racism, anti-sectarianism, and consciousness against ethnic/Nationalist identity and history which can corrupt consciousness into ‘identity’ politics within a return trip to idealist thought
3. Protecting women from patriarchal violence in houses with secret location to challenge and reveal the patriarchal determination of the ruling class
4. Establishing Marxist feminist media and schools to undo the idealist patriarchal and racist education of two generations
5. Legislative struggle to repeal discriminatory articles against women, and demand a new personal status law which is secular and egalitarian, besides other legal demands of ending death penalty and regulation of the social insurance system to levels which provide adequate financial support to widows, orphans, and elderly.
6. Connecting with the progressive parts of the international women’s movement to create alliances to empower local feminist struggles
7. Re-instituting of the health, education and security systems to be fully nationalized, and following a secular, feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist agenda
Precautions
It is noteworthy to mention that the Iraqi women’s movement, as much as it is mobilized and agitated to find ways to resolve a historic escalation against women’s freedoms and well-being, is strongly distracted by a liberal feminist vision of the NGO sphere, and a mainstream communist party which coopted the revolutionary movement into a partnership with the religious and capitalist patriarchs of Iraq. In order to set the course for a revolutionary feminist movement informed by Marxist concepts, organization and practices, a theoretically informed political
115 platform of feminist epistemological standpoint is a first step to build a revolutionary feminist organization on. In order to expand the agenda and turn the organization into a politically powerful arm, an organizational vision which is adequate to the times of the twenty first century is needed. The following guidelines are a first attempt at such a feminist political platform to share with a political party, to direct and organize combined struggles against patriarchy and capitalism in a post-war Iraq.
The final sections address the general structure of the political organization, and the combination of legal and illegal work during different stages of confrontation with the government. The organizational structure document is based on fundamentals taken from communist literature of the third International 1921. Although the general framework was adopted in this research, many of the historically specific current issues pertaining to our feminist struggle in Iraq were introduced, while inapplicable articles were removed. The intent was to address the building of a Marxist feminist movement along a Marxist perspective relevant to, but not a copy of building a communist organization.
As dry and redundant as it may seem to an outsider, every article in the following guidelines is a directive which we need along our organizing efforts on the ground, and on daily basis. The articles which were not relevant or too complex for the task were removed.
12.3 Organizational Guidelines
The following section is an exercise in implementing Marxist methods and concepts in feminist organization where applicable, and has been based on a document prepared for the Third International, prepared by a leading communist member in Finland and revised by Lenin. I found that most of the concepts and work are applicable to organizing in Iraq, in the general sense, and decided to make and build over the methodology of Marxist organizing within. This document is a first draft of what an organizational reference for our Marxist feminist work could look like. Some of the formatting which was used in the original document was kept in the following test in order not to lose the meaning and reason of every article. The text was written almost a century ago whereas wording, sentences and punctuation are slightly different.
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Guidelines on the Organizational Structure, on the Methods and Content of Work Proposed for Upcoming OWFI Conference
I. GENERAL
1. The organization must be adapted to the conditions and purpose of its activity. The organization should be the vanguard, the front-line troops of the feminists, leading in all phases of its revolutionary class and gender struggle and the subsequent transitional period toward the realization of gender and economic equality.
2. There can be no one absolutely correct, immutable organizational form for the Marxist feminist organization. The conditions of the feminist and class struggle are subject to changes in an unceasing process of transformation. The historically determined characteristics of the organization should adapt to the Iraqi society’s conditions and needs, but should also respond to international universal standards.
3. Common to the conditions of struggle of most Marxist feminist organizations is that they must still struggle against the ruling bourgeoisie and patriarchy. It is absolutely crucial that all organizational work in the capitalist countries be considered from the standpoint of constructing an organization which makes possible and ensures the victory of the feminist, anti-racist, anti- ethno-sectarian proletarian revolution over the possessing classes and patriarchal institutions.
4. Leadership of the revolutionary class struggle presupposes, on the part of the organization and its leading bodies, the organic tying together of the greatest possible striking Marxist feminist power with other social and class struggles, and the greatest ability to adapt to the changing conditions of struggle.
Moreover, successful leadership absolutely presupposes the closest ties with the proletarian masses and vulnerable women and those oppressed for ethnic/racist reasons. Without these ties the leadership will not lead the masses but will at best tail after them. The organization seeks to achieve these organic ties through democratic centralism.
II. ON POLITICAL AND FEMINIST LEADERSHIP
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5. A central and politically informed feminist leadership delves into matters of gender/anti-racist and class democracy. The ability for such leadership can only be attained on the basis of the constant common activity, the constant common struggle of the entire organization for gender empowerment.
6. Leadership centralization in the organization does not mean a formal and mechanical centralization but rather a centralization of Marxist feminism and social mobilization activity, i.e., building a leadership which is strong, quick to react and at the same time flexible. Formal or mechanical centralization of leadership would mean centralization of “power” in the hands of an organization bureaucracy in order to dominate the rest of the membership or the masses of the revolutionary feminist women outside the organization. But only enemies of feminism can assert that the organization wants to dominate the revolutionary feminist proletarian class struggles and through the centralization of this leadership. This is a lie. Equally incompatible with the fundamental principles of democratic centralism adopted by the Marxist feminist international movement is a power struggle or a fight for domination within the organization.
In the organizations of the NGOs, nonrevolutionary women’s movement, a thoroughgoing dualism developed of the same kind as had arisen in the organization of the bourgeois state: the dualism between the bureaucracy and the “women.” the vital working collective was replaced by mere formal democracy, and the organization was split into active functionaries and passive masses. Inevitably, even the revolutionary feminist movement to a certain degree inherits this tendency toward formalism and dualism from the bourgeois environment.
The Organization must thoroughly overcome these divisions by systematic and persevering political and organizational work and by repeated improvement and review.
7. In the reshaping of a mass women’s mobilization into a feminist organization, the organization must not limit itself to concentrating authority in the hands of its central leadership, while otherwise leaving its old structure unchanged. If centralization is not to exist on paper alone but is to be carried out in fact, it must be introduced in such a way that the members perceive it as an objectively justified strengthening and development of their collective work and fighting power. Otherwise centralization will appear to the masses as bureaucratization of the organization, conjuring up opposition to all centralization, to all leadership, to any strict discipline. Anarchism and bureaucratism are two sides of the same coin.
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Mere formal democracy in the organization cannot eliminate tendencies toward either bureaucratism or anarchism, for both have found fertile soil in the workers movement on the basis of formal democracy. Therefore, the centralization of the organization, that is, the effort to achieve a strong leadership, cannot be successful if we attempt to achieve it simply on the basis of formal democracy. Necessary above all is the development and maintenance of living ties and reciprocity-both within the organization between the leading organization bodies and the rest of the membership, and among the organization, the women, the working-class masses, and other egalitarian social struggle organizations.
III. ON MARXIST FEMINISTS RESPONSIBILITY TO ACTION
8. The organization should be a working school of revolutionary Marxist feminism. Organic links are forged between the various parts of the organization and among individual members by day- to-day collective work in the organization branches and areas of work.
In the women’s NGOs, activities take place only if paid for by a funder, and according to a funder’s request of activities. The Marxist feminist organization bases itself on an understanding of women’s struggles within a patriarchal capitalist system, and finds ways of how to overcome inequality and oppression through a revolutionary vision, but without excluding reform work which can alleviate the sufferings of vulnerable women on daily basis. The organization understands that an NGO legal framework is an actual protection for the organization from tribal and patriarchal militarized authorities, and the organization understands that it should not limit itself to the regulations set forward by the governmental bodies assigned to limit organizational work. All members of the organization should be involved in a form of participation or support of the organization work, otherwise there is a question mark over the organization’s development.
9. When a Marxist feminist organization takes the first steps toward transformation into a revolutionary feminist initiative, there is always the danger that it will be content simply to adopt a program, substitute feminist doctrine for the former patriarchal doctrine in its propaganda, and merely replace the hostile functionaries with ones who have feminist consciousness. But adopting a Marxist feminist program is only a statement of the will to become one. If revolutionary activity is not forthcoming, and if in organizing feminist work the passivity of the
119 mass of the membership is perpetuated, the organization is not fulfilling even the least of what it has promised to the masses by adopting the Marxist feminist program.
10. A Marxist feminist organization must demand of every member in its ranks that she devote her time and energy, insofar as they are at her own disposal under the given conditions, to her organization and that she always give her best in its service.
Obviously, besides the requisite commitment to feminism, membership in the Marxist feminist organization involves as a rule: formal admission, possibly first as a candidate, then as a member; regular payment of established dues; subscription to the organization press, etc. Most important, however, is the participation of every member in daily party work.
11.Marxist feminist nuclei are to be formed for day-to-day work in different areas of party activity: for door-to-door agitation, for theory studies, for press work, for literature distribution, for intelligence-gathering, communications, etc.
12. Introducing the general obligation to do work in the party and organizing these small working groups is an especially difficult task for Marxist organizations. It cannot be carried out overnight but demands unflagging perseverance, careful consideration and much energy.
13. All our organization work is practical or theoretical struggle, or preparation for this struggle. Until now, specialization in this work has generally been very deficient. There are whole areas of important work where anything the organization has done has been only by chance-for example, whatever has been done by the legal parties in the special struggle against the political police and legislators. The education of organization activists takes place as a rule only casually and incidentally, but also so superficially that large sections of the organization membership remain ignorant of the majority of the most important basic documents of their own organization- and the newspaper of the organization. Educational work must be systematically organized in an initiative of a Marxist feminist school of many levels, whereby male supporters of feminist struggle will be also encouraged to join into learning and educating groups of feminist activists based on Marxist fundamentals. Feminist education will constantly be carried be out by the entire system of the organization’s working collectives; thereby an increasingly high degree of specialization can also be attained for all areas of the struggle.
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14. In a Marxist feminist organization the obligation to do work necessarily includes the duty to report. This applies to all bodies of the organization as well as to each individual member. General reports covering short periods of time must be made regularly. They must cover the fulfillment of special organization assignments in particular. It is important to enforce the duty to report so systematically that it takes root as one of the best traditions in the feminist movement. These reports should not become a formal assignment void of content and direction, neither should they be used as undemocratic monitoring and control of membership.
15. The collectives make regular quarterly reports to the periodic meetings of the Executive Bureau of the organization. Each subordinate body of the organization must report to its immediately superior committee (for example, monthly reports of the local organizations to the appropriate organization committee). In the case of illiterate members, recorded voice messages over group rooms on social media are accepted until the member is supported into literacy through basic levels of the feminist school.
IV. ON PROPAGANDA AND AGITATION
16. In the period prior to the open revolutionary uprising our most general task is revolutionary propaganda and agitation. This activity, and the organization of it, is often in large part still conducted in the old formal manner, through casual intervention from the outside at mass meetings, without particular concern for the concrete revolutionary content of our speeches and written material.
The most important aspect of Marxist feminist propaganda is the revolutionizing effect of its content, which adds the feminist, anti-racist, anti-nationalist, anti-sectarian vision to Marxist class analysis.
17. The main forms of Marxist feminist propaganda and agitation are: individual discussion; participation in the struggles of the trade-union and political workers movement and all anti- oppression egalitarian seeking social groups; impact through the organization press and literature. Every member of a legal or illegal party should in some way participate regularly in all this work.
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Propaganda through individual discussion must be systematically organized as door-to- door agitation and conducted by working groups established for this purpose. Not a single house within the local organization’s area of influence can be left out in this agitation. In larger cities, specially organized street agitation in conjunction with posters and leaflets can also yield good results. Furthermore, at the workplace, the cells or fractions must conduct regular agitation on an individual level, combined with literature distribution.
In Iraq where national minorities form a considerable part of the population, it is the organization’s duty to devote the necessary attention to propaganda and agitation among the women and proletarian layers of these minorities. Individuals of these minorities should be gained as members who receive attention from the leadership. Yazidi community groups, and Black Iraqi groups are to be paid special attention because of a historically established discrimination against them by the working social systems of capitalism; tribal groups and the Islamic religious institution.
18. In conducting propaganda in communities or neighbourhoods where the great majority of the disposed women and proletariat does not yet possess conscious revolutionary inclinations, Marxist feminists must constantly search for more effective methods of work in order to intersect the nonrevolutionary woman and worker as she or he begin their revolutionary awakening, making the revolutionary movement comprehensible and accessible to them. The propaganda should use its slogans to reinforce the budding, unconscious, partial, wavering and semi- bourgeois tendencies toward revolutionary politics which in various situations are wrestling in their brain against bourgeois traditions and propaganda.
19. Agitation among the women must be conducted in such a way that those women engaged in struggle recognize the organization as the courageous, sensible, energetic and unswervingly devoted leader of their own common movement.
To achieve this the feminists must take part in all the elementary struggles and movements of the women and their families and must fight for their cause in every conflict with the patriarchal capitalists over right to life, dignity, income, security, and working conditions, etc. In doing this the feminists must become intimately involved in the concrete questions of women’s life; they must help the women untangle these questions, call their attention to the most important abuses and help them formulate the demands directed at the patriarchs precisely and practically; attempt
122 to develop among the women the sense of solidarity, awaken their consciousness to the common interests and the common cause of all women of the country as a united female population and unpaid laborers constituting a section of the world army of the women and unpaid proletariat. Only through such absolutely necessary day-to-day work, through continual self-sacrificing participation in all struggles of the women, can the organization develop into a Marxist feminist organizing and striking hand to patriarchal capitalism. Only thus will it distinguish itself from the obsolete women’s NGO sphere, and pacified women’s organizations of the mainstream communist party, which are merely propaganda for patriarchal petty bourgeois parties, whose activity consists only of collecting members, speechifying about reforms and exploiting parliamentary impossibilities.
20. In the struggle against the social-democratic women’s organizations and other petty- bourgeois leaders of the NGOs of tribal and religious women’s groups, there can be no hope of obtaining anything by persuading them. The struggle against them must be organized with the utmost energy. However, the only sure and successful way to combat them is to split away their supporters by convincing the women that their unfeminist social-traitor leaders are lackeys of tribal and patriarchal capitalism. Therefore, where possible these leaders must first be put into situations in which they are forced to unmask themselves; after such preparation they can then be attacked in the sharpest way.
21. Feminists’ participation in meetings and conferences of trade-union and other workers’ organizations must be carefully attended and effort to be given to introduce feminist notions and understanding of different matters of discussion in order to gain supporters within working class organizations.
22. Marxist feminists must learn how to be ever more effective in drawing unorganized, politically unconscious women into the sphere of lasting political feminist influence. Through our cells and fractions, we should induce these women to join into our activities of saving women and our press. Other social activities (Shelter talking groups, feminist school classes, groups of anti-trafficked women victims, Marxist study circles, poetry clubs, art groups, etc.) can also be used to transmit our influence.
23. For propaganda work in the army and security institutions of the capitalist state, a special study must be made of the most appropriate methods in Iraq. Western Iraq women continue to
123 suffer from ISIS/Daesh consequences whereas the army can alleviate some of the life-threatening dangers for them.
V. ON THE ORGANIZATION OF POLITICAL STRUGGLES
24. For a Marxist feminist organization there is no time when the organization cannot be politically active. The organizational exploitation of every attack against women, political and economic situation, and of every change in these situations, must be developed into organizational strategy and tactics.
Even if the organization is still weak, it can exploit politically stirring events or major strikes that convulse the whole community by carrying out a well-planned and systematically organized radical propaganda campaign. Once the organization or a leading local body has decided that such a campaign is appropriate, it must energetically concentrate all members and sections of the organization on it.
This intensified propaganda must be supported by parallel work at all trade-union and social groups and party meetings caught up in the movement. When necessary, our members and comrades must raise the demand for such meetings or organize them themselves and must provide suitable speakers for main presentations or discussion. Most of the space in our organization newspapers, and the papers’ best arguments, must be placed at the disposal of such a particular movement, just as the entire organizational apparatus must be wholly and unflaggingly dedicated to the general aim of the movement for its duration.
25. Demonstration campaigns require a very flexible and dedicated leadership which must keep the aim of the campaign clearly in mind and be able to discern at any moment whether a demonstration has reached the upper limit of effectiveness, or whether, in the given situation, it is possible to further intensify the movement by expanding it into mass action to take place simultaneously in the main governorates.
VI. ON THE ORGANIZATION PRESS
26. The Marxist feminist press must be developed and improved by the organization with tireless energy.
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No newspaper may be recognized as a feminist organ if it does not submit to the directives of the organization. Analogously, this principle is to be applied to all literary products such as periodicals, books, pamphlets, etc., with due regard for their theoretical, propagandistic or other character. The organization must be more concerned with having good papers than with having many of them.
27. A Marxist feminist newspaper must never become a capitalist enterprise like the bourgeois press and often even the so-called “socialist” papers, or liberal feminist papers. Our paper must keep itself independent from the capitalist credit institutions.
28. The Marxist feminist newspaper must above all look after the interests of the oppressed women and other gender groups who suffer from discrimination, in addition to struggling workers, and human rights groups. It should be our best propagandist and agitator, the leading propagandist of the feminist and proletarian revolution.
Our paper has the task of collecting valuable experiences from the entirety of the work of organization members and then of presenting these to organization activists as a guide for the continued review and improvement of feminist methods of work. These experiences should be exchanged at joint meetings of editors; mutual discussion there will also yield the greatest possible uniformity of tone and thrust throughout the entire organization press, including the radio. In this way the organization press, including the newspaper and radio, will be the best organizer of our revolutionary work.
Without this unifying, purposeful organizational work of the feminist press, particularly the main newspaper, it will hardly be possible to achieve democratic centralism, to implement an effective division of labor in the Marxist feminist organization or, consequently, to fulfill the organization’s historic mission.
29. The militant feminist press is in its true element when it directly participates in campaigns led by the organization. If the organization’s work during a period of time is concentrated on a particular campaign, the organization paper must place all of its space, not just the political lead articles, at the service of this campaign. The editorial department must draw on material from all areas to nourish this campaign and must saturate the whole paper with it in a suitable form and style.
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30. Our newspaper must be continually defended by organization members against all enemies. All organization members must lead a fierce struggle against the patriarchal capitalist press; its venality, its lies, its wretched silence about oppression of women and all its intrigues must be clearly exposed and unmistakably branded.
VII. ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF THE ORGANIZATION
31. The membership of the organization must cover the main cities and within all communities where attacks on women became a post-war frequent practice.
In beginning to build a new organization there is often a tendency to immediately extend the network over the entire country. This weakens the ability of the organization to recruit and grow. After a few years the organization may often in fact have built up an extensive system of offices, but it may not have succeeded in gaining a firm foothold in even the most important cities of the country.
32. To attain the greatest possible centralization of organization work it makes no sense to chop up the organization leadership into a schematic hierarchy with many levels, each completely subordinate to the next. Optimally, from every major city which constitutes an economic and political center, a network of organizational threads should extend throughout the greater metropolitan area and the economic or political district belonging to it.
The full-time organizers of such a district, who are to be elected by the district conference -after the membership had grown sufficiently in that district-or the district organization conference and approved by the organizational executive bureau, must be required to participate regularly in the organization life of the district’s main city.
33. The organization as a whole is under the leadership of the Executive Bureau. The directives and resolutions of the international leadership in matters affecting strategy, organizational alliances, and financial support will be addressed and disclosed to the executive bureau.
Directives and decisions of the International leadership are binding on the organization and, as a matter of course, on every organization member.
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34. The central leadership of the organization (Executive Bureau) is responsible to the organization annual conference. The narrower leading body as well as the board Bureau80 committee, are as a rule elected by the organization annual conference. The annual conference may, if it deems appropriate, charge the executive bureau with electing from its own ranks the narrower leading body, consisting of the presidency and deputies. The narrower leading body, directs the policies and ongoing work of the organization and is accountable for this. The narrower leading body regularly convenes plenary meetings of the executive bureau leadership to make decisions of greater importance and scope.
35. To be able to lead organization work effectively in the different areas each of the leading committees must implement a practical division of labor among its members. Here special leading bodies may prove necessary for a number of areas of work (e.g., for propaganda, for press work, for legislative struggle, for agitation in the countryside, agitation among workers, for communication, for planning sheltering, etc.). Every special leading body is subordinate either to the central leadership or to a district committee.
It is the job of the leading district committee, and ultimately the central leadership, to monitor the practical work as well as the correct composition of all committees subordinate to it. All members engaged in full-time organization work, just like the members of the parliamentary fraction, are directly subordinate to the leading organization committee. It may prove useful now and then to change the duties and work locations of the full-time feminists (e.g., editors, propagandists, organizers, etc.) insofar as this does not overly disrupt organizational work. Editors and propagandists must participate on an ongoing basis in regular organization work in one of the working groups.
36. The central leadership of the organization is entitled at all times to demand exhaustive information from all organization committees, from their component bodies and from individual members.
37. Organization members are to conduct themselves in their public activity at all times as disciplined members of a combat organization. When differences of opinion arise as to the correct course of action, these should as far as possible be decided beforehand within the organization and then action must be in accordance with this decision. In order, however, that every organization decision be carried out with the greatest energy by all committees and
127 members, the broadest mass of the organization must whenever possible be involved in examining and deciding every question. Organization committees and leadership also have the duty of deciding whether questions should be discussed publicly (press, lectures, pamphlets) by individual feminists, and if so, in what form and scope.
It is the supreme duty of every member to defend the organization and above all the Marxist feminist principles against all enemies of feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-sectarian, secular positions. Anyone who forgets this and instead publicly attacks the organization, or the Marxist feminist tradition is to be treated as an opponent of the organization.
38. The statutes of the organization are to be formulated so that they are an aid, not an obstacle, to the leading organization bodies in the continual development of the overall organization and in the incessant improvement of the organization’s work.
VIII. ON THE COMBINATION OF LEGAL AND ILLEGAL WORK
39. Corresponding to the different phases in the process of the revolution, changes in function can occur in the daily life of every revolutionary organization. Basically, however, there is no essential difference in the organization structure which a legal organization on the one hand, and an illegal organization on the other, must strive for.
The organization must be organized so that it can at all times adapt itself quickly to changes in the conditions of struggle.
The organization must continue to protect women and organize for the good of a female population even if in illegal ways of setting up shelters with no supportive legislation, or reach out to dangerous locations where women’s well-being was jeopardized due to military interactions or trafficking gangs.
40. The organization should build ties with the supportive political organizations, to educate them onto the mandate of the organization, and to lean on their support in cases of attacks on the organization work and premises. Similar ties should be built with gender-based groups and anti- racist and human rights groups, continuously exploring means to unify struggles against the patriarchal capitalist enemy. In case of legal crack down on individuals or organization, solidarity should be shown in providing refuge and support, and not only in statements.
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Every revolutionary organization must know how to ensure safety, protection, and probably combat readiness if it should have to go underground. The leadership of legal and of illegal work must always be in the hands of the same unitary central organization leadership. A legal organization should constantly improve its defensive measures to avoid being taken by surprise.
41. In revolutionary situations it has often been observed that the revolutionary central leadership proved incapable of performing its tasks. The feminist proletariat can achieve splendid things in the revolution as regards lesser organizational tasks. In its headquarters, however, for the most part disorder, bewilderment and chaos reign. Even the most elementary division of labor can be lacking. The intelligence department in particular is often so bad that it does more harm than good. There is no depending on communications. When clandestine mailing and transport, safe houses and clandestine printing presses are needed, these are usually totally at the mercy of fortunate or unfortunate coincidence. The organized enemy’s every provocation has the best prospects for success.
Nor can it be otherwise, unless the leading revolutionary organization has organized special work for these purposes in advance. For example, observing and exposing the political police requires special practice; an apparatus for clandestine communications can function swiftly and reliably only through extended, regular operation, etc. Every legal Marxist feminist organization needs some kind of secret preparations, no matter how minimal, in all these areas of specialized revolutionary work.
For the most part, we can develop the necessary apparatus even in these areas through completely legal work, provided that in the organization of this work attention is paid to the kind of apparatus that should arise from it. For example, the bulk of an apparatus for clandestine communications (for an online system, clandestine mailing, safe houses, conspiratorial transport, etc.) can be worked out in advance through a precisely systematized distribution of legal leaflets and other publications and letters.
42. The Marxist feminist organizer regards every single organization member and every revolutionary feminist from the outset as she will be in her future historic role as soldier in our combat organization at the time of the revolution. Accordingly, she guides them in advance into that nucleus and that work which best corresponds to their future position and type of struggle. Her work today must also be useful in itself, necessary for today’s struggle, not merely a drill
129 which the practical feminist today does not understand. This same work, however, is also in part training for the important demands of tomorrow’s final struggle.
This research is an attempt in theorizing our feminist struggle in Iraq based on the experience of Marxist feminist political activism of 15 years. Analyzing the events of the years to understand some of the motivations and agenda of the occupation were attempted to provide the materials and historic context. The analysis of violence against women was the main problematic of the research, which needs to be expanded into further studies, and to verify the concluded feminist platform in the praxis of revolutionary feminism on the ground, so as to expand and propose for the upcoming conference.
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• Smith, D. E. (1977). Feminism and Marxism: A place to begin, a way to go. Vancouver: New Star Books. • Smith, D. E. (1990). The conceptual practices of power: A feminist sociology of knowledge. Boston: Northeastern University Press. • Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. • Taghvaie, H. (2003). Worker-communism in Iraq: The dark scenario and the question of political power. Worker Communist Party of Iran website. Retrieved at http://www.wpiran.org/Worker%20communism%20in%20Iraq.htm • Zangana, H. (2008). Women and learning in the Iraqi war zone. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 27(2), 153-168. doi:10.1080/02601370801936325. Retrieved at https://journals-scholarsportal- info.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/details/02601370/v27i0002/153_walitiwz.xml • Zangana, H. (2014). Ja'fari law takes the Iraqi government's violation of women's rights to a new level. The Guardian issue of March 14. Retrieved at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/14/jafari-law-iraqi-violation- women-rights-marital-rape
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Appendix A
The contents are OWFI statements and articles from 2003 - 2018 in response to political events or for International Women’s Day.
OWFI's founding statement, written and published during a founding event in Al Waziriah, Baghdad, June 22, 2003.
Statement of Founding:
Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq – OWFI
Women’s freedom is the measure of freedom and humanity in society. Not only in Iraq, where women endure the most severe types of discrimination and injustice, but also in the more developed countries in the world today, the realization of full equality among women and men still requires continuous struggle and serious and rapid steps. The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq considers itself basically an indivisible part of the great, historic, and universal struggle for women’s liberation. Women’s rights are universal. They do not submit to any divisions based upon country borders, cultures, ethnicities and religions. Furthermore, women’s liberation from male chauvinistic shackles in Iraq will have a profound ripple effect on women’s status and people’s lives in the Middle East.
The suffering of women in Iraq during the past eras due to deprivation, lack of rights, and oppression, is one of the most malicious phenomena and bitter fact in the Iraqi society. Women were officially and legally deprived even from the trivial and limited rights and freedoms that the men enjoyed. In addition to starvation and destitution resulting from the economic sanctions and the absence of opportunities for women, women were the first victims of oppressive regimes, especially the fascist Baath regime, and the regressive political changes whether originating from the United States and their destructive wars or the nationalist and Islamist movements in Iraq.
Nowadays, the simplest personal freedoms of women are subject to pressure and restriction that may threaten women’s right to life. Women are considered second rate citizens and officially dependent on men. In Iraq, we confront male chauvinism and religious backwardness and tribalism that threaten women’s humanity and strongly question her presence in all fields.
The freedom of women and their full equality with men will always be a hope and aim for the protesting masses and freedom lovers in Iraq. The marginalization, violence against women, discriminatory laws and misogynist policies were encountered by continuous masses denunciation of contemporary Iraqi society. There is a huge emancipatory and secular force in this society that aims at achieving freedom and a better life for women. Women’s situation needs to be changed as the women in Iraq deserve another kind of life; one that is full of freedom, equality and prosperity. Therefore, the need arises to found the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq for the immediate realization of this human cause.
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Our objective is the unconditional freedom of women and full equality among women and men in Iraq. The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq thereby struggles to realize the following demands:
Establishing a humanistic law based upon equality and assurance of broadest liberties for women in addition to the abolition of all discriminatory laws of all kinds.
Separation of religion from state and education.
Stopping of all kinds of violence against women and of honour killings and stressing on punishment of the murderers of women.
Abolition of compulsory veiling, children’s veiling and protecting freedom of dress.
Equal participation among women and men in all social, economic, administrative and political realms and at all levels.
Abolition of sexual segregation in schools at all stages.
The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq strives to attract women’s masses outside the dark corners of their houses and to organize their ranks along a struggle that develops the status of women and assures their participation in economic, political and social life. The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq calls upon all women, men and groups protesting against the abnormal situation of women to join its ranks and struggle to strengthen and support the emancipatory and egalitarian movement for a better life for women.
Nasik Ahmad, Yanar Mohammed, Nadia Mahmood
Independent Women’s Organization
June 2003
Letter from OWFI President to US Administrator of Iraq about the abductions of women in summer 2003
To: Mr. Paul Bremer
Re: Letter Denouncing Women’s Abductions in Iraq
The four months since your troops have taken over in Iraq, proved to have exploded unprecedented violence against women. Hundreds of women endured the pain and suffering of being kidnapped, raped and sometimes sold. This violence is still a daily occurrence, especially in the streets of Baghdad without attracting the least attention of your troops.
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One of the justifications announced by the US administration as a pretext for the military attack was introducing a new era of freedom for women and men in Iraq. Nevertheless, all the subjugation and humiliation that we experienced since your arrival, expresses bluntly the falseness of your claims. One of the main aspects of these new times, similar to the Baath era, was discrimination and assaults against women, whether organized by professional gangs or individual crimes supported by male chauvinism unleashed and unobserved by your authorities, consequently turning the streets into no-woman zone. The moment a woman steps out to the streets, she is an immediate target to humiliation, sexual assault and abduction. The mere fact of her being a woman is reason enough for all to invade her humanity and pride without hesitation.
Moreover, hundreds of women and girls were subject to physical assault to be followed by killing sometimes, in spite of the devastating ordeal of experiencing rape. This brutal discrimination against women’s is a daily occurrence under your extensive military existence. After many months of your administrative supervision for founding governmental institutions such as Iraqi police, we do not witness any importance given to the issue of women’s insecurity.
We demand that you undertake your responsibility of providing us with security as a basis for decent life for more than half the Iraqi society. We demand the setup of security guards and patrols in every main street and community center on a twenty-four / seven basis. We also demand heavy sentences and penalties against sex offenders, on condition that we see concrete results on the streets and not only on paper. We demand an administrative and legislative process that grants dignity and self esteem for women. We will not tolerate your compromise with misogynist reactionary groups that throw the blame on women when they want to justify discrimination, thereby exploiting the violence to force women into historic religious dress code that defies freedom and humanity of women. In case the women do not respond, they are regarded as offenders rather than victims. In other words, we find your cooperation with backward political groups such as tribal heads or political Islamists outrageous as the first price paid being the freedoms of women. Women need a society that supports and empowers their pride and self- esteem. We expect an immediate response to our demand of deserving a secure environment and will not accept continued deterioration of women’s status in Iraq.
You must be aware that you are responsible for this situation. We expect a written answer to our concerns and demands.
Yanar Mohammed
Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq August 24 – 2003
Article written by OWFI Abroad representative for The Guardian
An empty sort of freedom Mon 8 Mar 2004
Saddam was no defender of women, but they have faced new miseries and more violence since he fell
Women in Iraq endured untold hardships and difficulties during the past three decades of the Ba'ath regime. Although some basic rights for women, such as the right to education, employment, divorce in civil courts and custody over kids, were endorsed in the Personal Status Code, some of these legal rights were routinely violated.
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The Ba'ath regime's "faithfulness campaign", an act of terrorism against women that included the summary beheading of scores of those accused of prostitution, is just one example of its brutality against women.
However, it is now almost a year after the war, which was supposed to bring "liberation" to Iraqis. Rather than an improvement in the quality of women's lives, what we have seen is widespread violence, and an escalation of violence against women.
From the start of the occupation, rape, abduction, "honour" killings and domestic violence have became daily occurrences. The Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq (Owfi) has informally surveyed Baghdad, and now knows of 400 women who were raped in the city between April and August last year.
A lack of security and proper policing have led to chaos and to growing rates of crime against women. Women can no longer go out alone to work, or attend schools or universities. An armed male relative has to guard a woman if she wants to leave the house.
Girls and women have become a cheap commodity to be traded in post-Saddam Iraq. Owfi knows of cases where virgin girls have been sold to neighbouring countries for $200, and non-virgins for $100.
The idea that a woman represents family "honour" is becoming central to Iraqi culture, and protecting that honour has cost many women their lives in recent months. Rape is considered so shaming to the family's honour that death - by suicide or murder - is needed to expunge it.
Like Iraqi men, many women have lost their jobs. Marooned at home and lacking independence, women are faced with new miseries. Islamist groups have imposed veiling, and have issued fatwas against prostitutes. Now "entertainment" marriages are taking place. This is an Islamic version of prostitution, in which rich men marry women temporarily (often for only a few hours) in return for money.
The Iraqi Governing Council - an American creature - offers no hope for Iraqi women, consisting as it does of religious or tribal leaders and nationalists who rarely make any reference to women's rights. In fact, many IGC members have a history of violating women's rights.
For example, the Kurdish nationalist parties that have been running northern Iraq for more than 13 years have violated women's rights and tried to suppress progressive women's organisations. In July 2000, they attacked a women's shelter and the offices of an independent women's organisation. Both were saving the lives of Kurdish women fleeing "honour" killings and domestic violence. More than 8,000 women have died in "honour" killings since the nationalists have been in control.
One of the IGC's first moves was symbolic. International Women's Day in Iraq has been changed from March 8 to August 18, the date of birth of Fatima Zahra, the prophet Mohammed's daughter. This has nothing to do with women's rights, and everything to do with subordinating women to religious rules.
When the IGC proposed replacing the secular law with sharia, there were big demonstrations, but these have received almost no media coverage. This is no surprise. When the Union of the Unemployed marched for jobs, American soldiers arrested some of the organisers. This, too, passed unnoticed.
What is needed is a secular constitution based on full equality between women and men, as well as the complete separation of religion from the state and education system. At a demonstration in Baghdad recently, Yanar Mohammed, Owfi's chairperson, received two death threats from an Islamist militia group. They threatened to assassinate her and "blow up" activists who work with her.
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Amnesty International has taken these threats so seriously that it has written to Paul Bremer, the US chief administrator in Iraq, raising its concern for Yanar Mohammed's safety. It is urging the Coalition Provisional Authority to ensure that, amid the bombs and the atrocities, the deterioration of women's rights doesn't become a secondary issue.
The groups represented in the IGC are irrelevant to Iraqis' demands and desire for freedom. American support for Islamist groups through the IGC exposes US hypocrisy. The parties in the IGC have no legitimacy and have not been chosen by Iraqis.
Iraq's lack of basic rights for women and the rise of political Islam are the result of three wars and the ongoing occupation. The only way out of this chaos is through the direct power of the real people of Iraq - the progressive, secular masses.
UK representative of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq
A Statement by Organization of Women’s freedom in Iraq – abroad representative for March 8
23 February 2006
Make it a day to say No! To Islamic Sharia law in Iraq! For secularism, equality and freedom!
The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) sends its greetings for this historic day to women activists all over the world. For centuries women have been struggling for their rights and for equality and liberation in all parts of the world. Major changes have been won, but nowhere do we have real equality, and in many parts of the world the oppression and exploitation of women are still striking. Iraq is one of those places.
The US-UK occupation has pushed Iraqi society back into a medieval world in which “honour killings”, beheadings, forced veiling and seclusion and sexual servitude are now a part of everyday life.
Now the reactionary, tribalist and sectarian government the US has installed in Iraq wants to go further by institutionalizing the oppression of Iraqi women. The outcome of a war and occupation which was sold to the world as bringing “liberation” and “democracy” has been a hand-picked group of political hacks and tribal elder imposed on Iraqi society through a pseudo- parliament and a constitution that makes women second class citizens.
For the last three years Iraqi women have stood up against not only the occupation but against political Islamist groups who are fighting to establish an Iranian or Saudi Arabian-type regime of gender apartheid, with all marital and family matters regulated by Islamic Sharia law. OWFI is fighting to mobilize Iraqi women and their supporters across the world against the occupation and Islamisation of Iraq. The USA and its allies claim that in facilitating our subjugation they are respecting “Islamic culture” and “Arab culture”.
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We say that this viewpoint, permanently relegating people in the so-called Muslim world to barbarism, borders on racism. We oppose politicized religion and demand a secular and egalitarian constitution for Iraq!
They want to divide people along lines of religion, ethnicity and gender. We are demanding equality for all Iraqis regardless of their origin! Women in Iraq need your support more than ever. OWFI has been able to maintain and continue its work because of international support and solidarity, because of solidarity from women’s, progressive and workers’ organizations all over the world helping us to stand firm for our lives and our liberties. We call upon you to join with us this International Women’s Day (8 March) to say No to religious law in Iraq and yes to equality and freedom.
No to Islamic Sharia Law in Iraq! Long Live International Women’s Day! Long live freedom, equality, and secularism!
Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq- Representative abroad February 2006
Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq’s Statement for International Women’s Day 2007
Published on OWFI’s website : www.equalityiniraq.com
After 4 Years of Occupation and Oppression, OWFI’s struggles continue
Women of Iraq have gradually let go of most of their 20th century gains and privileges in the last 4 years of occupation. Iraq turned from a modern country of educated and working women into a divided land of Islamic and ethnic warlords who compete in cancelling women from the social realm. Millions of women’s destinies are wasted between the destructive US war machine and different kinds of Islamic rule who have turned women into helpless black objects of no will or worth.
After 4 years of “democratizing” Iraq, systemic group rapes of detained women have become a routine procedure to be practiced in police stations and detainment camps. It has also become another ugly face of the atrocious sectarian war where assaulting females of the other sect is considered a political victory and punishment.
Abeer, Sabrine, and Wajidah’s sufferings were known, heard, and ended, but hundreds of unknown assaulted women still get beaten, raped and videotaped daily in the Iraqi ministries and around the American bases.
Sectarian genocide and gynocide have horrified millions of women speechless and paralyzed. In the same time, the occupation unleashed the freedoms of religious legislators to abolish any possibility of constitutional rights for Iraqi women to leave them vulnerable to misogynist religious norms of their clans, thereby committing a new crime of humanity against generations of unsuspecting female citizens to come.
In a time of unprecedented poverty and destitution in Iraq, the oil resources are awarded to foreign companies in generous deals which deprives 25 million Iraqis of a most needed wealth, meanwhile only
141 rewarding a minimal share to the ruling parties to be divided on ethno-religious and sectarian basis. This division, a first timer in Iraq, will only fuel the civil war to higher and deadlier levels.
The occupation forces have chosen to support and empower the enemies of women and freedoms in Iraq. Their relentless efforts of weakening and destroying women of Iraq have hit the highest point of inhumanity and barbarism. Nevertheless, the free women and people of Iraq can organize their ranks and refuse these atrocities. They struggle for freedom and equality to be achieved under a secular non-ethnic government in which the aspirations of women, youth and workers are represented.
OWFI calls on this IWD upon the freedom loving millions around the world to stand by us in this Dark Age of the New World Order. Do not watch in sorrow. Come forward. Contact us and become part of a worldwide movement to end the occupation and build a free secular egalitarian alternative in Iraq.
Long live freedom and equality. Our struggles continue.
Yanar Mohammed
President of Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq
March 1, 2007
IWD Festival at Baghdad Technical University for March 8, 2008 – Report written by Yanar Mohammed (retrieved from Fempeace website)
Comment from Fempeace: Many thanks to Yanar Mohammed for providing this remarkable report on the IWD Festival in Baghdad. In reading it you will find a remarkable strength and spirit that is not understood from the ‘news’ about Iraq:
OWFI (the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq) organized a festival in the Theatre Hall of the Technology University in Baghdad for IWD on March 9th. The festival opening was a pantomime theatre play dedicated to “Dua Khalil”, a victim of male-fascist tribalism in the northern town of Baashiqa. Police patrols stood around the scene of the crime, which was the public square of the town. They stood in solidarity with the cold- blooded killers. The criminal compromise between the police and the girl’s killers set the vista of our festival, which was a play of rejection of “honour crimes”. This play expressed anger against the slaughter of an innocent girl whose only crime was falling in love. The only spoken phrase in the play was (love will not die) which was followed by continuous applause from the audience.
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The play was written and produced by Ali Jwad who is the head of the “Hurriya theatre group” which is currently the Freedom Space-theatre branch. They joined the FS gathering where they can express themselves freely with no censorship.
Yanar Mohammed OWFI president gave a speech where she introduced March 8 as the consequence of a historical struggle of women for their rights and equality with men, a struggle which was connected with progressive and freedom-seeking movements. Yanar focused on current women’s sufferings under 5 years of occupation. They have lost their social status because of insecurity and anti- women legislation which in turn, ruled out the physical being of women in the society. This has been enforced by the creation of a dress code which covers the overall feminine appearance from the public domain. She reiterated that there will be no civil society without liberated women. Women must be the organizers and struggle hand-in-hand with all people who believe in freedom and equality. In the end, she concluded: “…There are serious steps; which this crowd of women need to take towards organizing the struggle for freedom and equality for a better world.
Then there was a song specially written for IWD by the Freedom Space- music branch. Jafar Al Mshattat has composed the tune for Wissam Al Assadi’s poem into an IWD’s song written for Iraqi women. Jafar is one of the leading figures of FS-musicians who find difficulty in playing music around their districts, which are dominated by Shiite Islamist militias. For rehearsals, his musical instrument needed to be smuggled across the religious militias’ checkpoints. Jafar continued to sing love songs and other vivacious songs. The side aisles and upper balcony was filled with students dancing in groups to the songs. A Poetry session of the Freedom Space followed. Popular poetry has become the signature of these events and this episode was started by well known popular poets. Jalil Sabih started with his poem “I am Iraqi” while walking up the stage and between the audience. Then Suad Shaheen followed, accompanied by her 9 year old son. They performed together in an innovative and creative duo. After her son stepped down, she read poems she wrote in praise of her lover. She had become a main feature of the Freedom Space gatherings with an outspokenness rarely found in men.
Security for the event was organized by progressive youth of Sadr city and Al Madaen. Holding the event was made possible with the security provided by two groups of volunteer progressive youth who believe in women’s freedoms as irrefutable rights. The first group watched the security of the hall, while the second group surrounded and accompanied Yanar Mohammed in
143 and out of the hall due to death threats that are continually issued. Two rings of supporters walked her out of the university.
A considerable number of egalitarian male figures attended the event such as Falah Alwan, the president of the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions of Iraq, Rasheed Ismail a veteran leftist activist, Naeem Moussa a leading unionist of Al Iskandariya who accompanied a women’s delegate from that town which lies in the deadly resistance triangle, Muamar Majid, secretary general of the FWCUI and Daniel Smith, an American journalist and artist/human rights activist from New Haven.
April 1, 2008 Posted by Fempeace on April 1, 2008
International Women’s Day 2009: IWD Statement in Iraq
From Yanar Mohammed, President of the Organization For Women’s Freedom In Iraq:
OWFI’s International Women’s Day poster 2009
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Freedom and Equality remain the aim of our struggles
After seven years of occupation, women in Iraq still suffer from insecurity and outrageous misogynist practices of the Islamist and nationalist ruling militias. The multiplying anti-women media of the ruling militias attempt to abort all our modern achievements for women’s rights. Their media shows women who veil their presence from the society with ragged historic wear, thus announcing their total submission to the newly created male-chauvinist culture in Iraq.
New anti-women barbaric practices thrived in these years. Mass killings of the unveiled, the working, and the educated women became part of the political agenda of the religious militias. While we have no regional precedents of systemic mass killings in the history of the Middle- East, the only references are the inquisition campaigns of the European church of the medieval ages where women and scientists were accused of heresy and killed in big numbers. In spite of killing thousands of women, the religious militias were rewarded recently with a fair share of the power; this being a function of the so called democracy under occupation.
Women’s hopes rise with the arrival of March 8 as a symbol of free people’s struggle for equality and for ending discrimination against women. This day is an event of the leftists, the socialists and freedom-loving movements. Women in Iraq get assured that their rights progress hand in hand with the strength of the movements of freedom, of the left, and of socialism. During six years, the occupation forces persisted to empower reactionary movements in Iraq; waking up priests of superstitions from deep sleep and awarding them the right to represent millions of non-suspecting people in Iraq. They were supported into organized groups and political parties under the pretext of so called “freedoms of religions and religious practice”. Instead of inviting youth into realms of education, culture, arts and political awareness in the new Iraq, they encouraged and sometimes forced their indulgence in the practice of religious rituals. With this process, a mainstream plot flowed against all directions of freedom and equality in all economic, political and social spheres.
Today, women in Iraq are victims of the domination of political Islam and the nationalist- Islamists. Both were welcome through wide open doors of the occupation forces. Women are the victims of American policies and strategies which assisted the Islamists, the sectarian, and the male-chauvinist nationalists – the oppressors of womankind – to become the rulers and have the upper hand on the Iraqi society. Six years of unprecedented enslavement of women brought about widespread humiliation, slaughtering, and home confinement for millions of women. The new constitution established laws of humiliation for women through allowing polygamist marriages in addition to many of the middle age practices. Moreover, a growing female population can find no way out of being trafficked into sexual slavery and becoming modern-day slaves. Furthermore, the lack of basic services such as water and electricity and the rocketing prices of family-living requirements have turned lives of women into daily hell. All of this happens while the authorities announce a budget surplus of tens of billions of dollars which merely fills the pockets of the ruling bourgeoisie.
The occupation forces and their assisting political Islam groups have maintained the oppression of women in all forms and levels in the last six years, in actions which put obstacles against the building of a vast social movement of feminism. Nevertheless, women activists, freedom-lovers and socialists never ceased their defense of women’s rights. The lack of a strong leftist political movement, which can defeat the Islamists and the reactionary, left women’s struggles for
145 freedom alone and isolated in the political scene. As the occupation gave way to the religious, the nationalists, and the tribals, women were discouraged and intimidated from rising and demanding their rights. In Iraq of today, women cannot grant their right to life under the ruling groups who unite around misogyny and male fascism which dwell on humiliating women and killing them if they challenge male supremacy. When these groups enroll women in their ranks for election purposes, their hatred for women does not become less. Their female representatives become live expression of women’s oppression in their appearance and eventually in their male- fascist announced agenda.
OWFI endeavored to change the lives of hundreds of women in Iraq throughout these years, instead of empty rhetoric. Tens were saved from honour killing. Girls and women were saved and sheltered away from trafficking, and from sectarian vengeance. Those who dreamt of an alternative to their daily humiliation in prostitution found refuge in OWFI’s shelters. We have announced our campaign of anti-trafficking, knowing that the authorities will only censor us from their misogynist media, and from their public spaces. We also expected them to assign female representatives to offend us in public fora, locally and internationally. OWFI will keep on raising the flagpole of March 8 as a symbol of freedom and equality. We also invite all freedom-lovers to join our ranks for realizing a better world of freedom and equality.
Long live March 8 the International Women’s Day Long live freedom and equality
Yanar Mohammed OWFI, president March 8, 2009
From Iraq
This story of mass demonstrations and government repression comes from the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq(OWFI). Excerpts follow:
February 25 was a historic day in Iraq. The revolution earthquakes in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya sent shockwaves in our direction. The main squares of most Iraqi cities were filled with protestors raising the same demands of providing electricity, employment, an end to governmental corruption, and a plea for general freedoms. Although the government announced a curfew and closed all streets from vehicular movement, and the highest religious clerics discouraged the people from protesting, almost 70,000 people gathered in the main squares in all of Iraq, united around their main demands. For the first time in eight years, the demonstration united people of different religions, ethnicities, sects, and political affiliations to denounce the extreme and continuous corruption and to demand a larger share in the country’s resources from oil for the people. OWFI plays a role in the political participation of women within movements for national freedoms and liberties in Iraq. Although our numbers are small when compared to the huge demonstrating masses, the purpose was to help organize some of the freedom-loving youth groups which had started on Facebook, but grew and
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multiplied in February. OWFI was one of the organizers of the demonstrations in Baghdad and Samarra raising slogans of change, right to work, and of course, equality.
Al Tahrir Demonstration in Baghdad Although the demo was announced as a peaceful one, the security forces ended it at 5 p.m. by throwing sound bombs, splashing hot water, and shooting plastic bullets and live bullets at the demonstrators. When we would not move, but chant slogans of relentless struggle, the security trucks began to drive down the square to chase and shoot us with live bullets, and beat up many of the demonstrators who fled into the alleys surrounding Al Tahrir square. One of our male supporters was shot in the knee, while two others were beaten by the U.S.-trained anti-riot police and the Iraqi army. Almost 20 people were shot that day around the square, although the announced numbers were much less. Some died while the wounded were detained. For those of us who ran to safety, we had to walk 5 hours in order to reach our homes in streets where cars were not allowed to drive.
In the western city of Samarra, OWFI women and men were leading the demonstrators, and raising banners Al Mousawat Newspaper, Issue no. 31, April 4- 2017demanding support for the widows, who are a majority among the women of Samarra. It was a precedent for a tribal community protest to be led by women. At the same time, in most Iraqi cities, the army shot the demonstrators in the evening, attempting to disperse the demonstrators. 7 were killed in this city, while 15 were wounded.
Demonstrations happened in parallel in the Kurdish North and the South, making it clear that nobody cared for the artificially created division lines of Sunni, Shia, Arab, Kurd, Turkmen, etc. It was a day of a unified struggle against corruption, oppression, basic rights and freedoms.—– While most demonstrating groups carried banners demanding reform of the government, the shooting and harassment of the demonstrators by anti-riot police and by the army shifted the slogans toward ones which rejected the oppressive measures. OWFI had carried the banner of “Change” since the beginning of the demonstration, and advised groups of cooperating youth demonstrators to do the same …. We are organizing for this coming Friday, hoping that the streets will be open, and that the army will let us into Al Tahrir square ….
Wish us good luck, Yanar Mohammed, President, Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq February 25 2011
Campaign against LGBT killings in Iraq 2012: Retrieved from emails.
From: "Yanar Mohammed"
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Campaign against Iraqi gay killings by smashing skulls with concrete blocks
New barbaric attacks started against the Iraqi lgbt in many cities like Baghdad and Basra while using inhumane methods such as hitting the head and body parts of gay victims with building concrete blocks repeatedly till death or by pushing them over high building roof which took place in Basra city. The actions of killings, torture, and dismembering against those who were described as “adulterous” by Islamic Shia militias, besides hanging lists on the walls of several sections in Al-Sadr city and in Al- Habibea region, had all terrorized the society at large and especially the Iraqi lgbt community, knowing that those attacks are directed against anyone suspected with gay practices or appearance.
The first killings took place on the sixth of February 2012 and continued or rather escalated till the current days. One of the hanged lists in Al-Sadr city included the names and addresses of 33 person, while other lists included other tens of names in other areas. News confirmed that 42 gay men were tortured and killed so far, mostly by concrete blocks, while some by dismembering.
The Islamic militias in Iraq believe that the religious family should consist of a male husband and a female wife, and is the cornerstone of building a pious Islamic society. Such an institution is handed to the males to rule and control. Under such an institution, they deny the right-to-life, or rather they comm and a death sentence against all who do not fit under the religious description of a family.
Based on those rules, the campaigns of honor killings happen against women and lgbt under the same token. Just as women face honour killing as a result of extra marital affairs, the lesbians and the gays face the same destiny because of their sexual practices which do not relate to marriage.
We call on all freedom-lovers of the world, the women’s and human rights organization and governments in the advanced world to put pressure on the Iraqi government to provide protection to the lgbt in Iraq, and establish legislation for defending their right to life, and criminalizing all aggressions against them. We demand also a full enquiry into the groups and criminal behind the killing campaign and that they get full punishment from the legal and correctional system.
Iraqi LGBT/ Madi Al Iraq /Ruby Al Hurriya
Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq\ Yanar Mohammed
1\3\2012
International Women’s Day Statement 2014 Patriarchal, Class, and Sectarian Oppression are Strengthened Through Exploiting and Subjugating Us
Eleven years of violence in Iraq have resulted in the escalation of a sectarian, authoritarian, backward, and oppressive rule; these years led to the creation of a dictatorial power that violently opposes any actions for liberation and egalitarian demands; an authoritarian dictatorship that is
148 ready to commit all types of crimes and violence against human rights in order to preserve political power and position; a tyrannical command that kills whoever opposes it; an oppressive power that has produced a culture of sectarian violence, terrorism, and assassinations; a dishonest government that destroys the western parts of the country by bombing based on an imposed sectarian conflict. The current Iraqi government has established a ruling class to whom extensive resources are allocated; meantime practicing economic oppression against the poor, who make up the majority of the population. Feminization of economic oppression is part of the Ja’afari Jurisprudence and personal status law, which incorporate articles that violate women and young girls’ rights by treating them as objects for men’s sexual pleasure. Ja’afari Jurisprudence guarantees women’s losing freedom of movement and property ownership. It deprives women of their marital alimony, if they are found to be not sexually appealing to their husbands. Ja’afari Jurisprudence deprives women of their economic rights and treats them as “objects” used for sexual entertainment and reproduction machines for males who maintain their rights and freedom in choosing either to acknowledge or deny that the child is their own offspring. The MENA region has witnessed dramatic political changes and revolutions against authoritative political systems during the so-called “The Arab Spring,” to which women have effectively contributed and offered sacrifices in order to make these changes take place. However, the Islamic politicized powers, which hijacked the Arab Spring revolutions to gain their political powers which became the counter-revolutionary governments in Egypt and Tunisia have directly targeted women, not only by excluding them, but also by legalizing women’s enslavement through jurisprudence and constitution. The aftermath of the “revolutions” pushed women out of the public sphere and jeopardized their legal rights. Simultaneously, in Syria, Yemen, and to some extent Libya, political Islam have imposed their own laws and cultures on women. In Syria, the situation has become disastrous: women are exploited to sexually entertain the male Mujahideen of Qa’eda and other terrorist groups, under a new jurisprudence called “Nikah Al Jihad” [Jihad’s intercourse], which is the worst type of a legalized rape committed by Islamic mobs and criminal gangsters against women. Through these criminal acts, Islamic politicized powers have proved that they are actually anti-revolutions; more accurately, they are counter-revolutions, which wipe out the true revolutions of progressive powers in the MENA region. In Iraq, the patriarchal ruling class has empowered some females so that can promote the implementation of the government’s oppressive policies, for example by electing a Minister of Women’s Affairs who is “Muhannaka” [covered with air-tight hijab that covers head and chin], thereby advocating her religious institution’s right to oppress women. Ironically, the female Iraqi Minister of Women’s Affairs is actually contributing to the oppression of women by representing the government’s misogynist policies. Unfortunately, some women’s organizations ally and compromise with this Minister of Women’s Affairs to implement some “reform projects,” which have ended up in producing a women’s movement that is not unified, for which every step forward results in two steps backward. In the same manner, some female parliamentary members have become oppressive tools against their own kind. OWFI firmly stands against all kinds of oppression and exploitation that are imposed by the authoritarian governing class, based on class analysis and a revolutionary vision for equality. We call upon all other women’s organizations not to submit to the misogynist vision of the ruling class thereby becoming oppressive tools and to focus their attention and efforts on building up a movement for women’s liberation, social justice, and the elimination of all types of oppression
149 and exploitation. Long live freedom and equality! Long live March 8, a symbol of struggles for women’s liberation! Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq 8 March 2014
On the Occupation of Mosul and the Cities of Western Iraq
The Iraqi society is suffering unprecedented crisis that threatens the future of peaceful co- existence of citizens, and augments genocides and civil conflicts based on the sectarian identities that were established on the Iraqi population, and were strengthened throughout more than a decade of the American occupation to Iraq.
Mosul City has fallen along with Tikrit, and previously Fallujah, under the control of considerably small troops of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The war continues in other cities like Tel Afar, Samaraa, and the cities of the western region. If the occupiers' mission succeeds, a large part of the Iraqi society would be ruled by a brutal Islamic state that does not fit in our modern world whatsoever; a state which sees an enemy in every human being who needs to be “disciplined” through humiliation, beating, and killing until he/she becomes good enough to fit within the extreme religious “set of morals”. This is a state that easily kills “apostates” and commits genocides against the religious and political opponents, a state that regards women merely as packages of flesh ready for the entertainment of the Mujahideen. Many Fatwas come out to ensure women’s humiliation under being “gifted” for the new Caliphate-age rapists, under the legislation of the so-called Jihad Al Nikah". In spite of all these atrocities, a number of the residents of the fallen cities joined them as a reaction to eight years of systemic sectarian subjugation under prime minister Nouri Al Maliki’s rule.
The American occupation’s policies resulted in the empowerment of the Shia Political Islam and gave them the upper hand in Iraq in the orchestrated Democracy. The US administration continues to deny the knowledge that their favourite political religious group would persecute other religions and sectarian divisions, once they are in power, and that it was only a matter of time before it takes place. It is very disturbing when the American media illustrates an image of Iraqis as “sectarian groups in conflict since the beginning of time”. This media denies the role of the US Administration in planning for a political divide on basis of religions, sectarian divisions, and ethnicities; in fact, the US Administration adopted religious and ethnic representation since 2003, which could only fuel a full-scale sectarian conflict. The sectarian civil which we witness today, is just the normal result of the US strategic plan to divide the Iraqis on sectarian and ethnic lines.
The human beasts of ISIS escorted hundreds of Iraqi soldiers to isolated sites and committed horrifying genocides against them, demonstrating lack of any humanity while performing genocide under the name of so-called “Jihad”. They knocked at doors of civilians’ houses in Dendan, Wihda, and Zuhur residential areas in Mosul city, and captured 18 unmarried young women, to be raped by ISIS warlords under the sway of the so-called “ Nikah el Jihad” [Jihad
150 intercourse], which resulted in four female victims committing suicide, in addition to one male who was a brother of one of the victims who committed suicide because he was unable to protect his sister and prevent those ISIS fighters from raping her. Unsatisfied with the crimes they have already committed, ISIS warriors performed punishment of cutting-off hands and flogging everyone who pronounced the name of ISIS with no grandiloquence. All these practices reflect a mix of brutality of Baath regime, a primitive chauvinist tendency to humiliate and practice religious superiority.
While the Iraqi society is striving to absorb the shock of their government’s failure, millions of Iraqi young men are driven to volunteer to fight the brutal and inhuman ISIS without any military training whatsoever, in battlefields which are financed by neighboring countries who are placing their bets on their representatives in Iraq. Meanwhile, Al Maliki government chants for nationalist patriotic rhetoric in order to push the youth of Iraq into deadly battles, in order to defend their corrupt and sectarian state and agenda. And the day has come when the Iraqi people have to pay the price for the farce of the "democratic" political process in Iraq.
The American administration is overlooking the catastrophic situations of millions of people in Iraq who lost their livelihood, well-being and security because of the poisonous sectarian politics brought forward by the US occupation. And meanwhile, Mr. Barak Obama comforts his citizens that the "Oil exports from Iraq will be stable”.
OWFI declares its solidarity with the civilians and residents of the Iraqi occupied cities, and calls upon the freedom-loving Iraqis to organize their popular committees, and to defend themselves and women from assaults committed by ISIS. OWFI will seek alternatives to open new shelters to protect female victims from these human beasts. OWFI calls upon all international organizations and decision – makers to take necessary political and diplomatic steps to intervene and stop the disaster of a full-scale sectarian conflict that jeopardizes lives of millions of people and would last until all civilized aspects in Iraq are demolished.
Al Maliki’s government, which is the main source of sectarian division and resulting conflict has to leave its position. The people of Iraq will no longer allow such criminal political parties to trample on our fates and lives.
Long live the people and women of Mosul,Tikrit, Fallujah, and Tel Afar, free and proud
Down with the terrorist ISIS, the creation of the criminal Qaeda and dreadful occupation
Yanar Mohammed
Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq 16-06-2014
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From: Yanar Mohammed,The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, president To: The Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women Re: Complaint against National Security Officer Muhamad Abdul Ameer – Baghdad – Iraq For Raiding OWFI office without search warrant, kidnapping personnel and a sheltered abused woman Date: March 3rd, 2018
A group of armed forces raided our Baghdad office on October 27th 2017 at 10:00 am, searching for a young woman (Tamara Uday) whom we had sheltered from her abusive family previously in October 16th. Tamara Uday’s father – from whom she was escaping - accompanied the armed group and claimed that our organization had kidnapped her.
Before the armed group’s forced entry into our offices, our organization’s security personnel Mr. Omer Al Kabeiy asked that they present their search warrant, court order, or any legal order to allow them to the task. They did not have any, and in response to Al Kabeiy’s question, they called their accompanying police force to detain Al Kabeiy for obstructing justice and kidnapping women and threatened to detain Ms. Dalal Jumaa who is in charge of the office for hiding information. After a loud and heated conversation at the door, they forced their entrance into our offices, while we managed the escape of Tamara Uday from the backyard, over the fence, and away through the neighbor’s lot.
Meanwhile the armed forces broke into our offices searching everywhere including the bathrooms and the lockers. Tamara Uday’s father was with them. And they had arrested our colleague, the security personnel, Omer Al Kabeiy, taking him to the police car.
The armed group took the identification papers of all the women in the organization in a humiliating and terrorizing manner. When they did not find Tamara Uday in the organization, one of them with the first name of Tahrir began to negotiate with Ms. Dalal Jumaa that they want us to deliver the woman Tamara Uday to her father; otherwise we will not receive our colleague Omer Al Kabeiy who would be jailed for many accusations.
After many phone calls back and forth with Tamara Uday and others, we were forced to bring her and exchange her for our colleague, hoping that her father does not harm her. They released our colleague Al Kabeiy, but we have not heard from Tamara Uday since then. The armed forces who raided our office and forced us to hand over an abused woman to her abusive family, were from many security institutions. After officer Muhamad Abdul Ameer from National Security had a heated debate at our door, he called ‘friends’ from other security institutions: Federal Police, Intelligence, Anti-Terrorism, and Anti-Crime Institutions. Tens of armed men gathered and forced their way into our organization terrorizing women who had just started their work for the day. The head of the task force was officer Muhamad Abdul Ameer from the National Security Institution who had gathered the group of armed forces and raided our offices illegally in order to force an abused woman to go back to her abusive family, while terrorizing and traumatizing all the women in the organization.
Officer Muhamad Adbul Ameer, was the head of National Security branch of Al Alwiya area, which is part of Karrada security district in Baghdad. We were informed recently that he became
152 in charge of the bigger district of Karrada afterwards. And we believe -according to information provided by an individual within the National Security institution, that Muhamad Abdul Ameer had not informed his institution before attacking our office to capture a victimized woman and hand her over to her abusers in the family.
OWFI shelters women who escape abusive environments and we keep them in our shelters, while getting them to our offices in the morning for psycho-social support and training. Tamara’s abusive family had been watching our headquarters while waiting to see her arrival during the morning hours, after which they called officer Abdul Ammer who gathered his ‘friends’ from many security institution to attack us in a ‘militia-like’ manner, with no search warrant or any court order.
The armed force, led by Muhamad Abdul Ameer, treated us like they would treat a terrorist cell. After humiliating and terrorizing all the women and men working in OWFI-including other shelter residents. They also forced a young woman to go back to her abusive environment against her will, while continuing to subject our colleagues afterwards to intimidations.
Our governmental institutions do not provide protection for abused women in Iraq, and furthermore, do not allow women’s organization to provide safe haven to women escaping violence. The governmental security institutions support abusers of women against women and women’s organizations.
We in OWFI have the mandate of protecting women against all odds, but we need international support to empower us against the misogynistic practices of the governmental security institutions.
We strongly need your interference of the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women to question the illegal way in which our office was raided, and the kidnapping of our colleague, and then taking a sheltered woman away against her will. We also require that the security institutions who attacked us to inform us of Tamara Uday’s well-being as we have not heard from her since then.
We have sheltered hundreds of women in our houses since 2003 and will need your support to continue in our sheltering program without being targeted by further Iraqi police, intelligence, security, or militias.
Please let us know what and when to expect a response from you.
Best Regards,
Yanar Mohammed
OWFI President
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Appendix B
The contents of this appendix are four issues of Al Mousawat Newspaper: two recent issues and two from 2013-2014. It is written in Arabic by OWFI activists, supporters, and new members including women residing in OWFI shelters. Every issue was 8 pages of A2 size, but the appendix shows only the first page of the issues.
OWFI published 36 issues of Al Mousawat (Equality) Newspaper throughout 15 years of work, mostly by volunteer feminist activists. Each issue was printed into 3000 copies and distributed in Baghdad, Basrah, and Samarra, and later on Diwaniah. The first issue was in April 2003, and was 4 pages of A4 size, with one writer, while Issue 36th was 8 pages of A4 size, and more than 10 activist writers, in addition to two articles\contributions by shelter residents. Editor in Chief of the newspaper was Yanar Mohammed, until Ibtisam Mane’a took over the task of Editor in chief in 2016. Issue 37 was being finalized during writing these lines.
The first pages of four issues 24, 25, 30 & 31 are copied below. Issues from the recent years are illustrated as the earliest issues date 15 years ago and were hard to retrieve from websites.
Al Mousawat Newspaper, Issue no. 31, April 4- 2017
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Al Mousawat Newspaper, Issue no. 30, May 30- 2016
155
Al Mousawat Newspaper, Issue no. 25, June- 2014
156
Al Mousawat Newspaper, Issue no. 24, September 8 - 2013
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Endnotes
1 The American Government Documents Department in the University of North Texas defines the CPA in their online website as “The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is the name of the temporary governing body which has been designated by the United Nations as the lawful government of Iraq until such time as Iraq is politically and socially stable enough to assume its sovereignty. The CPA has been the government of Iraq since the overthrow of the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Husein and his deeply corrupt Baath Regime in April of 2003.”
2 The founding statement of The Committee of Defense of Secularism in the Iraqi Society (CDSIS) was distributed in a meeting in Baghdad - Hotel Buhairat Al Baja’ on 18 September 2003, stating the dangers of political Islam on the status of civil society. A group of leading members of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq, including the researcher, announced the position and founding the committee. Text can be retrieved at: http://www.m.ahewar.org/s.asp?aid=10195&r=0
3 Zana Khasraw Gulmohamad argues that the sectarian policies of the Iraqi government against the “Sunni” population in Western Iraq led the local to sympathize with ISIS growth and empowerment (p.4).
4 The author debated the issue of defending women from sexual violence, and she challenged the mainstream Iraqi Left to take the progressive/ politically correct position of defending women in an International Women’s Day publication on the website of Modern Discussion, a website which had become a hub for human rights and political activists of Arab countries. The debate was published in 1/3/2016 and raised the issue for the first time within the Iraqi Left. It can be retrieved at: http://www.ahewar.org/debat/s.asp?aid=507230
5 The founding statement is included in the Appendix 1. It was drafted mainly by a leading female comrade who was the president of the Independent Woman’s Organization in Kurdistan and a supportive leading male comrade, both members of the Political Bureau then, with comments of some of the comrades. I was a newcomer to the party and was unable to articulate the political basis for the newly founded organization.
6 The Worker Communist Party of Iraq (WCPI) was founded in 1993 in kurdistan of Iraq, by the leader of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq Mansour Hekmat, after he defected from the Iranian Communist Party and based his theory upon a communism of workers, and upon separating from Nationalist views and identity, He also had some beginnings of addressing women’s oppression in the domestic realm, but could not further address it into the political agenda he wrote: A Better World.
7 I always took pride in detaching from the world of ideas, while connecting with concrete ‘sensuous human activity’ premises, as Marx expresses in the Theses of Feuerbach part I. In hindsight, I feel that the conflict between the activist and the theoretic Marxist in my thinking mostly gave way to activism.
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8 The militias have grown in the recent years 2014-2018 into huge armies benefitting from the state resources, and are affiliated with the Prime Minister office. It is public knowledge in Iraq that there are more than 65 militias affiliated with ruling factions, some of which are as big in size as the Iraqi army. The names, affiliates and leaderships are documented in The State of Human Rights in Iraq by The Geneva International Center for Justice, October 2014.
9 OWFI’s clandestine contacts inside the Baghdad Forensic institute reported that the average of 250 unclaimed female bodies had arrived to the morgue in 2013, and +300 in 2010.
10 In the Worker Communist Party the political agenda addresses revolution and reform simultaneously.
11 Between the progressive parts of the women’s movement, and namely the Madre organization in New York, and the politically correct comrades in the party, OWFI secured a small circle of supporters who helped us survive the turbulences and difficulties of our struggle.
12 Between the years of 2003 and 2009 CNN reporters asked for interviews with me or with other leading feminists of the Organization when they visited Iraq, or in response to governmental decisions in matters pertaining to women.
13 Brief notes and pictures can be found on a Facebook page. Retrieve at: https://www.facebook.com/%D8%AA%D8%AC%D9%85%D8%B9-25- %D8%B4%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B7-134898616580966/
14 The meeting took place in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of a European country which is known to support secularism and women’s initiatives. It was meant to be with one or two medium ranking program officers on April 21st, 2011, but I was surprised to step into a room full of officials including the Ambassador in Iraq and the Minister of the International aid cooperation. Parts of that meeting felt like an investigation in a court.
15 Our organization’s founding statement clarified both positions, and we continues to state it clearly in all interviews and debates.
16 The leading female figure of the organization partly changed her position after 2017 when she needed to refer vulnerable women to our shelters.
17 Two articles in the Criminal Code provide cover or leniency to ‘honour killing’. All legislative changes since 2003 did not touch on the articles which allow ‘honor killing’.
18 My two other comrades were older members in the WCPI party. One of them was previously the Secretary of the Independent Women’s Organization, which was a political women’s organization in the Kurdish Iraqi North before having the ruling party of PUK shutting it down and chasing its leaders who left Iraq. The other member was from the South, and had a leading position in the party organization, but she did not attend our meetings inside Iraq. She was candidate by the party as a founding members 159
19 OWFI website www.owfiraq.org provides updated information of the current size and activities of the organization.
20 White slavery, as meaning gender based salvery within the same race, continues to use the white colour as it was not used often in a cross-race setting.
21 Ethnic or rather Nationalist bigotry was a reason for concern in the modern history of Iraq which was full of dualist Arab/Kurdish clashes, with Arab criminal domination in general against other ‘minorities’, to which new categories of Turkmen, Christian, Assyrian, Shabak, and other were added after the referendum in Kurdistan of September 2017..
22 Debates and common frustration shared between my colleague, the abroad representative of OWFI in the UK and Europe- and myself always revolved around how some patriarchal comrades belittled our work, and called it a service to the bourgeoisie, a practice which was repeated by some women-comrades who competed to become leading members of the party’s ‘boy-club’.
23 Oum Kalthoum was the most prominent Arab Singer. She was from Egypt, and her songs were heard on televisions on daily basis since 1950s - a time of relative stability and prosperity for the Arab world, when arts thrived and connected Middle Eastern countries to Egypt as a center of arts and entertainment. The noun is translated to the mother of Kalthoum, but the actual meaning was the woman with big cheeks.
24 Five thousand villages were torn down by the Baath army apparatus.
25 Al Anfal is an ancient Arabic word which was used in the Koran, meaning generous gifts, or rather spoils of war which are gathered from defeating the enemy of ‘kufar’, or rather the non- Muslim infidels.
26 In Blogspot: http://ghanim-anaz.blogspot.ca/2015/03/blog-post.html
27 Minister of Defense of the US in 1983: http://www.alyaum.com/article/1137196
28 https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/170-sanctions/41952.html
29 In the 1980s, women constituted 40% of the public sector due to the recruitment of males to the Iraq-Iran war. The rate differed in the 1990s as many establisment included more women in mass lay-offs.
30 As referred to by Youssef Bassil’ in his research: The 2003 Iraq War: Operations, Causes, and Consequences, IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (JHSS) ISSN: 2279-0837, ISBN: 2279-0845. Volume 4, Issue 5 (Nov. - Dec. 2012), PP 29-47 www.Iosrjournals.Org. The original source is: Joseph J. Collins, Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath. Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 2008, 43 pp
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31 Shia, as by Oxford Dictionary, is one of the two main branches of Islam, followed by about a tenth of Muslims, especially in Iran, that rejects the first three Sunni caliphs and regards Ali, the fourth caliph, as Muhammad's first true successor. It can also mean a Muslim who adheres to the Shia branch of Islam.
32 After Saddam Husein’s military campaign of the late eighties against the Kurds, thousands of villages were torn down, and their inhabitants ran away to increasingly larger urban centers.
33 Shia Islamist militias killed Sunni individuals in Baghdad neighborhoods, and left their sectarian signature on the bodies, which was drilled holes into different parts of their body.
34 The head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) which has control of Erbil and surroung cities including Duhok.
35 KPMG is a professional service company and one of the Big Four auditors, along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
36 Recordings of the meeting are posted on : https://www.facebook.com/mgsnmanzeen/videos/1264928896946269/
37 In social gatherings of new-comers to Canada - Toronto, a male friend who had just arrived in 2009 described to many of us how he almost fell victim to the same practise of killing a female relative after he found out that she was prostituted for money. He explained that many other men in his sector of Sadre city had actually gone through with the killing.
38 It is important to point out that this party was not the mainstream Leftist party which was affiliated with the Soviet Union, but a smaller party which was founded in 1993 by Iranian leadership which aimed to make communism about the workers again. It also held a highly feminist outlook on women’s rights.
39 Copies of Al Mousawat (equality) newspaper are included in Appendice 2.
40 The comrade who founded the Organization with me could not endure the security and lawlessness of Baghdad, and decided to go back to her home in Germany, while Al Jazeera reporter got assassinated in 2006 by Al Qaeda in Western Iraq.
41 The founder of the Party was interviewed about abortion through which he prioritized the life of a few weeks old embryo to a woman’s choice of not to get pregnant. He justified it with a secular pro-life position. I found the position equivalent to a religious institution’s position. In the agenda of the Party, there are articles and text which defends women’s freedom better than the agenda of any other political party in Iraq, and yet there is a section for legalizing prostitution, which is not a feminist perspective in my opinion.
42 A leftist American woman from the organization Code Pink was in the square and shot the whole argument by film.
43 Displaced people’s complexes were governmental projects in Baghdad which were still under construction when the war broke out, and the sites became empty, and with no supervision. 161
Thousands of new families squatted into them as they had no other options for housing. The displaced housing complexes were a good location for gaining membership for a revolutionary political party.
44 The challenges were not just verbal or political, but rather reached to life-threatening situations by those who were upset at how I detached from their plans.
45 Seminar took place in the Railways Establishment in Baghdad near Muthanna airport in the summer of 2003. My colleague who joined into the leading group of the Organization passed away after five years to a detrimental illness.
46 A group of our comrades worked in the company and helped us organize a group of female workers into our organization.
47 Statement against the governmental campaign on our organization is attached in Appendix A.
48 The ‘Regressive Left’ is a term which was used by leftists, liberals and right-wing groups to criticize the tolerance of some leftist groups to the illiberal and inhumane positions of Islamists.
49 Cold War Museum website definition of the terms is the following:To reform the distraught Soviet Union, the democratization of the Communist Party was promoted through Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of “perestroika” and “glasnost.” Perestroika refers to the reconstruction of the political and economic system established by the Communist Party. Retrieved at: http://www.coldwar.org/articles/80s/glasnostandperestroika.asp
50 Their pre-war published statement clarified this position.
51 This saying was heard on daily basis from affiliates of the Iraqi communist party between 2003-2008.
52 There is a Black population of almost two million people who have Iraqi nationality, while living under social discrimination. Their ancestors were brought to Iraq as slaves in the 700s A.D. from Zanzibar (currently Tanzania) and have a long history of racial discrimination and abuse under slavery, mostly in Southern cities of Iraq.
53 A leading comrade of the WCPI, and one of the comrades who drafted OWFI’s founding statement in June 2003, and defended the feminist work of OWFI at many stages throughout the years.
54 Abaya is a black cloth that wraps the whole body of a woman with an opening from the front to facilitate movement.
55 The ICP’s main women’s organization NGO, with activities and meetings organized by the leading woman activist.
2004 صيف- البينة جريدة 56
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57 Deash is the Arabic acronym for ISIS.
58 Refer to statement in Appendix A. http://www.ahewar.org/debat/s.asp?aid=507230 59 ينار محمد - رئيسة منظمة حرية المرأة في العراق - في حوار مفتوح مع القراء والقارئات حول :احتفال بالثامن من مارس ام وقفة تحدّي لبُنى اجتماعية معادية للمرأة .
60 Muqtada Al Sadre is a Shia Islamist leader of the Sadrists. His followers are mainly in the largest ghetto of Baghdad, named after Muqtada Al Sadre’s family.
61 "Feminist Celebrity" is a term used against feminist figures within their socialist political parties in Iraq and Iran during the first years of the invasion, when the media was interviewing the women inquiring about the situation of women in Iraq. The mainstream of the political parties did not find the intensive interviewing task supportive of their political struggles. The pressure on the leading feminist figures caused enmity within the parties' ranks.
62 Lauren Sandler reported OWFI activities including the demonstration in a New-York times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/opinion/veiled-and-worried-in-baghdad.html
63 http://www.madre.org/page/your-support-in-action-175/news/al-mousawat-radio-reopens- 907.html
64 Ms. Nebras Al Maamouri is a journalist who started an NGO for the rights of female journalist to be in decision-making positions concerning Iraqi media governing bodies.
65 Assayeb Al Haq or Ahl Al Haq is an Islamist Shia militia which takes pride in cleansing the society from whom they perceive as ‘perverts’, with special focus on prostituted women and gay men. They became a parliamentary political group, albeit still active on the militia terrorist activities against individuals.
66 Both are pseudonyms, as those individuals continue to be under risk.
67 Aarousa means bride in Arabic, describing the beauty of the young man.
68 http://righttoheal.org/
69 The talk show can be seen on BBC Arabic Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiNOXhtr9V4
70 The televised talk of Al Yaacoubi is still posted at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4GG6vKs_vY Nevertheless, the page which his institution titled as ‘the immoral communist Yanar Mohammed’ and filled it with swearing words against OWFI women was deleted after a few months. 163
71 http://nationalpost.com/news/world/israel-middle-east/isis-jihadists-offer-islamic-justification- for-taking-thousands-of-yazidi-women-as-sex-slaves
72 In spite of the security measure which OWFI teaches its new activists, leak of information subjected OWFI to many raids throughout the years; some of which were by the women’s tribes, while others were by huge police/intelligence/anti-terrorist forces which collaborate with the patriarchal tribes. The last one was on October 27th, when a sheltered woman’s father brought armed forces from 5 security agencies with him surrounding OWFI’s headquarters in Baghdad, and terrorizing women in the offices.
73 The talk took place in the annual conference of a leading federation of workers in May 2007.
74 Safaa Khalaf is a journalist from the Southern city of Basrah who undertook reporting on the systemic killing of women by Islamist militias between 2005 – 2007. Al Mousawat newspaper published his reports in 2007 and 2008.
75 Article 411 of the criminal code allows killing of female relative with minimal imprisonment of few months, however judges allow the women’s killers to walk away after congratulating them for keeping the family’s honour.
76 In hindsight, the most probable explanation of the trafficking of women of Diyala has a sectarian background. Shia Islamist militias who were in control of the Sunni area of Diyala could have facilitated the process to create havoc in 2007, which was the height of the sectarian confrontations.
77 Rubaie’s interview was pre-recorded, but not broadcast, after the governmental campaign against OWFI’s publicizing of trafficking of Iraqi women in the surrounding Arab countries.
78 It took the UN more than three years to issue a statement on September 2017of recognizing that ISIS attack on Yazidis amounted to a genocide.
79 Article 411 in the Iraqi Criminal code was not changed in the past 20 years, in spite of women’s organizations campaigning.
80 Board in the case of OWFI.