The US invasion of Iraq: Has it led to feminicide?

There has been an unprecedented unleashing of violence against women in
Iraq in recent years. What is the link between the US-led invasion of the
country and the rise in women's rights violations?

By Kathambi Kinoti

Before the invasion of their country in 2003, women formed forty per cent
of Iraq's public work force. Today, ninety per cent of them are unemployed.
[1] Polygamy, previously virtually unheard of in Baghdad is making a
comeback as women become second and third wives in order to survive
economically. [2]

There has been a sharp increase in violence against women including so
called honour killings, abductions, rape and sexual slavery. Fear of
militia harassment for not being 'properly' dressed or behaved is keeping
many women in their homes and girls away from school.

Laws that protected women's rights have also taken a bashing after the
overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime. One of the first laws that the
Iraqi Governing Council sought to repeal was the progressive 1959 family
law that protected the rights of women in divorce and custody proceedings
and in matters of property ownership and inheritance. According to the
women's rights organization MADRE, 'through resolution 137, [the Iraqi
Governing Council] planned to replace the1959 law with arbitrary
interpretations of Sharia, or religious law.' [3] Their attempts to do away
with the family law were not successful, but the subsequent enactment of a
new national constitution brought further erosions of women's rights. The
new constitution made space for the application of extreme Islamist*
interpretations of Islamic law which, more often than not, restrict women's
rights.

By no means do advocates of democracy and women's rights support the
dictatorship that was the previous regime. However they dispel the US
administration claims that the one of the objectives for the invasion of
Iraq was the introduction of democracy. The invasion has instead led to the
introduction of theocracy. The US funded, trained and armed Islamist
militias, who are 'the best-armed and most powerful perpetrators of
gender-based violence.'[4] After the defeat of the Ba'ath regime, the US
supported the installation of Islamists in the new governance structures in
Iraq. Yanar Mohamed says, 'We used to have a government that was almost
secular. It had one dictator. Now we have almost 60 dictators ? Islamists
who think of women as forces of evil. This is what is called the
democratization of Iraq.'[5]

Feminicide in Iraq

According to MADRE, both the anti-war movement and the media have failed to
adequately examine the gendered dimensions of the war in Iraq. Of course,
war inevitably entails violence, but without gender disaggregated data on
civilian killings and other forms of violence, the true picture of the
situation is obscured. MADRE reports that US authorities have ordered
Iraq's health ministry to stop publishing statistics about killings. Where
statistics have been released, Iraqi women's organizations say that the
real statistics on the killings, rapes, abductions and harassment of women
are much higher than official numbers because of under-reporting due to
fear of retaliation, stigma and lack of confidence in the police. Yanar
Mohamed says that women professionals have been assassinated for no other
reason than that they were 'women in high places.' [6]

All these issues together with the impunity with which the violence is
perpetrated against women have led to MADRE's classification of the
situation as feminicide. Although the term is usually used to refer to the
routine killings of women in Guatemala and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico,
parallels can be drawn in the magnitude of the violence, the social climate
of discrimination, the inadequate official response and the wide impunity
for perpetrators. MADRE also points to the complicity of the authorities in
the violence. There have been reports of the involvement of Islamist
militias who form part of the police force in the trafficking and sexual
exploitation of women. There is also widespread rape of women in custody in
police stations and prisons without the perpetrators being brought to
justice.

The rise in violence against women and the erosion of women's rights,
together with the condoning of these conditions by the authorities could be
indicative of a shift to theocracy rather than democracy. As MADRE says:
'For Iraq's Islamists, as for religious fundamentalists in the United
States and elsewhere, the subordination of women is a priority of the first
magnitude?because it is both a microcosm and a precondition of the social
order they wish to establish.' [7]

For supporters of democracy and women's rights, there are two battles to be
waged within the prevailing politics in Iraq: the battle against American
domination and the battle against theocracy.

* 'Islamist' is used here to refer to those who pursue a reactionary social
and political agenda in the name of Islam, as distinct from 'Islamic'
relating to the religion of Islam. This definition is borrowed from MADRE's
report 'Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and
the US war on Iraq.'