By Larry Jones, February 28,2008
As people around the world celebrate International Women’s Day, in those parts of the of world ravaged by George Bush’s wars, including within the U.S. military itself, women are treated as second class citizens at best and as pieces of meat or subhuman property of men at worse.
AFGHANISTAN
Let’s take a look at what has happened in Afghanistan after Bush claimed that the war there was not only to go after Osama bin Laden, but to liberate the women of that country. Liberate??? We”re afraid not. The Taliban whom U.S. forces claimed to have driven out had a horrendous history of savagely abusing and violently oppressing women. Now with the U.S.’s puppet government in place, Bush wants us to believe that President Hamid Karzai is a democratic ally. The reality is that his government is filled with ex-warlords, militia leaders, and drug dealers.
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The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) says that the warlords in the present Afghan government were pre-Taliban fundamentalists who carried out “gang raping, lust murders, abductions of young females, blackmail of families with eligible daughters. In their new role in the Karzai government, they are “now free to brutalize Afghan women in areas under their domination.”
“We”re looking at a worse situation than the Taliban period,” said Malalai Joya, a courageous woman who battled her way into the lower house of Parliament with the political and emotional support of masses of ordinary people in the country. Her stay was not long lived. Elected in 2005, she was banished by the otherwise all male legislative body, allegedly because she stated that it was “worse than a stable.”
Joya has also stated that “Many, many times they insulted me, even inside of the Parliament they threw water at me and they threatened me with death, and one of them shouted, “Take her and rape her,”” Then, she said, they turned off her microphone.
Last year more women killed themselves in Afghanistan than ever before. “The murder of women in Afghanistan is like the killing of birds,” said Joya in an interview with Human Rights Watch, “because the government is anti-women. Women are vulnerable – recently a 22-year old woman was raped in front of her children by 15 local commanders of a fundamentalist party closely connected to the government. The commanders then urinated in the face of the children. These things happen frequently.”
Since these travesties against women are ongoing and Karzai’s patron and the country’s “liberator of women,” George Bush, is allowing them to continue, let no one say, “Oh, he will be out next January, so we don’t really need to call for his ouster now.” Tell that to the next gang-raped mother watching her children being urinated upon!!!
ARE THINGS REALLY GETTING BETTER IN IRAQ?
We are constantly being told that the surge in Iraq is working and there’s light at the end of the tunnel, even though it may a decades-long tunnel. But we seldom hear that things are improving for the lot of women. The truth is that in both the south and the north of Iraq, and often near Baghdad itself, severe degradation of women is the de facto rule of law. As the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) explains, the southern cities are under the control of theocratic Islamist groups that have turned the area into “no-women zones.”
IN THE SOUTH
Since the beginning of the illegal occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces, the southern cities of Iraq have become strong areas of operation for “Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (PVPV) squads. They not only prevent unveiled women from entry to the university, but they also detain “disobedient” students in detainment and torture rooms. Many women are killed in the area each month. While police officials state that something like 15 women are killed in Basra every month, ambulance drivers who are hired to clean the streets each day say the number is much higher.
According to OWFI, “When a woman is killed, the only given justification is that she was promiscuous or adulterous. While in fact, the top of the female death toll list is occupied by PhD holders, professionals, activists, regular office workers, and then prostitutes. This PVPV campaign terrorizes the female populations so as to restrain women into the domestic domain and end all female participation.”
The toll of this terror is monstrous. Yifat Susskind wrote on the Common Dreams website earlier this year that “In Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, 2008 was ushered in with an announcement of the 2007 death toll of women targeted by Islamist militias. City officials reported on December 31 that 133 women were killed and mutilated last year, their bodies dumped in trash bins with notes warning others against “violating Islamic teachings”” But ambulance drivers who are hired to troll the city streets in the early mornings to collect the bodies confirm what most residents believe: the actual numbers are much higher. (http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/10/6287/). Susskind goes on to say that “Their crime is not “promiscuity,” but rather opposition to the transformation of Iraq into an Islamist state. That bloody transition has been the main political trend under US occupation. It’s no secret who is killing the women of Basra. Shiite political forces empowered by the US invasion have been terrorizing women there since 2003″.
HONOR KILLINGS
Honor killings, where a family kills a female member who has had sex outside of marriage, even if she was raped, in order to maintain the family’s so-called honor and save them from disgrace, continue unabated. A National Public Radio report by Ann Garrels in 2005 talked about a 16 year old girl who was kidnapped in West Baghdad and the family was told she would be raped if her brother didn’t quit the U.S. trained police force. The brother did so and the girl was released. But just the idea that she might be raped made the family continue to fear being disgraced. The problem was “solved” when her cousin shot and killed her.
Many Iraqis say that this is a tribal tradition deeply rooted in their culture, even though it is contrary to the teachings of Islam. In a Salon article of 12/05 one said: “Killing a rape victim in order to preserve one’s honor may sound backward to you — as backward, say, as invading a country where there are no terrorists and then claiming you’ve got to stay and keep fighting because the terrorists now see the place as a central front in their war with you. Welcome to Iraq!”
Exactly! The U.S. has raped Iraq with its Operation Iraqi Freedom (doesn’t that name make you nauseated?) and we have all been disgraced. Naturally the U.S., being so very culturally sensitive, allows this to continue. Actually, changes in the attitudes and practices regarding women in Iraq will only truly change when progressive Iraqi women and men rise up and demand that these feudal practices be done away with. Current American imperialists grasping for more empire will do everything possible to prevent that from happening. Surely any regime, whether Bush’s or the next, are not going to change that, since all of the “viable” presidential candidates agree that empire is more important than justice for all the women of the world, stump speeches to the contrary notwithstanding.
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INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’s DAY Male domination, domestic servitude, beatings, rape, “honor” killings horrific working conditions, lower pay, government control of female reproductive organs ” and the list of daily crimes against women around the world goes on. International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8 is a time to recommit ourselves to the struggle to end all the horrors of women’s oppression. But IWD is also a day to celebrate the enormous contributions women have made and are making, often against overwhelming odds. It is said that women hold up half the sky, but in many situations they hold up much more than half. The first IWD in the U.S. was observed in 1909 when the Socialist Party of America designated IWD as a day to honor the 1908 garment workers” strike where 15,000 women loudly protested inhuman and unsafe working conditions in the garment sweat shops of New York City. |
NORTHERN IRAQ
In Iraqi Kurdistan, a 17 year old woman named Doa was publically stoned to death in the town of Bashiqa because she fell in love with a Muslim Arab man, while she was of the Yazidi faith. After she was seen visiting him, male members of her religion dragged her from her home and carried out the execution by stoning in April of last year as hundreds of people passively watched, including Kurdish authorities.
It seems clear that life for women in the countries George Bush claims to be liberating has gotten worse under his regime.
THE MILITARY “CODE OF HONOR” TOWARD WOMEN
“Once again, American GIs have raped an Okinawan girl, one from junior high. We are angry,” began a statement of Okinawan women recently. Their words were both a courageous indictment of how the military treats woman and an inspiring stand for “our dignity, our honor, and our freedom.” There have been numerous rapes by U.S. troops occupying Okinawa ever since World War II. Speaking as a mother whose children have lost the values they learned at home, these women strongly stated: “You have been turned into killing machines. The military organization has sought to teach you to see people not as people, but as something to kill. It is that same training that has taught you see us as someone you can rape casually. Go back to your hometown, where your mother is, and try to get yourself back to being a decent human being. ” Go back to America. Now.”
WOMEN IN THE MILITARY
While there are numerous sources regarding the inhuman sexual abuse women in the military must endure, this article in Salon by Helen Benedict is well worth reading in its entirety. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/07/women_in_military/ The maddening facts are that women are frequently raped in the military, which when combined with the stress of combat often leads to extreme cases of post traumatic stress disorder. (Yes, in Iraq women engage in direct combat even though officially they do not) Most rapes go unreported because the help supposedly afforded them is non-existent, and when a woman soldier is raped by a commanding officer (known as Command Rape) she inevitably suffers command punishment if she speaks to anyone about it.
Women soldiers in Iraq have died of dehydration because they refuse to drink liquids late in the day, knowing that if they make the long trip to the latrine in a darkened area at night they will surely be sexually assaulted. And this in summer Iraqi weather which can reach above 120 degrees. One 21 year old National Guard woman in Iraq told Benedict: “There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke. This guy out there, he told me he thinks the military sends women over to give the guys eye candy to keep them sane. He said in Vietnam they had prostitutes to keep them from going crazy, but they don’t have those in Iraq. So they have women soldiers instead.”
One woman who was raped by a commanding officer and harassed by two others finally broke rank and told. She was then for months treated as a traitor. Finally, on leave to her family, she went AWOL and ultimately was arrested. Jailed for desertion she was offered to have her punishment reduced in return for her affidavit stating that she was not raped. She refused and is still in prison in the Mojave Desert. Her assailants received letters of reprimand.
To this writer, the U.S. military is one of the most vicious and backward in the world. As the Okinawan women pointed out, the military teaches decent young people to become killers and it also gives its men the opportunity to exhibit their basest macho tendencies toward woman, foreign as well as within their own ranks.
Any human being with an ounce of humanity must continue to help build the kind of mass movement which can tell Bush, Cheney, and their military sycophants or any of the presidential hopefuls that this will not be tolerated.
Larry Jones is a long time political activist and former United Church of Christ minister who lives in Honolulu.