Friday, March 15, 2013

The topic so many columnists are (again) ignoring

Alsumaria reports that Dhi Qar Province announced yesterday their figures for 2012 marriages which included 360 underage marriage.  And when Iraq talks underage marriage, they're referring, as in this article, to girls as young as ten-years-old.

Do not mistakenly picture two little ten-year-olds holding hands, looking like the "Love is . . ." comic strip.  While the  wife may be as young as ten, the husband is generally in his fifties.

These are the figures for one province only.  It's appalling.  It's not a joke, it's not a meet-cute story to be shared years from now.  It is abuse plain and simple.  That's why the United Nations Population Fund has their End Child Marriage initiative.  They note:

Child marriage is a grave threat to the lives and prospects of young girls. It violates their rights, denies them of their childhood, disrupts their education, jeopardizes their health, and limits their opportunities.

The campaign, Too Young to Wed, which launches on the first International Day of the Girl Child, calls attention to this egregious human rights violation. Beyond providing new data and co-sponsoring a high-level panel on this issue, UNFPA is working with governments and partners at all levels of society to deliver comprehensive programmes addressing the needs of vulnerable and married girls.

Start here by getting the facts, watching the videos, viewing the multimedia exhibit and sharing what you know with friends and colleagues.

Child marriage is not cute.  Children need to be children, they don't need to be married off to adults. They don't need to have their learning and their lives stunted or taken away from them.  Extreme poverty is at the root of many child marriages in Iraq.  

And child marriage is only one of the many ways in which females suffer in Iraq.

The Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq's Yanar Mohammed pointed out this month, "Iraqi women have witnessed all kinds of crimes and grievances which accompany all wars; first of which is the loss of 10% of the Iraqi female population’s husbands and fathers, leaving more than 3 million women and girls with no source of income or protection, thereby turning them into a helpless population which is deprived of all components of human dignity. In result, 3 million widows and female orphans of war are currently vulnerable to being exploited by the human beasts which were raised inside the green zone to enjoy the riches of Iraq, while depriving the 99% of resources and making sure to trample upon the human dignity of a female population who became victims of trafficking, sexual exploitation, polygamy, and religious pleasure marriages."

You can't talk about the Iraq War without acknowledging what was done to Iraqi women.  As Sami Ramadani (Guardian) observed yesterday, "Women and children pay the highest price.  Women's rights, and human rights in general, are daily suppressed."  The link there goes to Haifa Zangana (Guardian) column from last month about the state of Iraqi women:

The plight of women detainees was the starting point for the mass protests that have spread through many Iraqi provinces since 25 December 2012. Their treatment by the security forces has been a bleeding wound – and one shrouded in secrecy, especially since 2003. Women have been routinely detained as hostages – a tactic to force their male loved ones to surrender to security forces, or confess to crimes ascribed to them. Banners and placards carried by hundreds of thousands of protesters portray images of women behind bars pleading for justice.

[. . .]
No wonder, ten years after the invasion, the Iraqi authorities are accused by US-based Human Rights Watch of "violating with impunity the rights of Iraq's most vulnerable citizens, especially women and detainees". HRW's account is echoed by a report by the Iraqi parliament's own human rights and women, family and children's committees, which found that there are 1,030 women detainees suffering from widespread abuse, including threats of rape.
Responding to these findings, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki threatened to "arrest those members of parliament who had discussed the violence against women detainees". Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Hussain al-Shahristani has acknowledged that there are 13,000 prisoners in custody accused of terror offences, but he only mentioned women detainees in passing:

"We transferred all women prisoners to prisons in their home provinces."
Al-Shahristani's statement is one in a long list of contradictory and misleading statements by the regime's most senior officials – from al-Maliki speaking of "not more than a handful of women terrorists", to his contradictory promise that he will pardon all "women detainees who have been arrested without a judicial order or in lieu of a crime committed by some of their male relatives". That assurance was followed by parading nine women, cloaked in black from head to toe, on the official state TV channel, al-Iraqiya, as a gesture of the regime's "good will".
Protesters and Iraqi human rights organizations estimate that there are as many as 5,000 female detainees. The truth is leaking out, drip by drip. A few weeks ago, 168 women detainees were released and there were promises of another 32 waiting to be released. No one accused of torture, rape or abuse has yet been brought to justice.


It's really something to read the let-me-dash-off-a-piece-on-Iraq-because-it's-ten-years-later writing and grasp how lazy so many are.  They're not addressing the ongoing protest movement, or the authoritarian regime of Little Saddam Nouri al-Maliki, they're not acknowledging any of the realities and they're not writing about anything they couldn't have written about in 2010 or 2009 or 2008 or . . .



It's impossible to be aware of what's taken place in Iraq and what's taking place in Iraq without grasping how Iraqi women have suffered.  So it's telling to see so many rush to weigh in with bad columns that don't even acknowledge women.

On this week's Making Contact, Iraq is explored.  Excerpt.

Yanar Mohammed:  We have turned in the last ten years into a new police state. [. . .]  [W]hat happened in Iraq is that the US administration wanted to empower only those who are on the right [wing] side of the political formula.  And on the right side, it was mostly the Islamists.  And when they dealt with the political groups who are on the ground, they dealt with them in what is understood as the rule of the jungle: Whoever has the biggest militias, whoever has the better ability to kill, those were the ones who are in the Parliament now.  You do not see the political parties that are progressive in Iraq that have a history, have a big membership, you don't see them having any seats.  If we were to go back to 2003 and if there was a political will to allow the times to happen in Iraq all of the political groups should have been empowered in the same way -- and especially the working class groups and the women.  To cut a long story short, they did not want Iraq to become a modern state.  They wanted to become another Saudi Arabia in the region.  Saudi Arabia which is lying on top of a big field of oil which where the state has one function to pull the tabs of oil and to open them in full to the foreign companies.



Of course, Iraqi women have had some 'success' under Nouri's leadership.    Let's drop back to the November 12th snapshot:

Staying with violence, as noted in the October 15th snapshot, Iraq had already executed 119 people in 2012.  Time to add more to that total.  Mohammed Tawfeeq (CNN) reported last night that 10 more people were executed on Sunday ("nine Iraqis and one Egyptian").  Tawfeeq notes the Ministry of Justice's statement on the executions includes, "The Iraqi Justice Ministry carried out the executions by hanging 10 inmates after it was approved by the presidential council."  And, not noted in the report, that number's only going to climb.  A number of Saudi prisoners have been moved into Baghdad over the last weeks in anticipation of the prisoners being executed.  Hou Qiang (Xinhua) observes, "Increasing executions in Iraq sparked calls by the UN mission in the country, the European Union and human rights groups on Baghdad to abolish the capital punishment, criticizing the lack of transparency in the proceedings of the country's courts."


Yes, in Nouri's Iraq, women are executed and put on death row.  Other rights may have withered but Nouri -- like most misogynsts -- will always support the right to proclaim a woman guilty of some crime or 'crime.'

From Amnesty International's new report  [PDF format warning] "Iraq: A Decade of Abuses:"


Men comprise the great majority of prisoners sentenced to death and executed in Iraq but at least 14 women have been executed since executions resumed.  The authorities have reported carrying out 129 executions in 2012, including five executions of women.
The number of women currently on death row is unknown to Amnesty International.  In October 2012, the HHRO reported that at least 18 women were on death row there when they visited the Women's Prison in Baghdad.
Some women prisoners have been on death row for several years, including Wassan Talib, who was sentenced to death in August 2006 after the Central Criminal Court convicted her of murdering members of the security forces, and Samar Sa'ad 'Abdullah, sentenced in August 2005 after she was convicted of murdering several relatives despite her allegations that she was forced to confess under torture in pre-trial detention.

They're represented in mulitples on death row but there's only one woman in Nouri's Cabinet -- and he only named a woman to the post after women publicly rebuked him in January 2011 -- including women in Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's family.




The following community sites -- plus PRI, the Guardian, Ms. magazine's blog, Media Channel, C-SPAN, ACLU, Pacifica Evening News, Antiwar.com and Iraq Veterans Against the War -- updated last night night and this morning:

St. Patrick's Day is reason to note law professor Francis A. Boyle, an expert in human rights and international law,  on the Irish famine:

 Professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, Boyle is author of "United Ireland, Human Rights and International Law." http://www.claritypress.com/BoyleIX.html

    He said today: "Some controversy has surrounded the use of the word 'genocide' with regard to the Great Irish Famine. But this controversy has its source in an apparent misunderstanding of the meaning of genocide. No, the British government did not inflict on the Irish the abject horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. But the definition of 'genocide' reaches beyond such ghastly behavior to encompass other reprehensible acts designed to destroy a people."


Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (phone)
217-244-1478 (fax)


And if you click here, you can stream a video of Boyle addressing the Great Irish Famine in terms of genocide.



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