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Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday August 14, 2005
The Observer
Earlier this year I was in Iraq's second city, Basra, lunching with a group of Iraqi women professionals. It was the time of the elections, and the conversation turned to women's rights. Since the fall of Saddam, the women complained, their freedoms had gradually been eroded, not by official diktat but by groups of Shia radicals who had invaded hospitals, universities and schools, insisting that women wore headscarves and behaved as men saw fit.
It was a story I heard again and again across the once cosmopolitan city from middle-class professional women who told me they intended to vote for the secular list headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi for fear of what would happen if the 'religious' Shia list swept to a majority.
It was not to be. Allawi and the largely secular views he represented have lost out to a new sense of religiosity and resurgence of tribal authority that is on the march across Iraq south of Kurdistan.
Now women from Basra to Kirkuk are facing a renewed assault on their freedoms as Iraq's politicians squabble over a new constitution that will at best fudge women's rights, and at worst hugely undermine them, despite the guarantee of a quota for representation by women in Iraq's new parliament.
The principal of equality that existed in what was once one of the Middle East's most secular countries, and guaranteed women's rights even in the midst of Saddam's atrocities, is now under threat in the negotiation of the very constitution that many hoped would guarantee equality. Ironically, it is with the tacit agreement of millions of largely poorly educated Iraqi women.
The major Shia religious parties want to replace the secular civil law that now governs marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance with Sharia law. A draft of the constitution published earlier this month in the newspaper run by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq frames sexual equality specifically in terms of 'the provisions of Islamic Sharia' rather than Iraq's civil legal code. Even if, as has been suggested, the new constitution results in a parallel system where women can choose Sharia or the civil code, women's rights activists fear they may be forced by male relatives to choose a system that is not in their interests.
In a country where the most basic human rights - to life, freedom from intimidation, freedom from torture, a fair judicial process, and freedom of confession - are routinely abused, the issue of women's rights is low on the agenda, except for those who would proscribe them. Whatever happens over the next few days with the finalisation of a draft constitution, any nods it makes towards equality are likely to be vague, and are unlikely to improve the lot of most Iraqi women.
Sunday August 14, 2005
The Observer
Earlier this year I was in Iraq's second city, Basra, lunching with a group of Iraqi women professionals. It was the time of the elections, and the conversation turned to women's rights. Since the fall of Saddam, the women complained, their freedoms had gradually been eroded, not by official diktat but by groups of Shia radicals who had invaded hospitals, universities and schools, insisting that women wore headscarves and behaved as men saw fit.
It was a story I heard again and again across the once cosmopolitan city from middle-class professional women who told me they intended to vote for the secular list headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi for fear of what would happen if the 'religious' Shia list swept to a majority.
It was not to be. Allawi and the largely secular views he represented have lost out to a new sense of religiosity and resurgence of tribal authority that is on the march across Iraq south of Kurdistan.
Now women from Basra to Kirkuk are facing a renewed assault on their freedoms as Iraq's politicians squabble over a new constitution that will at best fudge women's rights, and at worst hugely undermine them, despite the guarantee of a quota for representation by women in Iraq's new parliament.
The principal of equality that existed in what was once one of the Middle East's most secular countries, and guaranteed women's rights even in the midst of Saddam's atrocities, is now under threat in the negotiation of the very constitution that many hoped would guarantee equality. Ironically, it is with the tacit agreement of millions of largely poorly educated Iraqi women.
The major Shia religious parties want to replace the secular civil law that now governs marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance with Sharia law. A draft of the constitution published earlier this month in the newspaper run by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq frames sexual equality specifically in terms of 'the provisions of Islamic Sharia' rather than Iraq's civil legal code. Even if, as has been suggested, the new constitution results in a parallel system where women can choose Sharia or the civil code, women's rights activists fear they may be forced by male relatives to choose a system that is not in their interests.
In a country where the most basic human rights - to life, freedom from intimidation, freedom from torture, a fair judicial process, and freedom of confession - are routinely abused, the issue of women's rights is low on the agenda, except for those who would proscribe them. Whatever happens over the next few days with the finalisation of a draft constitution, any nods it makes towards equality are likely to be vague, and are unlikely to improve the lot of most Iraqi women.
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