The Hindu Business Line : The continuing `collateral damage' in Iraq

On the fourth anniversary of Iraq's occupation by American forces, RASHEEDA BHAGAT takes stock of the situation on the ground. Only to find the circumstances have worsened for the people, in general, and women, in particular, as they face violence from the occupying force and the Iraqi militia alike. Does Iran, which has defiantly proclaimed it is `joining the nuclear club', face a similar future?

In October 2003, when one had visited Baghdad and the holy Shia cities of Karbala and Najaf, the occupation of Iraq by the allied forces was only seven months old. Several Shias were still recounting the atrocities against them by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and though happy that their country had been rid of the dictator, were reluctant to express gratitude to the US and its allies for the "liberation".

The occupying forces did all they could to make visible their presence on the streets of these cities and under the guise of searching for "terrorists" had made the lives of ordinary citizens difficult and traumatic, whether queuing up to get the petrol that was being shipped out of the country through mile-long oil convoys headed for the Um Qasar port near Basra, or for accessing the most basic health care.

Already it was a free-for-all on Baghdad streets, but at least the armed gangs waited for night to fall before emerging to terrorise the ordinary people. Anyway, at dusk most people kept off the streets and the odd unwary person fell a victim.

But despite the barricaded roads, shortages, and uncertainty about the future, as the Coalition Provisional Authority led by Paul Bremer kept up the façade of finding a group of pro-American Iraqis, who had lived outside Iraq for decades and had no clue of the ground realities in their country, to set up an "Iraqi administration", most still believed that the occupiers would get out within a year.

Incentives to stay on

"If they don't leave on their own, we will drive them out," a taxi driver who was driving me from Karbala to Baghdad had said with much bravado. Of course, one realised that he was living in a fool's paradise if he thought the occupying forces were going to leave his country so soon; Iraq's oil reserves and its strategic location were certainly incentives enough for the world's only super-power not to leave it in a hurry.

As hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shias demonstrated in the holy city of Najaf on Monday to mark the fourth anniversary of the occupation, waving Iraqi flags and demanding that the US-led troops leave their country, one was reminded of the naivete of people like the taxi driver. The protesters were out on the streets in response to an appeal by the fiery Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr, who has declared the American troops Iraq's "arch enemy". He has been in hiding and has not been seen for some time, but his "Mehdi army" is dreaded both by the Iraqis and the Americans, who consider it the biggest threat against peace and stability returning to the battered country.

Never mind who shattered this peace and stability in the first place.

Now let us look at the `collateral damage', a favourite American term after the attack on Iraq in March 2003, but not heard for some time now, as more and more American people look at the Iraq war as a botched campaign. In four years of occupation about 3,400 coalition forces have been killed. And what about Iraqi civilians?

The BBC web site has this take on this vital question: "US forces do not keep complete records of civilians killed in the conflict. Nor does the Iraqi government have a precise figure, although estimates from the Health Ministry in November 2006 ranged from 100,000 to 150,000 dead. But a survey of Iraqi households published by the Lancet suggested that about 655,000 Iraqi deaths had occurred `as a consequence of the war', by July 2006."

But while counting the dead or listening to the woes of Iraq, have you wondered how almost all the voices heard are those of men? What is happening to the women in Iraq?

Iraqi women's plight

In October 2003, the women this correspondent spoke to, even while continuing to wear Western clothes, had begun to cover their heads with a scarf. Most of them were working women and knew that their freedom to dress as they wanted and the independence to work in offices would be shortlived as a Shia Iraqi administration was in the process of taking over the governance of Iraq. Use of black burqas, they had pointed out, was on the increase and women's status was bound to take a beating.

That is exactly what is happening on the gender front in Iraq, where almost 11 per cent of households are headed by women today. In smaller towns, women can no longer dress as they did under the Saddam regime and there are areas where women would have to pay with their lives the price of wearing lipstick.

Reminds one of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but there too the US-led "war on terror" has done little to improve the status of women who were terrorised by the Talibs. If anything, the Taliban is being invited to join the Hamid Karzai administration.

To get a first-hand account of what is happening to the women in Iraq, one looked at the blog titled `Baghdad Burning' being meticulously maintained by a young Iraqi woman, an IT professional, through the occupation of Iraq. She calls herself `Riverbend' and her last entry, on February 20, 2007, says, "It takes a lot to get the energy and resolution to blog lately. I guess it's mainly because just thinking about the state of Iraq leaves me drained and depressed. But I had to write tonight."

She had to do that because flipping through TV channels she found that while, on one, Oprah Winfrey was advising American women how not to over-shop and to get out of debt, "Sabrine Al-Janabi, a young Iraqi woman, was on Al Jazeera telling how Iraqi security forces abducted her from her home and raped her. You can only see her eyes, her voice is hoarse and it keeps breaking as she speaks. In the end she tells the reporter that she can't talk about it anymore and she covers her eyes with shame.

"She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever. Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but this is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name. Hearing her tell her story physically makes my heart ache. Some people will call her a liar. Others (including pro-war Iraqis) will call her a prostitute — shame on you in advance."

To the Western world Sabrine would be just another "subtitle you read on CNN or BBC or Arabiya: `13 insurgents captured by Iraqi security forces.' The men who raped her are those same security forces George Bush and Condi are so proud of... the ones the Americans trained," says the blogger.

Filled with rage, Riverbend says that a Western audience would feel "pity and maybe some anger" at Sabrine's plight; after all she's not a girl "in jeans and a T-shirt so there will only be a vague sort of sympathy. Poor Third World countries — that is what their womenfolk tolerate. Just know that we never had to tolerate this before. There was a time when Iraqis were safe in the streets. That time is long gone."

The chilling reality is that Iraqis are no longer safe in their own homes and this woman was probably one of hundreds of "Iraqi women who are violated in their own homes and in Iraqi prisons. She looks like cousins I have. She looks like friends. She looks like a neighbour I sometimes used to pause to gossip with in the street. Every Iraqi who looks at her will see a cousin, a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt... " This then is what Iraq's liberation has done to its men and women. But is this the end of the saga when it comes to the troubled region? Quite unlikely.

Iran next?

The American posturing against Iran, the almost-daily dose of threats from the US to the government in Teheran on its nuclear ambitions, and the increasing defiance of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who proclaimed on Monday that his country had "joined the nuclear club of nations" with the capability of producing industrial grade uranium, forecast war clouds gathering again over this troubled region.

The sudden release by Iran of the captured British sailors has diffused the situation a bit and given the rest of the world some breathing time, but who knows if the next flashpoint will not erupt in a huge explosion? If it does and oil prices explode, as they are bound to, and the whole world becomes that much more a dangerous place to live in, all of us will have to brace up for the `collateral damage'.

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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