The Committee to Defend Women’s Rights in the Middle East offers this commentary from Yanar Mohammed of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI):
Yanar Mohammed: Condemn a constitution of de-humanizing women
An era of post-occupation atrocities unfolded to disclose the final chapter of human rights abuse in Iraq: A constitution of legalizing women’s discrimination.The constitution draft which was circulated secretly eliminated the minimal rights women had under the previous 1959 “Personal Status Law”. Although this law was partly based on Islamic Sharia, it included much reform that secured minimal standards of human rights for women, such as preventing marriage for female children and making polygamy more difficult for men — a practice that is allowed under Sharia in addition to beatings, stoning, flogging and forced veiling.
The draft constitution indicates in its article 14 the elimination of the current law and refers family laws completely to Islamic Sharia and to other religions in Iraq. In other words, it leaves women vulnerable to all inequalities and social hostility in addition to designating females as second rate citizens or semi-humans.
Since the beginning of the occupation, the US administration has recognized Iraqis according to their ethnic/nationalist and religious identities. This predetermined polarization of the society around its most reactionary forces has resulted with a most lethal weapon which is a government of division and inequality – a potential timed bomb for a civil war that has already started. Furthermore, the only mutual agenda for the parties in power is one of oppression, bigotry and misogyny in addition to representing the US occupation interests.
The enemies of the people seated in the panel of writing the constitution have decided to give life to resolution 137 [the defeated shariah measure proposed for the interim constitution]. This resolution isolates Iraqis from the modern world and turns Iraq into an Afghanistan under Taliban where oppression and discrimination of women is institutionalized under Sharia.
We have witnessed [many] kinds of atrocities under this occupation. The time comes for the US occupation to leave an unprecedented hallmark of abusing human rights by forcing a constitution that turns 13 million women into semi-humans.
We need your support in rejecting a constitution that gives way to decades of silent massacres against women.
Let the freedom loving people of the US know what is being committed in their name and in the name of democracy.
Write open letters to the US administration, to its allies, and especially to the UN. Remind them that women’s rights cannot be the price for a hideous democracy of racism, ethnicity, religiosity, sectarianism and misogyny.
Help us find a way out of the never ending attack on our freedoms and lives.
Yanar Mohammed
Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq
23 July 2005
See WW4 REPORT’s interview with Yanar Mohammed, and our last posts on the Iraq war and the status of women.
Who are the people’s enemies?
Yanar Mohammed makes reference to the “The enemies of the people seated in the panel of writing the constitution” with the confidence that any leader who doesn’t agree with her own concepts of just government must be illegitimate. However, no observer that I am aware of disputes that the Iraqi Alliance which won those election was the choice of a majority of Iraqis – indeed, many suggest that the U.S. manipulated the voting results to reduce its margin of victory. It seems to me that the real “enemies of the people” are those who refuse to accept the results of the election simply because he or she does not agree with the policies of the winners.