Iraqi Women Before And After The 2003 Invasion
Interview With Prof Nadje Al-Ali Univ of London
June 19, 2015 "Information
Clearing House"
- Professor Nadje Al-Ali is a professor of
gender studies at SOAS, University of London. She has authored
several books and articles on the history and present state of
Iraqi women including
Iraqi Women: Untold Stories From 1948 to the Present and
What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq,
and was one of the editors of
We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War.
The Iraq War has given rise to a number of contradictory stories
about women in Iraq. One is that Iraqi women were liberated and
on the rise under Saddam, and then all that was reversed after
the 2003 invasion as religious parties gained control and
attempted to impose their views upon society. An opposing view
was that Iraq was a typical Arab Muslim country where women had
a secondary role, but then the Americans freed them from these
restrictions. To try to provide a clearer picture of what women
have gone through both before and after the fall of Saddam
Hussein is an interview with Prof. Al-Ali.
1. The Baath took power in Iraq in the 1968
coup. It had a modernizing vision for Iraq, which Saddam Hussein
partially implemented when he assumed control of the country.
Part of that was opening up opportunities for women. That
accelerated during the 1980s when many men were drawn into the
military for the Iran-Iraq War. What exactly was the Baathist
vision for women and what kind of policies did Saddam carry out
during the 1970s and 1980s?
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Iraqi women at
university in Iraq in the 1970s |
The Baath regime came to power in 1968, and
Saddam Hussein actually became president in 1979, so there was a
decade when he was vice president. The Baath Party’s ideology
initially was very secular, Arab socialist, and nationalist, and
I think very similar to other post-colonial secular leaders in
the region like Ataturk and also the Shah of Iran. In the 1950s
and 60s and 70s in many countries in the region there was a push
to modernize and an understanding that this process meant
pushing women into education and the labor force. This process
was sped up in the Iraqi context because of the economic
conditions. In the early 70s there was an oil crisis, and then
afterward oil prices shot up and so all the oil producing
countries had their economies boom. While some of the other
countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait dealt with this boom and
expanding economy by trying to bring in foreign laborers the
Iraqi government tried to mobilize its own human resources, 50%
of which was women. In the 70s there was a very strong push for
women’s education. Lots of schools were built, lots of
universities were built, lots of scholarships were made
available to women, also to study abroad to get M.A.’s and
PhD’s. There were systems in place that allowed women to have
families and children and work. For example childcare was free,
and transportation to work and school was free. Those were the
kinds of systems put in place that allowed women to have active
working lives. And when I say women I mean mainly the urban
women, although in the countryside there were also literacy
campaigns. There was also something called the General
Federation of Iraqi Women that was like the female branch of the
Baath Party, and it was responsible for implementing some of the
state’s modernizing policies. For instance, it had a big
campaign to raise awareness about health and hygiene, how to
feed children, and it also had a very successful literacy
campaign. At the end of the 70s Iraq actually received a prize
from UNESCO for being the country that managed to raise its
female literacy the quickest.
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Saddam posing with
Iraqi school girls in the 1970s |
You can speak about the ideology of the Baath,
which was secular and socialist in outlook with a centralized
state and wanting to modernize. In other ways it was just being
pragmatic. It was responding to the situation on the ground and
decided that it had human resources and it should take advantage
of them. Lots of Iraqi women, even those who were in opposition
to the regime and who might have suffered under the regime, who
I have talked to think with nostalgia about the 70s when there
was an expanding economy, social-economic rights, and the state
was quite generous. In my mind, it is not true that Saddam
Hussein and the Baath Party lasted so long just because they
brutally repressed the population. I think they also bought off
the expanding middle class. In terms of social-economic rights,
in terms of access to education, health care, having a house, a
freezer, a car, people could do quite well if they didn’t open
up their mouths. This was all in the 1970s
Than in the 1980s there was the Iran-Iraq War.
During that period things changed drastically. Lots of the state
funding, instead of channeling it into education, health care,
and child care, it got channeled into the military, and that’s
when things started to shift. But because it was such a long war
where thousands and thousands of men fought and died that also
meant that over a long period of time women started taking over
many of the roles that men initially played not only in terms of
different jobs in the labor force, but also in the state
bureaucracy and administration. So women became very visible in
the 80s.
There was also a shift in state ideology. It
wasn’t about the good Iraqi woman being the educated, working
woman like in the 70s, but in the 80s the good Iraqi woman
became the mother of future soldiers. At some point, Saddam
Hussein said that every good Iraqi woman should have five
children. The government made abortion illegal, contraception
illegal, and it gave very generous subsidies to baby foods, and
things like that.
2. In 1989 the Iran-Iraq War ended and there
was a demobilization of the military, and then shortly
afterwards Iraq invaded Kuwait and faced international
sanctions. How did those changes affect the status of women?
What really had a devastating affect upon Iraqi
women was not the Gulf War in 1991, but the 13 years of economic
sanctions. To my mind I feel that part of history should not be
forgotten. You can’t actually understand contemporary Iraq
without understanding the impact that the sanctions had on
society. Lots has been written and talked about the humanitarian
crisis that occurred during that period in terms of health care
and education. When it came to women it really triggered a shift
to greater social conservatism. That had different causes. One
was that when people are fighting and struggling over resources
and over jobs there is often a call for women to go back home
and look after the children. That happened in Iraq where in some
parts you had up to 70% unemployment. The state couldn’t afford
all these generous welfare policies anymore or pay salaries. A
large percentage of Iraqi women who had been in the public
sector were suddenly told the state couldn’t afford them to work
anymore, because they couldn’t pay for child care,
transportation, and salaries. The other thing was that by the
1990s there was a huge demographic imbalance between men and
women because more men had been killed in the Iran-Iraq War and
Saddam’s political persecution had driven more men to flee the
country. By the 90s there was 55-60% women, with many
female-headed households and many widows. Before there was an
extended family network that would support people, but by the
90s each nuclear family was just busy surviving.
One of the things that happened was that there
was an increase in prostitution. That was also partly pushed by
the regime and a class of nouveau rich and war profiteers who
made lots of money from smuggling. The big impact wasn’t that
suddenly there was so much more prostitution, but that there was
an awareness that there was more prostitution. Eventually the
regime crackdown on prostitution, because although it was
initially behind creating the market for it the regime got very
embarrassed when the Jordanian government complained about the
number of Iraqi women who came to Jordan to work as prostitutes.
Afterwards it was a matter of protecting the honor of the
nation, so Saddam’s son Uday brutally cracked down on a number
of prostitutes and pimps and publicly beheaded them. In the
aftermath there was a panic and lots of families became very
protective of their daughters, sisters, and wives. Lots of Iraqi
women told me that in previous decades, female students had been
able to go after school or university for coffee or ice cream
with their friends, but during the 90s, they weren’t able to do
that anymore. They had to dress much more conservatively.
Mobility became more difficult. The dress code became much more
constrained. Even more seriously polygamy increased during the
sanctions period. As families were struggling to survive some
families agreed to have their daughters get married to older men
who had more money as a kind of survival strategy.
This shift towards greater social conservatism in
the 90s is an important background in order to understand what
happened after 2003. Also, lots of people had left by 2003
including many secular, educated, and middle class people, and
this has had an impact on what’s going on today.
3. After the 2003 invasion the Coalition
Provisional Authority said that it attempted to make some
changes to the country that would empower women as part of
transforming the society. They set up a quota system for example
that reserved 25% of the seats in parliament for women. Do you
think the Americans were able to make any progress for women?
First we need to challenge the idea that the
United States installed the quota system. The quota system was
enshrined in the constitution and previously in the Transitional
Administrative Law despite objections from the CPA, particularly
Paul Bremer. In the spring of 2004 a delegation of Iraqi women’s
rights activists went to see Paul Bremer, and asked for 40%
representation in the parliament saying that women actually make
up the majority of the Iraqi population. They told him that
Iraqi women had played an important role in keeping the country
together during the dictatorship and the Iran-Iraq War, and now
women wanted a piece of the new Iraq. Bremer looked at them and
said “We don’t do quotas.” It was only due to intense lobbying
on behalf of Iraqi women’s rights activists and transnational
women’s solidarity by international organizations and media
coverage of this lobbying that the Transitional Administrative
Law and later the constitution included a compromise 25% of
seats quota for women in parliament. This was due to pressure
from Iraqis and international groups, not because the Americans
put it together.
Secondly, I personally think that a quota can be
a positive thing, but not in and of itself. If a quota is the
only thing there is then it is not doing that much to represent
women. What has happened in Iraq is that the 25% of parliament
who are women are to a large extent the wives, sisters, and
daughters of male politicians. They are also often very
conservative male politicians. One should say that it has
allowed some outspoken women into the parliament, but that is
just a small number. It’s also complicated because over a period
of time women who initially looked towards how the men were
voting before they put up their own hand started to develop
their own views and voices and sometimes work across religious
and ethnic lines with other women on some issues that are less
controversial like access to health care for example or
education.
On the other hand without the quota there
probably would be hardly any women in the parliament. If you
have conservative Islamist members of parliament you might as
well have some of them be women. But that doesn’t mean they
protect women’s rights, and we need to be clear about that.
Another thing to be said about the quota is that
it is not applied consistently. It is applied in parliament, but
not in the ministries or within any of the important committees
that decide things, so it is quite inconsistently applied. A
quota only really works if it is linked to other measures and
policies, so if it is just a quota and everything else is gender
blind then it is really only cosmetic.
4. There are many religious parties that run
the country such as the Dawa, the Islamic Supreme Council of
Iraq, the Sadrists, the Iraqi Islamic Party, etc. What kind of
impact have those parties had?
I think we need to distinguish between an Islamic
view, which many Iraqis were ready for because after all they
had experienced a brutal dictatorship for several decades, which
was secular. So as a reaction to that many people thought that a
more Islamic government would be the solution. I think that the
Islamist parties that have come to power post-2003 are not just
Islamists but sectarian. I hold the politicians who lived
outside of Iraq for a long time and were in the opposition
partly responsible for the increase in sectarianism. I don’t
think it’s right to say that sectarianism didn’t exist before
2003, and certainly Saddam Hussein played on sectarianism and he
did stir up sectarian sentiments, but these new political
parties helped by the CPA, which based the Iraqi Governing
Council on ethnic and sectarian divisions, and then the first
elections institutionalized sectarian politics. So it’s not only
Islamism, which is already problematic, but its
Islamist-sectarianism imposed from above. I think right now on
one hand many people are really fed up with the
Islamist-sectarian politicians, and on the other hand I think
sectarianism is really deep and engrained, much more so than it
was during the height of sectarian tensions in 2007.
Speaking more specifically about women clearly
they are getting it from both sides. On the one hand they have
now been exposed to a government that’s largely been based upon
Islamist politics, which is either ignoring issues related to
women or the laws around like the Personal Status Code, which is
a set of laws that governs divorce, marriage, and inheritance.
There is a strong push to create one that is a more conservative
interpretation of Sharia law as opposed to the one before that
has been in place since 1959. That one was also based upon
Sharia law, but it was a progressive reading. I think women are
now being used by the Islamist government to show that they are
different from the previous regime, which was secular. At the
same time, women are being used by insurgents and various
militia groups to show resistance to western imperialism. So
women are being crushed by both sides by these conservative
Islamist forces.
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Children heading to
school in Baghdad (NY Times) |
5. You talked about how woman had a lot more
opportunities in the 1970s and 80s, and how that changed during
the sanctions period. How about today because most U.N. reports
that talk about women in terms of schooling and work force
participation show very low numbers?
One big issue is security. Sending your children
to school in general is scary for many parents. For girls,
parents worry even more, especially in neighborhoods that are
not safe. There are threats in terms of kidnapping, forced
prostitution, and trafficking. Lots of young women are being
trafficked out of Iraq. Those kinds of risks and threats and
lack of security negatively impact young women’s education as
well as labor force participation, because parents worry about
sending their daughters out. Women do work, but there is a lot
of unemployment in Iraq generally so there is competition for
jobs. I have a lot of contacts in universities, and women work
there, but their opportunities are very limited.
6. Looking into the future Iraq is a country
that has a lot of potential. Do you see opportunities for women
opening up for them in the coming years?
Defintely. Iraqi women have been extremely
resourceful, creative and courageous over these past decades,
and they will continue to be so in the future. There is a very
active women’s movement across central and southern Iraq as well
as in Iraqi Kurdistan. Women are not only lobbing for more
equality and women’s rights, but they are also at the forefront
of the opposition against authoritarianism, sectarianism, and
corruption. I have been very impressed by some young women who
are determined to educate themselves and make a difference in
Iraq. However, I think that short-term, or even the next decade,
will be extremely tough for women as they are squeezed between
Islamists, corrupt politicians, a police and judiciary that is
not very sympathetic to women’s plights, such as various forms
of gender-based violence, mafia-type gangs and militia, as well
as a revival of conservative tribal leaders and practices.
Via Musings On Iraq -
http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/
