Coral Wynter, Caracas
During the January World Social Forum, Medea, a spokesperson from the US women's organisation Women in Pink, asked that women organising International Women's Day events this year incorporate opposition to the war in Iraq as one of the central issues. She asked that women protest outside the US embassy or consulate in their city to declare: "Women say no to war".
Medea introduced Yenara Hammad from the Organisation of the Women of Iraq. They first met when Hammad was organising a demonstration of women in the same square in Baghdad where the world watched the statue of Saddam Hussein fall down following the US-led invasion of Iraq. Hammad was confronted by a US officer who asked if she had a permit for her demonstration. Hammad replied: "And where's your permit to be in my country?"
Hammad told the forum: "Iraqis are not victims who will just suffer and weep and cry because we are occupied [by a foreign army]. We will resist. Our resistance comes in many forms — one of them is the voice of women and the power of women. That day we had got together to raise our voices, outside the Green Zone, the most dangerous place in the world.
"The occupation is not working. It was planned in the name of liberation for Iraqi women and men, but what we have witnessed has been the total abolition of every previous achievement of our civil society. Women in Iraq were much better off [before the invasion]. We had a modern life. I was educated as an architect and I finished my Masters degree inside Iraq. I was paid a salary for studying. I don't know if students in the US can do that.
"Of course there was a bloody dictatorship [in Iraq]. But why keep us hungry with economic sanctions for 13 years so that we can't rise up against this dictatorship? [The US has] carried out two of the bloodiest wars in the modern history of the world. Some 150,000 were killed in the first [Gulf] war. In this one, I'm not sure of the figures, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say 200,000 by now. This is nothing less than genocide, and it is nothing less than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"We need your help to end the occupation. Because under this occupation there is no possibility that we can have a decent political system ... Although we are a women's group, our ideas are not Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish or Arab. All artificial ideas have been imposed on us by this administration."
Hammad explained that under rules imposed by Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq following the invasion, "we find out that ... we are not allowed any political affiliation. We have gone back to the dark ages and can only admit to our religious ideas. With this occupation of Iraq we have been forced into a very barbaric situation.
"We need your support, not only to end the occupation, but we need your support for the people of Iraq to be able to organise themselves and to have some political aspirations to build towards a future where we can be free, where we can enjoy equality and political choice. Women are now second-class citizens, as [enshrined] in the constitution. The constitution states that no article of law can be in contradiction to Islamic Sharia law, which makes us automatically second-class citizens. In Iraq, we used to enjoy the best family law in the Middle East.
"So is this liberation? No. It has to end right now, and it's from people like yourself that the pressure can begin. Help us to end one of the darkest periods in the history of modern Iraq."
From Green Left Weekly, March 8, 2006.
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