City Of Widows An Iraqi Womans Account Of War And Resistance – Haifa Zangana

Inside Iraq, the budget allocated to women’s NGOs amounted to several million US dollars. According to Paul Bremer, on June 30, 2004, on the eve of handing over sovereignty to Iyad Allawi’s8 interim government, Bremer had “allocated almost $750 million from the American and Iraqi budgets. Much of the program was meant to build the institutions and organizations that formed what we westerners call civil society.”9 Judy Van Rest explained to Allawi that “we are establishing these institutions all over Iraq .

. . our provincial offices [have] midwifed the birth of dozens of human rights centers, nongovernmental organizations, legal associations, even PTAs. We had funds to set up women’s centers in all eighteen provinces, nine in Baghdad alone.”10 In fact, this money was mainly spent on organizing conferences, mostly outside Iraq, and training selected women to be leaders on “democracy.”

According to a fact sheet issued by the US State Department’s Office of the Senior Coordinator for International Women’s Issues on June 22, 2005, “The United States allocated nearly half a billion dollars to support democracy-building programs in Iraq—including projects that specifically help women with democratic organization and advocacy.”11 Tracing the history of how some of these organizations came to be established will shed light on their role as civil-society organizations intended to be the “soft occupiers” in the aftermath of liberation.

On October 4, 2002, at a highly publicized official event called “The Unheard Voices of Iraqi Women,” held at the National Press Club in Washington DC, the audience was invited to listen to accounts of Saddam’s persecution of women as told by “seven Iraqi women of different regional, ethnic and religious backgrounds.”12 The event was sponsored by the International Alliance for Justice (IAJ), which has Congressional funding, and was attended by Safia Taleb al- Suhail, the IAJ advocacy director for the Middle East and Islamic world.

The panel also included Zakia Ismail Hakki, a lawyer and former president of the Kurdish Women’s Foundation, and Katrin Michael, a member of the Iraqi opposition in Washington, who lived through chemical attacks unleashed by Saddam Hussein on Iraq’s Kurdish population in June 1987. Katrin Michael, who joined the Iraqi Women’s League13 as a teenager and had lived in the United States since 1997, explained in an interview on December 12, 2002, only five months before the invasion, how the US administration had ignored Iraqi women’s rights.

Her goal was “to make the women of Iraq as visible to the American public as the women of Afghanistan were a year ago, when the Bush administration criticized the Taliban for its repressive attitude toward the country’s women and girls.”14 More importantly, she wanted to make the administration take note of the presence of women within the opposition.

I – The Transition to Modernity II – Invading Iraq III – Life Under Occupation IV – Resistance Afterword Notes Acknowledgements Copyright Page To the memory of A’beer Qassim Hamza al-Janaby, the fourteen- year-old girl who was gang-raped and set on fire by US troops in Mahmudiyah, twenty miles south of Baghdad, on March 12, 2006. Introduction This is a story written in exile, in the hopes that readers in the West will gain insight into a country they have impacted so fully and terribly.

Writing this book is also a personal history that includes my story of growing up in Baghdad: living through wars and periods of peace and prosperity; joining movements for social change and participating in armed struggle; and working for equality as a woman, an Iraqi, and as a citizen of the world. The US-UK catastrophic adventure has been shrouded by the old colonial phrase “liberators not conquerors,” and by the new imperial lie of “establishing democracy.” Both require the rewriting of Iraqi modern history, a process in which Iraqi people, women in particular, are often invisible or portrayed as victims.

I have written this book to challenge this neocolonial misrepresentation. I hope there is also substance here for readers already wary of propaganda. I have tried to address the prevailing stereotypes of our history, society, and culture, and some of the misconceptions about the people of the Middle East. This is also an attempt to clarify how Arab and Muslim women, particularly in Iraq, continue to shape our modern history in response to the devastating situation they find themselves in due to external and homegrown challenges.

It is a story of tremendous suffering and sacrifice, of courage and triumph, and also of hope and humanity. Iraqi women have been among the most liberated of their gender in the Middle East. They have a long history of political activism and social participation since the nineteenth century, having taken part in the struggle against colonial domination and in the fight for national unity, social justice, and legal equality throughout the twentieth century.

In fact, UNICEF reported in 1993, “Rarely do women in the Arab world enjoy as much power and support as they do in Iraq.” Nonetheless, as part of the misguided preparation for the US invasion of Iraq, Iraqi women had been selected to be the beacon of hope for all women in the Middle East. They were presented, along with the rest of our population, as needing to be liberated, despite the complex social history and systems in place in Iraq at the time.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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