Equal Rights Still a Stretch in Iraq
by M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News
December 26, 2023

It can be a lonely struggle when you're just one of three women on Iraq's new governing council.

Some men avert their eyes when you talk. The leaders ignore your reports.

They wait until you're away, then rush through important votes. And they dismiss your indignant protests - if they listen at all.

Dr. Raja Khuzai is learning these things on the job, but the 57-year-old mother of seven says she has survived tougher, more solitary battles.

She flashes back to just before the first Persian Gulf War. As an obstetrician, she was installed in 1990 as the first female hospital director in Iraq, taking over a maternity hospital in Diwaniya. It wasn't long before the town was under siege.

After the U.S.-led coalition forced Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in early 1991, there was a short-lived rebellion against Saddam Hussein's Baath Party regime in Diwaniya. Saddam sent the Republican Guard to quash it.

The town was bombarded, and the hospital was caught in a war zone.

Khuzai was the only doctor left standing at the hospital. With no electricity and the anesthetist incapacitated, she had to work solo taking care of a flood of women in labor.

"I did 22 Caesarean sections by candlelight," Khuzai said in a telephone interview. "I wasn't thinking. It just comes from the heart. I have to save my patients."

There's a big difference between that solo struggle in 1991 and her current work challenging traditionalists on the male-dominated Iraq Governing Council, she said.

"At that time, I was alone in the theater," she said of 1991. "Now we are many."

Since she was installed on the 25-member council in the spring, Khuzai has emerged as one of the most outspoken and most closely watched female figures in the new Iraq. But she says she wouldn't be as confident or defiant if not for an hourlong, closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill in November.

She and fellow governing-council member Songul Chapouk led a delegation of Iraqi women to Washington, D.C., meeting with President Bush and scores of top U.S. officials. Their message was simple: If Iraq is going to be reborn as a true democracy, women must play an equal part.

They were encouraged everywhere they went, and Khuzai said her life was changed by a meeting with a bipartisan group of congressional women, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rep. Diana DeGette of Denver.

The congresswomen spoke from their own experiences in being "outmanned" in the U.S. Congress: "Don't be furious when you see men putting you off. Let them hear your voice. Stay brave," DeGette said.

"They encouraged me so much. I am a different person because of them," Khuzai said. "I feel I am more brave than when I went to Washington."

Although Khuzai is optimistic about the prospects for women's rights in the new Iraq, other Iraqi women, members of Congress and international civil rights groups see troubling signs.

The biggest fear is that the fall of Saddam's secular government has emboldened long-oppressed Shiite minorities and could give rise to Islamic extremists who view women as second-class citizens.

'Wrong traditions'

Salwa Ali, an adviser on human rights issues for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, said she was horrified this summer when she tried to participate in local elections in Baghdad but found her neighborhood plastered with fliers telling women they weren't allowed.

She confronted men at the school where the election was taking place.

"The men there told me that I don't have to worry and they will take care of the women's concerns in that area," Ali said in an e-mail interview.

"Wrong traditions and wrong interpretation of Islam are used to fight and prevent women from participating more in public life. Iraqi men feel that family is their responsibility, especially the economic part. They simply don't want any women competing with them for jobs."

Saddam's regime was known for its brutality across the board, but his government did allow Iraqi women to become among the best-educated women in the Middle East, pursue careers as doctors, lawyers and other professionals, and to vote in the nominal elections.

"Women in Iraq have been educated and have been holding an important role in society," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who has visited Iraq and sponsored a congressional resolution pledging support for Iraqi women. "It would be a tragedy beyond words if they lost the gains they had . . . under a secular government."

"(Saddam's) human rights record to everyone was brutal," said DeGette, D-Colorado. "I would think that if it's done right, human rights for everyone could improve. The risk is that if Iraq is taken over by Islamic extremists, the situation for women could be much worse."

Tough all over

The women's rights issue is being fought on many fronts in Iraq, where observers say the Coalition Provisional Authority faces the dilemma between imposing civil rights guarantees and granting Iraqis the autonomy to decide issues for themselves.

Some international women's rights groups are encouraged by an aggressive effort to create a network of women's centers where Iraqi women can tap into services such as education and health care and learn the skills they will need to participate in the new democracy.

But some say those efforts could be pointless if women are systematically excluded in the new Iraqi government and the constitution that will take shape next year.

Khuzai and Chapouk loudly protested when the council named 25 people to serve on a committee to draft a constitution and not one woman was included. They protested again when the council named only one woman to head a government agency, public works minister Nisrin Barwari. They have now focused their efforts on having women become deputy ministers.

Some groups want U.S. Ambassador Paul Bremer, who heads the Coalition Provisional Authority, to take a more active role and impose quotas guaranteeing female representation, at least until the budding democracy gets off the ground. The concept has been used in Uganda, India and elsewhere.

"They told me that in the absence of such requirements, they will be left out," Clinton said in an interview. "I'm not going to substitute my judgment for theirs."

Clinton said she heard from an Iraqi woman who was shunned after being appointed to be a judge in Mosul. "Male judges and other leaders refused to acknowledge her as a judge," Clinton said.

"She was as qualified as her male counterparts. She was summarily rebuffed."

Clinton said the latest sign of the women's uphill struggle came in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that led to the appointment of a replacement for Akila Hashimi, one of the original female members of the governing council.

Hashimi, 50, was a controversial member from the start. Not only was she a champion of women's rights, but she was a former Iraqi diplomat and member of Saddam's Baath Party. Accompanied by bodyguards, she was being driven to her office in Baghdad in September when she was shot by a gunman. She died a few days later.

Her post remained unfilled for months, leaving the council with just two women and 22 men. Although the Americans had appointed the original members of the council, Bremer left it to the council to pick the replacement, much to Clinton's chagrin.

Khuzai and Chapouk wanted to bring in a replacement who would pick up where Hashimi left off, advocating for women's rights. But as soon as the two of them had left for a World Bank conference in Jordan on advancing women's rights, the all-male council rushed through a vote to appoint a different woman, Salama Khufaji, a Shiite professor of dentistry from Baghdad University. Clinton described Khufaji as an "ultra-conservative," and women's rights advocates are hardly celebrating now that the council's female contingent is back up to full strength.

"Why would they let that happen unless they've kind of thrown in the towel on women's rights?" Clinton said.

"It was clearly a railroading," said Swanee Hunt, a former U.S. ambassador who chairs the initiative Inclusive Security: Women Waging Peace.

Last week, Hunt met with top Coalition Provisional Authorities, delivering letters of protest from Khuzai and Chapouk and asking that the Americans take a more active role in safeguarding women's rights.

"You have a clash of values," Hunt said. "On the one hand, you have the very important value of self-determination. On the other, you have protection of human rights. It's a classic clash. (Bremer) has the unenviable responsibility of figuring out how far he goes in one direction at the expense of another. But it's not OK to simply abdicate human rights in the name of self-determination."

But it could be worse

Through it all, however, Khuzai has remained hopeful, believing that things were so much worse under Saddam - for women, for men, for everyone.

She tells the story of her brother, Dhahir, who was 21 years old when he disappeared in 1983. She says her brother had been talking with his "dearest friend," who was making critical comments about the Baath Party. That friend turned out to be an undercover intelligence agent. Dhahir disappeared.

Three months later, a soldier came to Khuzai and said her brother was sick, in a hospital in another town. She and her husband, a surgeon, rushed to the hospital but didn't find him in the registry. They checked the morgue and found him there with a rope around his neck.

Officials gave her strict instructions not to tell anyone about his death.

They held a secret burial in the middle of the night, and she reported to work the next morning. She never spoke out about it, never told friends, and didn't even tell her own children until after Saddam was gone.

She's determined not to stay quiet anymore.

This summer, amid all the talk that fundamentalists were opposed to women's rights, she went against the advice of men on the governing council and sought a meeting with Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al Sistani, considered the most influential cleric in Iraq.

"I told him, 'Now that I'm in this position, what do you think about me being a woman?' "

"He said, 'Congratulations and God bless you.' He said that a woman can do anything like a man if she is a powerful woman, if she is educated, if she is brave."

She takes him at his word, so brave is what she's trying to be.

Copyright 2004, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.

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