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NEWS & LETTERS, OCTOBER 2003Woman as ReasonChallenge from Iraqi feministsby Anne Jaclard A radical Iraqi feminist organization has emerged from the ashes of Baghdad, presenting a challenge to women’s, anti-war and left movements around the globe, not only to support the Iraqi women, but also to exchange ideas about creating a different world. The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) was founded in June to stop post-war atrocities against women and to fight for women’s equality. By its very existence and in its writings, OWFI illuminates the internationalism of the concept of women’s liberation, and invites us to work out its meaning in a new way. OWFI’s Statement of Founding begins: “Women’s freedom is the measure of freedom and humanity in society. Not only in Iraq, where women endure the most severe types of discrimination and injustice, but also in the more developed countries in the world today, the realization of full equality among women and men still requires continuous struggle and serious and rapid steps. OWFI considers itself basically an indivisible part of the great, historic, and universal struggle for women’s liberation." 'HISTORY IS IN THE MAKING' The statement and OWFI’s newspaper can open up a dialogue about the politics of the here and now, and its relation to social transformation. This, even as feminism in Iraq is being attacked from all sides, and it is not even safe for women to leave the house! Fundamentalist groups are using the political vacuum created by the U.S. war to terrorize women, to force them to veil, to leave jobs and school, and are even raping and killing them. Yet one of the founders of OWFI, Yanar Mohammed (whose talk on International Women’s Day is excerpted in the July N&L), chose to launch the organization and its newspaper with the words, “History is in the making. My call to all our readers is: Support women in Iraq--do not feel sorry for them--give them support and solidarity. That is what they need in their challenge to change the grim future being prepared by America.” The Statement of Founding condemns all past, current and would-be future oppressors: the deposed “fascist Ba'ath regime” that legally deprived women of “even the trivial and limited rights and freedoms that men enjoyed”; then the U.S. sanctions that further impoverished women; and now “regressive political changes whether originating from the United States and their destructive wars or the nationalist and Islamist [fundamentalist] movements in Iraq.” OWFI publishes MOUSAWAT (EQUALITY) while its sister organization in London, the Iraqi Women’s Rights Coalition, publishes an English newspaper EQUAL RIGHTS NOW! It also runs women’s shelters and plans programs to help women develop job skills, provide legal services, obtain social insurance, and change the Constitution to give women equal rights and eliminate justification for “honor killings” (men killing women family members). It works with the Unemployed Union, which held large demonstrations in July, and with the Worker-Communist Party (no relation to the Communist Party of Iraq). TO THE U.S.: END RAPE AND KILLING OWFI initiated a petition campaign to demand that the U.S. occupiers “stop rape, abduction and killings of women.” You can sign on at http://www.ipetitions.com/campaigns/Women_in_Iraq. Now OWFI is under attack, not only from the U.S. and fundamentalists, but also from some of the so-called Left, because of demanding that the occupiers guarantee women safety, rather than demanding only that the U.S. get out. These feminists will not allow women to be excluded from the process of trying to realize a completely different way of life. We want to discuss with them, what alternatives are possible? How can we escape the pulls of capitalist and religious unfreedoms? Some claim to support feminism, yet avoid discussing how to transform society, and truncate the free flow of ideas by the dead end of advocating a “lesser evil”--whether that is considered to be the U.S. or the fundamentalists. Much of the Left around the world falls into such dead ends, some even to the point of making alliances with fundamentalists in the belief they represent the opposite of U.S. imperialism. Such Leftists forget the Iranian experience in 1979, when a genuine revolution against a fascist dictator was hijacked by religious fundamentalists. Some feminists are drawn to secular capitalist society as a “lesser evil” than religious domination. This posing of the question, as if the two were opposites, likewise means death for revolutionary movements. As the 2003–2004 Marxist-Humanist Perspectives discusses, such “lesser evilism” always concedes the idea of freedom to the powers that exist. We want instead to change the discussion to how to win the “great, historic, and universal struggle for women’s liberation.” To correspond with OWFI or make a donation, contact IWRC at iraqwrc@hotmail.com, or U.S. supporters at j4fasulo@yahoo.com or through N&L. |
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