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NEWS & LETTERS, February - March 2007Women hanged in IraqEditor's note: Below we print excerpts of a talk given by Yanar Mohammed, the chair of The Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, to Radionation in December. * * * Iraqis are surprised that it is possible to take us back 1,000 years in time, to let go of our civilization, our modernity, and to have practices in our street that we have not seen before in the 20th century. These days, you go to the areas controlled by the Islamist militias who are in the government, and public executions of women have become a common thing in some of those main squares. We sent an activist because we heard two women were executed in predominantly Shi'ite parts of Baghdad. A third execution took place in front of him. He was walking in the street and, all of a sudden, he saw a young woman dragged out of her house by members of a Shi'ite militia. They flogged her in the middle of the street, and then they brought a wire and wound it around her neck. They kept on dragging her. He said she tried to resist by holding the wire so that she didn't suffocate. They went to the closest football field to hang her from the goalpost. They shot tens of bullets into her body with machine guns, although her brother came screaming that they should stop. In regular cases people do not interfere because of fear or because they don't know what is happening or assume that it has something to do with an "honor killing." I'm not saying that this should be allowed, but in this case her brother came after her and tried to stop them, so they decided to shoot him with her. Just imagine: these are the political groups who are ruling in Iraq under the blessings of the U.S. occupation. Some of these militias are members of the police force that go around in Baghdad and decide what we can and cannot do. Three women were killed in the same area in public executions by Islamist militias affiliated with the government. There is no guarantee that your life is yours to decide what to do with. They can take away your life for whatever reason. The more the troops stay, the more we have all sorts of fundamentalists, Islamists, terrorists, pouring on us from all over the globe in order to liberate their so-called holy land from the occupiers. If the U.S. troops were not there, why would these fundamentalists, terrorists be heading to Iraq and why would they stay? The metropolitan people of Iraq, 80% of the people of Iraq, did not care who was Shi’a, who was Sunni. But with the dawn of the occupation, I remember when we were taken sometimes to meetings, or to see somebody responsible in the green zone, the first question they asked me was whether I was a Sunni or a Shi’a. In the public sphere, 40% were women--hundreds of thousands of women who were economically independent and living a modern life. I had just finished my masters [degree]. You have almost five generations of educated women who nobody could beat easily. We were able to run for parliament and all political seats. This new so-called democracy has only taken away all our social status, all our economic privileges, and all our political aspirations for generations to come. The Hamilton-Baker report did not bring anything new. Speaking to an Islamic Republic to bring us the same inhumane situation of Iran into Iraq and the rest of the stuff that came into the report was idiotic and does not have any solution for us in Iraq. We are a women's group trying to get a big number of women around our campaign, Women Against Occupation, and we are working with the Workers Against Occupation and Students Against Occupation. Our secular alternative will have to start with ending the occupation and then working towards an egalitarian and secular era in Iraq. Our people's alternative will come from the women, the workers, the students and others who are joining us. The secular circle is growing but we need the people of the U.S. to support us. |
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