Room for a View

Collateral Damage:
The War Against Iraqi Women

by Vanessa Norton

In early January, a week before George W. Bush was selected as the 43rd US President, a group of 48 people, mostly from the US (also represented were Turkey, Greece, Canada, Japan, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Scotland), landed at Saddam International Airport in Baghdad. The Iraq Sanctions Challenge delegation, as named by the NYC-based International Action Center, was the fourth of it kind. This latest group, like those before them, was defying US/UN sanctions law which forbids American civilians from entering Iraq, bringing with them over $2 million worth of medicine. Among the 48 people was former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, as well as four residents of the Mid-Hudson Valley. Our foreign correspondent, Vanessa Norton, joined the delegation to investigate the effects of the US/UN sanctions on the lives of women in Iraq.

“Mankind’s welfare will be achieved when women’s well-being is achieved. The question that imposes itself: How could we achieve women’s well-being under a destructive and dangerous embargo whose consequences threaten the whole society, and women and children in particular?” —statement by the General Federation of Iraqi Women, 6/2000.

The airport in Baghdad was large, clean and barren. It stood as a proud testament to Iraq’s persistence for modernism, one of many such symbolic structures that creates today’s Baghdad. Eight-lane highways, modern apartment buildings, enormous bridges shooting across the Tigris all survive as a result of Saddam Hussein’s nationalistic policies to remodel the country with its oil revenues.

The Iraq Sanctions Challenge delegation was housed in one such structure—the Al-Rasheed Hotel—a five-star bastion of civility, with over five hundred employees and rooms and services as in any American-based hotel. (Unbeknownst to many delegates, the Iraqi government was footing the bill for housing and the enormous spread of food offered at every meal.) It didn’t take long, however, to experience the shaky underpinnings of presumed amenities. The tap water was undrinkable, one had to avoid all raw vegetables (they are washed in the water), and blackouts were frequent. Some delegates experienced broken bathroom fixtures. Part of a missile sits behind glass in the main lobby of the hotel, a reminder of the bombing the hotel received during the Gulf War.

On August 2, 1990, two years after the end of the Iran/Iraq War, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Four days later, the United States and United Nations imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. The UN Security Council, consisting permanently of US, Britain, China, Russia and France adopted Resolution 661, which determines what can be imported into Iraq. (Only permanent members have the power to veto any resolution and one veto from one of these countries can block a resolution.) Any foreign order for any and all goods must go through the Committee 661. They alone decide whether or not to approve any order. If approved, the goods order is passed on to the company (in whatever country) to which the order was placed.

Currently, there are tens of thousands of orders put on hold by Committee 661, presumably because they cannot decide whether to allow Iraq to have a certain material or supply, be it syringes (currently on hold) or refrigeration units (currently on hold). The criterion by which Committee 661 decides is the “dual-use” factor. Can the item in question be used for military purposes as well as its presumed civilian use?
In Iraq it is dangerous to drive at night because most cars do not have headlights. Half of the vehicles on the road have nearly-destroyed windshields. Iraq is prohibited to import car parts under UN Sanctions Resolution 661. The US/UN sanctions have had a drastic negative effect on Iraq’s economy, its ability to function as an industrializing nation, and its capacity to uphold the progressive steps it had made previous to the sanctions that ensured each Iraqi access to nutrition, medicine and education. Right now, there are systems set up in Iraq to run a modern, healthy, well-educated society, but they cannot operate under the current sanctions because the supplies that are needed to run and maintain these systems are missing. The sanctions forbid the importation of the technical parts necessary to replace broken or archaic ones (in pharmaceutical manufacturing, in hospitals, in water treatment). The sanctions also ban the importation of materials such as chlorine, which is necessary for water treatment.

A pharmaceutical manufacturing plant in Samarra, Salahuddin, a city approximately 100 kilometers north of Baghdad, cites the following orders currently on hold by Committee 661: blood bag production line; eye drop line; ointment production line; vial production line; oral drop production line; mixing vessel for preparation of eye drops; fully-automated deionized water plant; powder filling line; syrup filling line; variable high speed flow pump; fully automatic film coating unit machine. Some, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, have argued that these holds are not based on dual-use, but on arbitrary reasons that are detrimental to the survival of Iraqis. Due to broken equipment in the Samarra pharmaceutical plant, a plant which supplied a significant amount of the country’s medicines, few medications are being manufactured. Furthermore, the contamination rate is high because workers are mixing and packaging by hand due to broken mechanical parts (spare parts are banned under 661).

Specifically, for Iraqi women, the sanctions are devastating. They have pushed the question of gender equality so far on the back burner no one can see it. Although in periods of crises it may be typical to overlook ideas about social progression, in this case, the subsistence living has actually altered NGO-sponsored programs to enable Iraqi women to take advantage of their equality rights. Over the past 30 years, Iraq has made significant gains in women’s rights. In Iraq, this doesn’t happen without absolute approval of Saddam Hussein. Today, however, women have been pushed back into the private sphere more than ever, as they struggle to survive with a three-fold increase in infant mortality, unusable domestic implements and prices that they cannot afford due to exorbitant inflation.

Resonating with the United Nations statement that 1975–1985 be the “Decade of the Woman,” a declaration which reflected the existence of indigenous movements opposing patriarchal systems across the globe and confirmed the UN’s support of those movements, the years 1970 through 1990 marked a general, and at many points dramatic, increase in the standard of living for women of Iraq. When, in 1975, the first UN International Conference on Women took place in Mexico City, and stated its objectives of improving the status of women in terms of standard of living, equity of income, access to education, health care, and political freedom, Iraqi women had already been making great strides in these arenas.

In the Middle East, a region dominated by theocratic governments, secular Iraq was one of the most progressive countries in terms of women’s rights. Legislation ensuring equal rights for women on the job had been in place since the early 1980s, when many women began to enter the workplace. With the start of the Iran/Iraq war in 1980, many women entered professional fields such as science, engineering, university-level teaching and managerial positions, while many men were fighting in the conflict.

The changes in women’s status on a national level were drastic in terms of literacy during the years 1977-1990. According to UN figures, in 1977 the illiteracy rate among Iraqi women was 70.7 percent, and by 1990 illiteracy among women had dropped to 12 percent. This was due to a state-sponsored literacy program aimed at girls. Iraq opened teaching centers all over the country with the assistance of volunteers.
Today, Baghdad’s main university, Al-Moustanserya University, has an enrollment of just under 50 percent women. More rural universities may have a disproportionately higher enrollment of men, as Baghdad is, on the whole, more educated than most other areas of Iraq.

It is in secondary education where girls are missing, as their enrollment has gone down five percent since 1990. From the age of 12-17 is when it is most common for a family to keep a daughter home for domestic help. In the case of the sanctions, these girls are especially vulnerable because household tasks have become much more arduous and time-consuming due to the loss of their ability to repair broken appliances such as ovens, washing machines, dishwashers and sewing machines.
Iraq had also made great advances in infant and maternal mortality. According to UNICEF’s estimates on deaths of infants, the rate steadily declined from the year 1960 (117 deaths per 1,000 live births) to 1990 (40 deaths per 1,000 live births). Today the infant mortality rate is 110 deaths per every 1,000 live births, approximately what is was in the early 1970s, prior to much of Iraq’s industrialization and subsequent social service system. The high infant and children-under-five (130 deaths per 1,000) mortality rates in Iraq are due mostly to malnutrition and dysentery infection caused by ingestion of untreated water. Because much of the sewage system was severely damaged during the Gulf War, many parts of the country, especially the Southern region of Basrah, suffer from the co-mingling of raw sewage and the water supply. Many areas, including Basrah, which was heavily bombed during the Gulf War, exist on two hours of electricity a day, some with none at all. As can easily be imagined, this is detrimental to those in Basrah hospitals. Yet, even in Baghdad, it is common to see two children in the same bed, sharing one oxygen mask.

The need to cope on a daily basis with basic issues—infant and child death, loss of electricity and clean drinking water, constant sickness—has changed the direction of the state-sponsored woman’s movement. Discourse on the changing role of women has dissipated into a desperate struggle for survival.
“This embargo stands against the aims of the women’s international conferences which aimed at improving the status of women, enhancing her position in society and realizing equality with men,” asserted Dr. Amal Shlash, an Iraqi University professor who has, in conjunction with others, compiled a series of papers documenting the status of the Iraqi woman five years after the Beijing Conference, the most recent of the UN International Conferences on Women.

And in a presentation given to the Iraq Sanctions Challenge delegation at the headquarters of the General Federation of Iraqi Women (GFIW), Dr. Manal Younis Abdul Razaq, president of GFIW, asserted that Saddam is convinced of the women’s cause and his policies have reflected the idea of equality. In some cases, such as work laws, women actually have more rights than men. Razaq is referring to the fact that Iraqi female employees are more extensively protected in cases of family need than their male counterparts.

Yet the UN continues to impose sanctions on Iraq while sponsoring various documents declaring its absolute support of woman’s equality, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted in 1979. Other UN declarations contradicted by UN/US sanctions include the UN International Declaration of the Rights of the Child (adopted by UN General Assembly in 1989), which states that “the best interest of the child shall be a primary consideration” (Part 1, Article 3).
Since the imposition of US/UN sanctions in 1990, many women who once benefited from pro-equality work policies are being forced back into the private sphere because families cannot afford to buy basic necessities, such as food and clothing. With the ban on the many small parts used to repair household appliances, many women have been forced to return to full-time domestic work in the oldest fashion. Before women can consider working out of the home for extra money, they must first consider whether their family can afford it. For many Iraqi women, the answer is no. The sanctions undermined modern living to the extent that even educated women’s choice in career paths yield to the basic necessities of preparing food and repairing or making clothing.

Baking bread is time-consuming and had become almost obsolete, but many cannot afford to buy bread and women must make it the old-fashioned way. Same thing for making children’s clothes, mending and reusing old things. If the woman doesn’t do it, it will not get done, says Razaq.
The GFIW was formed in the early 1980s in order to progress the development of Iraqi women politically, economically and socially, yet the course of the organization has had to adjust to the siege-like circumstances of the sanctions. The Federation is the main voice of women on a number of life issues, including everything from reproductive health to marriage loans. The work undertaken by the GFIW 10 years ago was intentionally created to advance women’s understanding of their rights and of their bodies. Today the GFIW teaches survivalist skills such as advice on what’s profitable to sell (household goods), and how to keep children in school (rather than at work in the street or at home helping Mom). The original intent of the organization has nearly vanished; the cause is now general, humanitarian and absorbed by the material and emotional complexities of high infant death—a stunning three-fold increase since the implementation of sanctions.

The sanctions on Iraq continue to create a catastrophic situation for Iraqis causing the deaths of 1.8 million people and devastating one of the most inclusive public service systems in the world. In the past 10 years, according to UNICEF, Iraq has gone from near-developed nation status to acquiring notoriety as having the highest infant mortality rate in the world. Although the US and UK are becoming more and more isolated in their insistence on sanctions (UNICEF, The Red Cross, The Holy See, several UN agencies, and 17 governments are opposed to the sanctions), they occupy a dictatorial position within the United Nations, one which makes dissent within the UN merely symbolic.

It may be expected that it is women who manage the private sphere, and thus their management becomes imperiled when so much less is available in terms of the materials needed for basic survival. Women in universities are affected as well. UN Committee 661 forbids the importation of textbooks. Iraqi students, close to 50 percent of them female, waste several hours a week photocopying out-of-date textbooks.
The 800-year-old Moustanserya University is composed of a wide variety of colleges, including a medical school, an environmental institution, and arts, science, and language colleges, all awarding degrees through the Ph.D. level. The droves of women who entered the college over the past 20 years are walking on shaky ground: They are the last to enter and the first to leave if a family cannot afford to have a person not bringing in income or working on domestic necessities.

A 20-year-old (female) biology student at Moustanserya University in Baghdad stated, “We don’t have the necessary lab equipment to hold labs. It can’t be imported under the sanctions. We try to [make] do with very little supplies, but the women get less opportunity to use them. It just happens that way.”
But news seeps out—even to nations under forced isolation. Again and again when asked what the answer is to the situation of sanctions, every Iraqi person expressed a nearly-identical statement: Keep protesting the sanctions. What was surprising was the frequency with which Iraqis, lit up with excitement, mentioned the WTO protests in Seattle. When Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz addressed the delegation, he mentioned that the WTO protests “lifted the morale of people struggling to rid their countries of US domination around the world.” The protests illustrated a level of involvement with international issues of economic domination. Many Iraqis asked if there were any plans to protest the Bush inauguration.
The people of Iraq are coping with a living hell, but are strongly doing so. What other choice is there? As Dr. Razaq said, at the end of her presentation, in a small, but comfortable room, complete with the constant serving of tea and the ever-present enlargement of Saddam Hussein on the wall, “We are doing well. We are believers.”