The Daily Star – Politics – Iraqi women try to stay the course after an advocate’s killing By Annia Ciezadlo
KARBALA, IRAQ: Those in public roles often face death threats, assassination attempts. ‘We are all targets,’ says an outspoken feminist. ‘There are many activists, but they cannot speak out boldly against political Islam.’
For their new women’s center, the women of Karbala chose the name of a warrior: Zainab al-Hawraa. Sister of the Shiite martyr Imam Hussein, Zainab fought alongside him in 680 AD, saving his young son and his legacy for future generations.
When Fern Holland heard the story, she laughed and told the women, ”We want all Iraqi women to be just like her.”
Holland, a young lawyer from Oklahoma, was women’s rights coordinator of Iraq’s Shiite heartland for the Coalition Provisional Authority. She helped write the portion of the new constitution addressing women’s rights. To the women in Karbala, she was ”just like a sister.”
On March 9, after visiting the center, Holland and her deputy, Salwa Ourmashi, and coalition press officer Robert Zangas were killed, their car forced off the road and machine gunned. Investigators arrested six suspects, four with valid Iraqi police ID.
Coalition officials hesitate to conclude if the three civilians were targeted for promoting women’s rights….
Over the past few months, Iraqi women in public roles, especially those who work with the US or promote women’s rights, have been targets of death threats and assassination attempts. Many large international aid groups, including most of those with women’s programs, have already withdrawn international staff, and the few remaining women’s groups fear they will be next. …
[E]ven devout women who wear the veil aren’t safe: Raja Habib Khuzai, a Shiite member of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, received threats after opposing a measure that would have replaced Iraq’s civil personal status laws with Sharia law. …
Under Saddam Hussein, women enjoyed civil protections relatively advanced for the Arab world, a legacy of the pre-Baathist monarchy. But after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Hussein began courting Islamic hard-liners, segregating schools and decriminalizing polygamy and ”honor killings.”
After the 1991 Gulf War, women in Iraq’s Kurdish-controlled north passed laws protecting their rights, including one outlawing honor killings. But elsewhere, Saddam’s regimed clamped down on women, especially in the south, where Saddam executed tens of thousands of Shiites.
Today, women make up about two-thirds of southern Iraq’s population. Yet they are largely absent from public life.