WOMEN’S WAR DAILY #2
FOR WOMEN ONLY:
The Rape Movement in Iraq & Men's Anti-War Politics
by Butch Lee
Sister, this discussion is just on time. Because these new men's wars
of the 21st century are just starting up. They are different because they
take place within the stage of a greater war, the worldwide war against women
and children. Increasingly, women are drawn into wars not only meant to reverse
our rising but wars that are over which class of men shall own us and how?
Rape wars. For war now is above all about gender.
What is the difference now? Women & children have
always been property veiled or unveiled since the rise of patriarchy. But
men's world is being restructured now, including all the property. If capitalistic
men can clash about whether to clearcut or bank their remaining forests,
you can bet that they're going to clash over their most important property--women
& children. Globalization has forced this. Like, the Bush empire wants
to forcibly modernize the Muslim world so it can be safely integrated into
Manhattan and Israel and Germany. So who's going to be in control of running
& executing women property? Is it to be each man or maybe religious cults
or a State? Who's going to control reproduction, define marriage, push the
brake or the accelerator on population? UN troops and international bureaucrats
for corporate interests? And women are rising, making moves, fighting for
survival. One thing for sure, no one's going to come out of this where they
started.
This isn't like the guerrilla wars of the last generation
by national liberation movements in Vietnams and Cubas. That was then, this
is now. Wars of globalization are primarily between different tribes of capitalistic
men. These insurgents like in Iraq aren't against Mercedes-Benz or Boeing.
They aren't against IBM or Shell. They are killing for their own slice of
the capitalist life. To own their own women & territories & markets
& cultures (four names for the same thing). Which is why these conflicts
are a confusing mix of old and new, feudalistic and post-modern.
Rape is the visible tip of that iceberg, the political
terrorism that marks women as the property of any and all men (just as marriage
marks women as the property of an individual man or male family). The massive
waves of rape and other gender terrorism against Iraqi women have been occasionally
mentioned as an unfortunate side effect or collateral damage in the war over
the u.s. occupation. i say that it is the other way around.
This is a mark of men's new wars of the 21st century.
In their March 7th report on mass atrocities in the Congolese civil war,
Human Rights Watch says that new parameters are being established. "Something
we are increasingly seeing in conflict zones, in wars, is that rape is being
used as a weapon of war," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher
on the Demcratic Republic of the Congo for Human Rigjhts Watch. "This isn't
just soldiers on occasion wanting a bit of sex. This is becoming part of
the conduct of war."
Just as women have no bizniss in the u.s. army, we have
no bizniss in men's Anti-War movements. i wanna say to all these young
grrrls trying to solve their paycheck problems by signing up to be boots
in Iraq, you have no bizniss in these institutions where men are fighting
it out to the death with other men. Same message for these young grrrls trying
to solve their alienation problems by volunteering to be embedded in men's
Anti-War movements. Grrrl, you don't have to look 10,000 miles away to Iraq
to find a war to fight. You got your own war at home. Women are our own side.
We don't need to support the Mahdi's Militia or the Dick National Guard,
when we need to be starting women's insurgencies of our own. It's one way
or the other, you know. For war now is above all about gender. Because women's
bodies are also the territory that all war is being fought on.
But men's Anti-War movements just can't get it. Because
to them the biggest war of all is the one war they don't want to oppose.
As long as any Iraqi men of one faction or another end up with the Big Power
in Iraq, then men's Anti-War movements are satisfied. And us? From women's
viewpoint, what sense is it to help the Iraqi islamic-fascists into power
who will 100% kill and enslave women--just so you can say that you helped
defeat the u.s. war machine, which is also killing and enslaving women? Yet
this is exactly what "anti-imperialist" men are cheerfully doing. And proud
as a shiny new penny about their moral superiority, too.
Some "anti-imperialist" voices, not content with agitating
for a u.s. withdrawal as the sole political issue for women, are telling
us to support the leftover Baath Party regime thugs or the islamic-fascists
as the heroic role models for the new 21st century. Such as Naomi Klein's
thinking-just-like-men article in the socialist Nation magazine, which used
the catchy title "Bring Najaf to New York" ( "W" and his christian-fascist
friends are already doing that, thank you. No need to doubleup on the religious
fundamentalist gangbang that is already under way in amerikkka).
Jumping off the political cliff in her desperation to
find some manly men to punch George W. in the nose for her, Klein wrote:"Muqtada
al-Sadr and his followers are not just another group of generic terrorists
out to kill Americans; their opposition to the occupation represents the
overwhelmingly mainstream sentiment in Iraq." That's not only untrue but
ridiculously untrue. But when Naomi Klein says these clerical-fascists represent
the "the overwhelming mainstream sentiment" that's a revealing slip of slave
conditioning--since she really means mainsteam male sentiment. The number
of women in Iraq who want a new ayotollah or taliban to conduct men's terrorism
in their neighborhood and rule over them is nothing like any majority. Our
Iraqi sisters are only occupied by men with guns, they're not crazy.
Same with the even more tragic case of Arundhati Roy,
the young Indian novelist who has become a world moral figure for so brilliantly
opposing the Hindu fascist BJP movement that vaulted into power using genocidal
pogroms against Muslims. But in Iraq, Roy switches sides and writes: "The
Iraqi resistance is fighting on the front lines of the battle against Empire.
And therefore that battle is our battle..." In India she rightfully fights
the clerical-fascist Hindu movement, which among other things would even
further reduce Indian women and which freely practices rape, torture and
mass murder. But for Iraq she applauds the same type of clerical-fascist
movement because on the way to reenslaving Iraq women its men are hitting
heads with the u.s. Marines in the NFL. Grrlfriend, if the Hindu fascists
suddenly became more anti-Washington (they love patriarchal capitalism but
are not enthusiastic about Christian amerikkka), would you change your mind
and embrace your own rapists? Do you see how hopeless this whole dimension
of men's patriarchal politics is for women?
Or the leftist Asia Times, whose male Middle East correspondent
went on and on likening the fighting in Fallujah to martyred Guernica, the
Spanish village that was wiped out by Nazi attack during the 1937 Spanish
Civil War. That comparison would make the clerical-fascist fighters in Fallujah
like the 1930s democratic and socialist and anarchist soldiers who were fighting
fascist aggression in Spain. So under this new kind of amoral men's "anti-imperialism",
the neo-fascists are supposed to be the same as the real anti-fascists. And
they say that women don't understand politics! What's really true is
that they're afraid that we are starting to understand men's politics all
too well. It really is time to leave Dick behind.
The Anti-War movement has without debate accepted the
marginalization of Iraqi women and gone along with the coverup of the war
against them. Which means that inescapably it has also gone along with the
coverup of the sex crimes by u.s. troops against Iraqi women & children
that the Pentagon itself has overseen.
Nothing shows the degeneration of men's Anti-War politics
clearer than this.
Let's recognize that women need, as a life and death
matter, a foreign policy and a political-military worldview of our own. From
us, by us, for us. Does that sound insane or impossible? Why can't half the
human race have its own strategy, its own agenda, and its own power to carry
these out? It would be more ridiculous to say that half the human race couldn't
have its own politics.
So this is real politics, and it is underhanded and tricky
and complex. We can hear so much about the rape movement in Iraq because
it's the policy of not just the u.s. government but Western capitalism to
let us know about that. Just like the u.s. media is always glad to tell us
about Saddam's crimes against women. Doesn't mean that it isn't true, it
just means that under patriarchal capitalism every piece of news is
spun for the sponsor.
It's down in the sleazy character of amerikkkan imperialism
to always justify their macho conquests as rescuing helpless women vics.
They used that lie when they stole Indian lands. They used that lie when
they started lynching Black women & children & men. Now they're using
it to make their atrocities in the Muslim world look all Clint Eastwood.
(That's why the big u.s. army heroine of the Iraq invasion was a skinny white
sister from West Virginia who never fired a shot and was said to be sexually
assaulted but can't remember a thing about the many Arab people who saved
her life). What i'm saying is that the white men in suits got a rape script.
They all got a line on rape, and everyone's been rehearsed on rape like the
boys choir. And it's lies. Listen to them sing:
"The Iraqi people are free now. And they do not have to
worry about...their wives being taken to rape rooms. Those days are over."
Paul Bremer, Chief U.S.Mafia Leader in Iraq (notice the unconscious patriarchal
possessive in his language--"Iraqi people" are men, while women are only
"their wives"). 9/2/03
"We know about the mass graves and the rape rooms..."
Scott McClellan, White House Minister of Propaganda. 12/10/03
"Every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms
and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed." George W. Bush,
Klan Chief of White Men. 3/12/04
"There's still remnants of that regime that would like
to take it back. They could torture people and have rape rooms...But they
can't do that anymore." Donald Rumsfeld, Minister of Aggression. 3/16/04
"There are no more rape rooms and torture chambers in
Iraq." Condoleezza Rice, Chief White House Just-Like-Men. 3/19/04
"Iraq is free of rape rooms." George Bush II, Temporary
King of Iraq. 10/8/04
As my favorite playwright, Bertina Brecht*, said, "When the leaders talk of
peace, the people know the war has already begun." When the suits talk
now about rescuing women, sisters should know that mass rapes have already
started. Go to the u.s. women closest to the scene of the crime--the tens
of thousands of servicewomen in khaki and desert camouflage. There they are,
with M-16s in hand, in combat boots, young and fit, been through the world's
most expensive patriarchal capitalist boot camp. Are they protecting Iraqi
women and children from terrorism and rape? No way. Because they're the first
line of vics themselves. They're who gets raped first in the warmup before
GI rapists even get to the iraqi women and children. How can they protect
Iraqi women and children if they can't protect themselves? They're the make-believe
"Amazons", who painfully prove the world of difference between real Amazons
and naive just-like-men GI Janes. Bear with me, we're going at this from
a different direction.
Irene Weiser writes about the results of an official u.s.
study, which found 112 reported rapes of servicewomen by their fellow
GIs in Iraq and Afghanistan in eighteen months of 2002-2003:
"The U.S. serviceman waited outside the latrine and hit
the woman on the back of the head as she exited, knocking her unconscious.
He tied her hands with cord, blindfolded her, cut her clothes off with a
knife, stuffed her underwear in her mouth and proceeded to rape her...When
she came to she was transported to another facility where she was interrogated
for three hours. She received no medical treatment for her head injuries...Prosecution
of these crimes is delayed indefinitely, and servicewomen must often continue
to serve in the same unit as their assailant."
We know that most u.s. rapes go unreported, and that it
is often said that there are at least ten rapes for every one reported (i
would say from personal experience that no one knows for sure, but that few
rapes are ever reported to the police), meaning that possibly 1,000 u.s.
servicewomen have already been raped by their "comrades in arms" even on
the Iraq-Afghanistan battlefields. Over 1,000 sexual assaults on u.s. servicewomen
were reported in 2003 on bases worldwide. Think on it, rape not in the ones
or tens, but by the thousands. Not accident, we say, but policy.
Think about the u.s. Air Force Academy scandal in 2003-2004,
where rape was found to be so prevalent that it was a part of the training--at
freshwoman orientation, the senior cadet speaker bitterly told her sisters
that she herself had been raped, that most women cadets were raped, and that
they should expect to be raped themselves as cadets. This is not a rape room
but a whole rape academy. Even Saddam didn't have that innovation.
No matter how superpower, hightech, or equal opportunity,
the u.s. military has an institutional loyalty to rape. They need it and
cover for it and promote it and insist on it. We're not talking about semi-literate
crimies from poor backgrounds, some marginal privates. It's the activity
of the elite. In March 2005 nearly 150 women broke through the male headlines
in the news by charging that they had been raped as cadets. The result was
a complete hysterical whitewash and near blanket protection for all the rapist
future generals and admirals. i mean, the Roamin' Catholic Church of Child
Molesters couldn't have done better. Using a survey of all women cadets as
a prop, the Pentagon told the nation's press that sexual assault at the service
academies was "comparable to civilian schools"--reported by 5% of women cadets--and
came from the bad influence of society not from the military. In elite government
academies, where doors are without locks and where young people are groomed
to lead massive violence, women have a better chance of being raped than
being a starter in a varsity sport. The patriarchy says that this is only
normal, and who can disagree?
But reading the fine print of the Pentagon report, the
horror show of patriarchal capitalist power becomes even more visible. As
a tipoff, the word "rape" itself doesn't appear anywhere in the report or,
apparently, in the survey of women cadets. How can you explain that? Then,
the Pentagon excluded from the survey all the rape and assault victims who
had quit or been forced out of the academies (many cadets who reported rapes
were then charged themselves for offenses and forced to resign). And yet
& again, buried deep in the report, were confirmations of how deeply
these women cadets are being brainwashed to be participants in men's ownership
of women's bodies. Into rape culture. Half the women cadets said that women
were afraid to report sexual assaults for fear of reprisals by higher command.
Even more women cadets--63% at West Point and 81% at Annapolis-- said that
they personally would NOT report or intervene when other women were sexually
harassed or assaulted. They have learned from the system to be obedient "good
girls" and not protect women from violent male attacks. This is a core value.
We all need to rethink rape on a deeper level. To rethink
the persistence of rape. Not just as a "crime", not just as part of sexism,
but as a structural component necessary for even the most modern and cosmopolitan
male society. Like, the u.s. military is today's poster boy for "Equal Opportunity".
Black men are generals and top sergeants, while women are flying combat missions
in fighters and helicopters and commanding MP companies. Yet & again,
the Green Machine is wedded to rape. Like it's their institutional need on
a cellular level.
What is starting to emerge is a world war 4 over who shall
own women. If you haven't understood that, your daughters will. And rape
is the visible tip of the iceberg, the political terrorism that marks women
as the property of any and all men (just as marriage marks women as the property
of an individual man or male family).
We can follow the u.s. rapists' footsteps right to that
Abu Gharib prison in Baghdad. After (and only after) the torture scandal
broke, congressmen told the press that they'd seen photos of an Iraqi woman
prisoner "forced to bare her breasts". Newsweek May 10-17, 2004 reported
that unreleased photos "include an American soldier having sex with a female
Iraqi detainee and photos of American soldiers watching Iraqis having sex
with juveniles." The Pentagons are only admitting what photos don't let them
deny, but simple logic tells us that inside those special u.s. "anti-terrorist"
prisons and detention camps where "anything goes", rape is widespread, common,
and routine for women and children as well as men.
And you didn't learn about it first from Mr. Anti-War,
for all his grants and intellectual muscle-building and buzz-sawed forests
of manifestoes and articles. Even though long before those sex-tourism snapshots
in Abu Gharib were public, Iraqi women were investigating and trying to get
the story out. But the Anti-war movement of men and their helpers couldn't
hear those women's voices.
Michigan attorney Shereef Akeel, who has interviewed some
50 former detainees in Iraq about their treatment in George & Laura's
custody for a class action lawsuit, has recorded sexual attacks as
routine treatment. As recently as last Summer, when an Iraqi boy just fifteen
years old said his GI guards raped him. "He was told to go on all fours naked
and was sodomized from behind...He said they made him dance and he was crying."
Another Iraqi woman told Akeel she witnessed another woman and man being
raped on her first night in captivity.
Team America has their rape rooms, too, it turns out,
just like Saddam did. We as women should be ashamed for not knowing that.
We shouldn't need big world media scandals to know that. It should be a given,
if we see the world through the eyes of women.
So what else are the patriarchal capitalist media concealing
by not asking? Why, what are the Iraqi women doing in the special "anti-terrorist"
detention camps in the first place? The whole world knows that women are
hardly allowed to be terrorists in Iraq. ThereÕs no tv images
of Iraqi women in black ski masks trotting down the street with anti-tank
missiles on their shoulders. With the exception of two women ex-officials
in Saddam's regime (the Iraqi Condoleezza & Hilary), these women are
captured (to say they have been "arrested" is to falsely suggest some juridical
process other than groups of men with guns doing whatever they want) not
as terrorists, but usually as hostages because their husbands or fathers
are wanted by the occupation regime. This has been admitted. The threat has
been that wanted men should surrender or "their" women property will be damaged.
So the GI rapos are really part of the whole program. The other reason Iraqi
women are captured is just for rape and to cover up rape. If GI rapos are
all comfortable doing u.s. servicewomen in their own units, why wouldn't
they be even more out there in attacking Iraqi women? With the men of the
family out of the way, fled or tied up, the soldiers take women somewhere
for what they call "interrogation". You fill in the blanks.
The British Guardian newspaper's male correspondent in
Iraq filed this story about systematic rape and the Abu Gharib prison scandal:
"The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph
but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west
of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that,
at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been
trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe.
"The note claimed that US guards had been raping women
detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several
of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip
naked in front of men, it said....Late last year, Swadi, one of seven female
lawyers now representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together
a picture of systemic abuse and torture perpetrated by US guards against
Iraqi women held in detention without charge. This was not only true of Abu
Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it, 'happening all across Iraq'.
"In November last year, Swadi visited a woman detainee
at a US military base at al-Kharkh, a former police compound in Baghdad.
'She was the only woman who would talk about her case. She was crying. She
told us she had been raped,' Swadi says. 'Several American soldiers had raped
her. She had tried to fight them off and they had hurt her arm. She showed
us the stitches. She told us, "We have daughters and husbands. For God's
sake don't tell anyone about this."
"Astonishingly, the secret inquiry launched by the US
military in January, headed by Major General Antonio Taguba, has confirmed
that the letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as 'Noor'
was entirely and devastatingly accurate. While most of the focus since the
scandal broke three weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their
sexual humilation in front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible
proof that women detainees - who form a small but unknown proportion of the
40,000 people in US custody since last year's invasion - have also been abused.
Nobody appears to know how many...
"Taguba discovered that guards have also videotaped and
photographed naked female detainees. The Bush administration has refused
to release other photographs of Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare their
breasts (although it has shown them to Congress) - ostensibly to prevent
attacks on US soldiers in Iraq, but in reality, one suspects, to prevent
further domestic embarrassment.
"Earlier this month it emerged that an Iraqi woman in
her 70s had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another
coalition detention centre after being arrested last July. Labour MP Ann
Clwyd, who investigated the case and found it to be true, said, 'She was
held for about six weeks without charge. During that time she was insulted
and told she was a donkey.' "
The London Muslim weekly Al-Wasat printed an interview
with "Nadia", an Iraqi woman who was gang raped repeatedly in Abu Gharib
and who was the subject of some of those GI sex-tourism photos. "Her visit
to a relative ended up in her detention by American troops, who stormed the
home under the preferable excuse of 'searching for weapons'...five soldiers
fondled and raped her one after another..."
"Nadia was set free from the US hell in Abu Gharib after
spending up to six months there. The American soldiers dumped her along the
highway of Abu Gharib and gave her a meager 10,000 dinars to 'start a new
life.' Too ashamed to return home, she now works as a housemaid for an Iraqi
family."
But what does that wornout language mean anyway, "too
ashamed to return home"? Here is more patriarchal double-talk. The
true term is too terrorized to return home (and "home", that's an unexamined
concept we need to get into later). Here is where we cross the lines again
from one side of men's battlefield to the other. Many of these women victims
of George and Laura's "family values" can't bear witness because they are
missing. Because they have been silenced. Many are dead soon after release.
Attorney Shereef Akeel couldn't interview one u.s. prison rape victim who
became pregnant because she had committed suicide. Or so he was told.
The Guardian article says on this point: "Some of
the women involved may since have disappeared, according to human rights
activists. Professor Huda Shaker al-Nuaimi, a political scientist at Baghdad
University who is researching the subject for Amnesty International, says
she thinks 'Noor' is now dead. ' We believe she was raped and that she was
pregnant by a US guard. After her release from Abu Ghraib, I went to her
house. The neighbours said her family had moved away. I believe she has been
killed.' Honour killings are not unusual in Islamic society, where
rape is often equated with shame and where the stigma of being raped by an
American soldier would, according to one Islamic cleric, be 'unbearable'.
The prospects for rape victims in Iraq are grave; it is hardly surprising
that no women have so far come forward to talk about their experiences...".
Like, i'm certain you know, but for those who don't: so-called
honor killings are a big part of life in parts of the capitalist world. If
a woman has sexual relations with a man other than her husband, or sometimes
just physical contact with a man outside her family--even if it's involuntary,
such as rape--then the family is considered "dishonored". The only way to
regain their honor is for the men of the family to kill "their" offending
women. There are not only thousands and thousands of cases of husbands murdering
their wives, but many cases of brothers killing sisters and sons killing
mothers. Even if the woman has not had any contact with other men but is
suspected or just falsely rumored to have done so, then she must be murdered
anyway to preserve the male family honor.
The roots of this rule have to do with our his-story as
a unique property of man. A human property that can reproduce and give the
patriarchal family new household workers and heirs of the same blood. Which
is why it has been so important to these men that "their" women do not have
even the appearance of unauthorized sex with others. This terrorism gives
those women a big incentive to stay indoors, limit outside relations, not
travel outside the family house unescorted, staying within invisible boundaries
as the true social prisoners.
Professor Huda al-Nuami, consultant for Amnesty International
and the head of Palestinian Studies at Baghdad University, has experienced
this trap herself. Where your own family and your own sisters and daughters
want to silence you. Stopped at an amerikkkan roadblock in Baghdad,
made to leave the car with her family so GIs could search it, Professor Nuami
protested and was the target of verbal sexual abuse by one of the u.s. soldiers.
He pointed his rifle at her to halt her, then grabbed his crotch and made
"a lewd suggestion".
"Ms. Nuami says she shook with outrage, but found herself
just as infuriated at her own family members, who shoved her in the car and
yelled at her all the way home for bringing shame and dishonor upon the family.
Later, she says, her own 20-year-old daughter told her, 'I don't want the
stigma of a mother who was mistreated by the U.S.' "
While on their side of the battlefield, the islamic-fascists
and their rapo brothers are successfully waging a criminal-guerrilla war
against Iraqi women. They are attacking many, many more Iraqi women than
they are attacking GIs. So their war against Iraqi women is really
the larger war, the greater war in Iraq.
Rape is political terrorism. Nowhere is this clearer
this moment than in Iraq. The rapist political agendas of menÕs neo-fascist
movements, the mass spontaneous woman-hating of individual men, the supporting
societal framework of women as a unique type of property under patriarchal
capitalism, all mesh together into a "perfect storm" of rape for Iraqi women.
Because it is a time of crisis in which the ownership of women is being contested
just as the rule over society is up for grabs.
Suzzanne Goldenberg reported in the English Guardian newspaper:
"For Asma, an engineer in her twenties, the attack was utterly random. She
was abducted on May 18 from a crowded street in a suburb of Baghdad where
she was shopping with her mother, younger sister, and an adult male cousin.
"A pickup truck was parked on the kerb, and six
men were investigating car trouble. 'Suddenly something flashed before my
eyes, and we were surrounded.They opened fire all around us,' her mother
says.
"Asma was bundled inside, where two men pushed her
head to her knees, and drove for several hours to a farmhouse on the edge
of Baghdad, where she was repeatedly raped. It is unclear why she was targeted,
but she was admonished for wearing trousers and for failing to cover her
hair. The next day she was encased in hijab - the traditional headscarf -
and dropped off near her parents' home. She has barely spoken since, and
sits at home playing cards with her mother.
"But at least she is alive. In the emergency room
of Baghdad's al-Kindi hospital, a forlorn notice begs for information about
a schoolgirl who disappeared from her home in May. Another seeks news of
a woman of 33 who disappeared from her home in central Baghdad in July.
"Fears of a similar fate have driven Baghdad's female
population indoors ...Another, Rafel Daniel, says she has stopped driving
her own car, and asks her parents to chauffeur her on errands. 'I'm under
house arrest,' she says."
Amnesty International quotes Amal Al-Khaderi, formerly
an official with the Iraqi Red Crescent aid society, as also afraid to drive
her own car or be alone in public: "Do you see the women on the street? There
is no one. This country is like a cemetery. You'd be crazy to think we can
go on like this, covered and silent?" Men outnumber women in the streets
and markets "20-1, remarkable in a nation where the population is 55 percent
female."
This is a well-coordinated, strategic war of terror against
Iraqi women. The French newspaper Le Monde interviewed "Nadia Ahmed", the
pseudonym of a 49 year-old Iraqi woman who has "no particular political ideology"
but is "opposed to both the islamists and the American occupation". She said:
"Women are rarer and rare in the street. Kidnappings,
hostile men's looks, and insecurity are the main reasons for this.
The most courageous women go out and shop as quickly as they can, hurrying
home before it gets dark. Gripped with fear, I sometimes go shopping
with another neighbor, May, a 50-year-old woman. Each of us is as tense as
can be! Once we get back, we can breathe again and praise God that
we're safe and sound! Women are kidnapped in broad daylight, others have
been killed because they were wearing tight jeans.
"A month ago, a car full of masked men was stopped in
front of the institute where my husband works. The guards who were supposed
to protect the place ran away. One of the masked men got out of the car.
Addressing himself to the institute's receptionist, he made threats: "Tell
all your women students and workers to wear the veil! Beginning tomorrow,
if we see a single one without a veil, she'll be dragged by the hair in the
mud in front of you!"
"The news spread quickly. Some girls decided to abandon
their studies and stay home. Others, already veiled, only showed indifference.
And those who wanted to continue studying decided to start wearing the veil
against their will. The next day, only a few were still bare-headed.
As for me, I'm not veiled and I'm against the wearing of the veil, and this
incident was frightening, and fed my fear. What would I do if Iraqi women
were forced to wear the veil? I couldn't stand such a requirement,
such an annihilation!"
So isn't this a perfect war for men? Both sides are raping
occupied women at will while the families are silencing and killing many
of the victims. As Dick likes to say when he's having fun, "It doesn't get
any better than this!"
The u.s. occupation's Iraqi police have been quoted as
saying that they would never arrest a man just for killing a woman relative.
One Iraqi police station commander said that they would only hold a man in
an honor killing if he came to the police station on his own initiative and
voluntarily insisted on being arrested! Even then the sentence, if any ,
would be less than three months. And this is the George and Laura "democratic"
Iraqi police, paid for with our very involuntary tax dollars.
Can we figure out yet which side of men is our side, as
women?
By the way, this isn't about Arab society or Muslim society
only, as we all know but should keep remembering. All male societies do this.
Have something like honor killings and rape movements. In Latin America,
for example, it has long been customary for capitalist police and courts
to excuse men's "crimes of passion" or "crimes of honor" in killing their
women property. In the Congo, as that March 7th Human Rights Watch report
reminded us, over four million people have been killed since the fighting
began in 1998 but the strategy of mass rape is still gathering momentum.
Thousands of mass rapes of women and children in untold numbers are used
in eliminating entire ethnic communities. Human Rights Watch says, "What's
particularly frightening, of course, is the scale of what's happening in
the Congo." The U.N. military "peacekeeping" expedition there (known as M.O.N.U.C.)
has joined right into the war against women, especially in raping and forced
prostitution of children. U.N. official Jane Rasmussen has admitted: "The
fact that women are so degraded already that it almost starts to become normal
to them. One girl commented to me ruefully that at least MONUC pays."
Nor is it only poor societies in the Third World. Since
the basic definition of patriarchal society is the ownership of women's bodies
by men, even in the most technologically-developed societies changes in women's
bodies such as pregnancy can please or displease men...and cause death. For
example, a recent report found that "Murder is a surprisingly common cause
of death among pregnant women in the United states, U.S. Government researchers
reported..."
" 'Homicide is a leading cause of pregnancy-associated
injury deaths,' Jeani Chang and colleagues wrote in the latest issue of the
American Journal of Public Health. They investigated the deaths of women
who died while pregnant or within a year of being pregnant between 1991 and
1999 and found... of the injury-related deaths, 617 or 31 percent were ruled
homicide, making murder the second most common cause of injury-related death
for pregnant women after car accidents."
It is just as easy for men to harvest women and children
in Denver or Seattle as it is in Baghdad, although amerikkka wants you to
believe otherwise. The landmark Jessica Gonzales vs. Castle Rock, Colorado
case now before the Supremes is so revealing you almost know that something
bad is being arranged to retire her (fatal car accident, arrest for drug
possession, or maybe remarriage). That's the case where despite a so-called
court order of protection, her estranged husband kidnapped her three young
daughters and killed them. The police refused, of course, to do anything
in response to her increasingly alarmed reports of the kidnapping. So the
husband had plenty of time to kill the girl-children as part of a special
day for him (first he took them all to the amusement park). Since it turns
out that there is no legal right to police protection from male violence,
her lawyer is trying the novel tactic of claiming local government violation
of Gonzales' "property rights" in her children. After a surprise victory
on the lower court level, hostile questioning by the Big Nine made any reasonable
outcome look dim. One Man In Black declared that the fundamental right was
of police to do whatever they wanted no matter how many court orders women
obtained--he said that police had the right to simply say that they were
"too busy" or even "didn't want to" protect a woman & her children.
The truth is that u.s. court orders of protection "protect"
women in Colorado just like piles of Korans "protect" women in Iraq ( and
isn't capitalist men's law only our version of the Koran?). The real meaning
is the opposite. A court order of protection for a woman is never enforced
against a man because it can't be. Patriarchal law doesn't allow us to do
preventative or prophylactic elimination of dangerous men. That's what these
court orders really mean, that the capitalist patriarchy has taken over any
power of self defense we might have and orders us on pain of imprisonment
to remain defenseless. This is in the 21st century!
i said this before, but i want to underline it: Let's
recognize that women need, as a life and death matter, a foreign policy and
a political-military worldview of our own. Why can't half the human race
have its own strategy, its own agenda, and its own power to carry these out?
From us, by us, for us.
You know, in Kenya there's a notorious small village
called Umoja, the Swahili word for Unity. The women who live there are a
self-governing, self-supporting women's community made up of rape victims
and other women escaping marriage. Many of them were raped by the visiting
British soldiers who train at a neo-colonial military base nearby (yet another
modern capitalist rape academy). Running for their lives from murderous husbands
who wanted to regain their male honor, they came together into their own
tiny outcast community. And found themselves keeping for themselves and their
children all their time and energy and income from making handicrafts and
herding. Their spokeswoman, Rebecca Lolosoli, says: "We've seen so many changes
in these women. They're healthier and happier. They dress well. They used
to have to beg. Now, they're the ones giving out food to others."
Unity for women isn't some bland platitude, as in men's
political speeches. Unity for us has a dangerous edge, because it means being
free to be there for women by leaving the villages of men. By leaving home.
That's where unity starts for women. That's why it is so rare still.
( The end for now)
* i used the name "Bertina
Brecht" to recognize in my own way that many of the German radical playwright
Bertold Brecht's most famous works - like The Three-Penny Opera -
were not written by him at all but by his unacknowledged women collaborators.
[return to text]
Butch Lee is a revolutionary Amazon theorist,
the author of Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial
Terrain, Jailbreak out of History: the re-biography of Harriet
Tubman, and The Military Strategy of Women and Children. Many
of her writings are available online on this site, and
all of her books can be ordered through Kersplebedeb - for more information
se my list of Texts by Butch
Lee.
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