Katha Pollitt, “‘Democracy’ Is Hell”

Here is an excerpt from Katha Pollitt’s new essay at The Nation:

… Women’s status was never as high under Saddam as opponents of the war sometimes asserted, and it was already declining throughout the 1990s, as Saddam embraced Islam to distract the populace from the effects of the Gulf War, UN sanctions and his own depredations. But Iraq today is even worse for women: more repressive, more violent, more lawless. As if car bombs and suicide bombers weren’t horrific enough, criminal gangs, religious militias and death squads kidnap, rape and kill with impunity, with special attention to women professionals, students and rights activists. According to the United Nations’ most recent quarterly report on human rights in Iraq, domestic violence and “honor” killings are on the rise–Kurdistan, often described as comparatively peaceful and orderly, saw more than forty such killings between January and March of this year; in the province of Erbil, rapes quadrupled between 2003 and 2006. Women who’d worn Western clothes and moved about freely all their lives have been terrorized into wearing the abaya and staying inside unless accompanied by male relatives. In Sadr City and elsewhere, Shariah courts mete out misogynist “justice.”

“The political climate in Iraq is such that anyone can carry out crimes against women,” Kurdish feminist and labor activist Houzan Mahmoud told me when I reached her by phone in London, where she serves as the UK representative of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI). “You can come upon women’s bodies anywhere.” Far from promoting women’s rights and security, “the occupation has strengthened the tribes, political Islam and reactionary bourgeois parties–all of which are anti-woman.” The true extent of the violence may never be known. According to Yifat Susskind, author of Madre’s 2007 report Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq, comprehensive statistics don’t exist: The Iraqi institutions responsible for collecting human rights data are complicit in human rights abuses, and besides, the United States has told the Ministry of Health not to publish figures on civilian fatalities. …