🚀 go-pugleaf

Source: http://nationalcatholicreporter.org/fwis/fw041706.htm

By Joan Chittister, OSB

Good Friday is the day, tradition says, when standing at the foot of the 
cross as Jesus died, a sword pierced Marys heart. This Lent I heard that 
same kind of pain a hundred times from other women who are also watching 
everything theyve ever loved -- their country, their culture, their 
husbands, their children and their own futures -- die.

The expression of their agony, their frustration, lingers in my mind 
more a wail than a cry: We are a civilization of 7,000 years, said a 
delegate to the U.S.-Iraqi Womens Conference sponsored by the Global 
Peace Initiative of Women, March 29-31 in New York. You are a country of 
200 years. She drifted off into the unsaid. But the message was plain: 
You are a young country. What have you ever lost? Who are you to tell us 
how to live?

The lament came out of a well of agony. While the West struggles with 
its uncertainty about the implications of veils and burqas for the full 
development of women in Islamic cultures, these women, some in hijab or 
head scarves, some in trim pant suits, some in abayas, are struggling 
with what it means to stay alive, to rebuild an entire country, to keep 
their families safe, to be safe themselves.

There are now, the women told us, 1.5 million widows in Iraq and the 
numbers are rising daily as men disappear.

Before the war, women constituted almost half of the college population 
in Iraq, one woman pointed out. But after the invasion women had no 
chances for either the jobs an education could bring or the independence 
it promises.

After the overthrow of the tyrant, a doctor said, shortages of fuel, 
medicine, and food got even worse than before.

It seemed that the litany would never end. Forget about the past, the 
speaker said. Anyone can start a war; only a few can stop it. And only 
time and life can measure the outcome of it.

Being able to tell who the real victors are in Iraq is becoming more 
difficult every day. Women, helpless in the face of war, have yet to 
learn what this situation means for themselves. So far, life has only 
gotten worse for women.

Now we have corruption, damage to lines and power stations. It is 
difficult to live in Baghdad. We are on electricity 3 x 3. Three hours 
on; three hours off. Only a few have generators.

Another woman, a business woman made the basics plain: We need $7 
billion to fix the sewage and water systems. That will not be available 
for five years. And the pipes are already out of date before they even 
begin to put them in again.

Some areas have putrid water, another woman said.

Food rations got us through the sanctions, a fourth woman said. But now 
these are reduced till 2006 and will probably end then.

It got more and more difficult to listen to the almost rote recitation 
of living conditions that most of us have never even seen, let alone 
attempted to cook in and clean in and raise children in and care for old 
parents in while finding ourselves more and more under siege every day.

We must learn the facts, a woman researcher told us. Women are a large 
part of the economic sector in Iraq but education and employment 
opportunities are directly linked to one another.

In 1970, the Iraqi government increased its focus on education. This had 
a significant effect on girls. But the drop in educational opportunities 
now has been disastrous:

      50 percent of women above 15 years old have never been enrolled in 
school.

      64 percent of rural women above 15 have no elementary education.

      40 percent of girls in rural areas are not in primary school.

      47 percent of women are illiterate.

      50 percent of women in urban areas are literate.

Most victims of honor crimes -- women who have been raped, molested or 
slept with their lovers -- are women and girls, an enraged woman 
reported. In every case, the perpetrators are protected -- by 
legislation! she said. I thought of all the women who have been burned 
or stoned for the sins of men while the fathers and uncles and brothers 
who killed them for dishonoring their families would go free.

And thats where the whole emerging future of women becomes unclear. The 
new Constitution, the one crafted after the fall of Saddam and 
guaranteed to guarantee democracy, does not guarantee it for women.

On the contrary. Young women pointed out, in fact, that the new 
Constitution, for all intents and purposes, rescinds the Personal Status 
Law of 1959 and now makes women subject to the religious laws of every 
region.

To satisfy regional and religious agendas, the new constitution, having 
promised women full civil rights, turned around and gave regions 
sectarian control over marriage laws and womens civil rights. The 
majority party in each region, as a result, will determine how women are 
treated in that area, regardless what the federal constitution 
supposedly allows.

Its a very neat political trick. On the one hand, the Constitution looks 
like its committed to equality. On the other hand, each region, thanks 
to the Personal Status clause of the document, can determine whether 
they will function under federal or sharia (Islamic) law where women are 
concerned. The effects of such a statement are to put marriage law with 
its personal rights and understandings of abuse, divorce law with its 
conditions and compensation, and inheritance rights for women under the 
judgment of a womans sect or religion rather than the federal laws of 
the land.

Its the equivalent of saying that a woman has a right to divorce or 
marry or seek protection from abuse or financial support as long as her 
religion will grant it to her.

We had to do this in order to preserve the family, one of the older 
women, now a parliamentarian of the new government, told us. Someones -- 
anyones -- definition of family, it seems, will trump the civil rights 
of women every time.

Democracy will never be done by troops, guns and random shooting, 
another woman told us ominously.

From where I stand, it looks as if that insight is clearly correct, at 
least this time. At least here. At least where women are concerned. Is 
this really the world we said we were going to create in Iraq when we 
went in there to destroy a tyrant and abolish tyranny? Or are we now 
only the unwitting creators of more of the same?

For all these women, too, will there finally be a resurrection? And will 
we even bother to care?

[Program Note: Erie Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister was a panel member 
on the special Easter Sunday edition of NBC televisions Meet the Press 
public affairs program. The program aired Sunday, April 16 at 10 a.m. 
(eastern time). The Meet the Press Web site, 
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608, carries a video and written transcript of 
the program.