Iraqi and US women on war, occupation, peace

I’m here attending the two-day conference Creating our Common Future, which is billed as an “Iraqi and American Women’s Summit”. The morning’s session was extraordinary. We had six Iraqi women and one man up there on the platform, in a lengthy panel discussion titled “Stories from the Ground”, that was moderated by Elizabeth Vargas, the co-anchor of the big network news program that ABC News does every day.
Of the seven Iraqis, one (the ethnic Kurdish judge Zakia Hakki) was a strong cheerleader for the US invasion of, and continued presence in, Iraq; a couple– including Faiza al-Araji and Dr. Rashad Zaydan (a pharamacist working with a charitable organization in Baghdad and Fallujah)– were outspoken critics; and the rest were all somewhere in between.
I believe the Iraqi “delegates” here (not sure that anyone has actually been “delegated” to be here; but it sounds important, doesn’t it?) have had some time meeting just with each other over the weekend.
And then just before lunch, the deep differences among the US invitees here became clear, too. First up there was Sr. Joan Chittister, a Benedictne nun who gave a truly inspiring, wonderful short sermon about the folly and tragedy of the whole war venture, and the need for us all “not to drink from the water of hate.” Then there was Olara Otunnu, a Ugandan-American who’s worked with the UN for a long time, including as Sec-Gen’s Special Rep for Children and Armed Conflict. He gave a kind of generic plea for everyone to focus on the children, saying very little of any specificity to Iraq. And then we had Charlotte Ponticelli, who’s the “Senior Coordinator for International Women’s Issues” at the State Dept.
Sr. Joan had gotten a standing ovation from most of the 120 or so people present, for her oration. Ponticelli tried to follow that performance with some extreme rhetorical flourishes, and with continual references to “the courage of our Iraqi sisters who have stepped up to the plate“– a very provincially American metaphor from (I think) baseball that most people from outside the US find quite mystifying… Exactly what plate it was the Iraqi women had “stepped up to”, and what they were expected to do now they were there– all that was left very general…
And she talked again and again about how her Bushite masters had “liberated” the Iraqis, and how much better things were in Iraq now than before 2003, etc.
It’s been an interesting experience being in this gathering where the differences of opinion within each of the two bodies politic are so very, very evident.
I’m not sure exactly what the organizers are hoping to get out of the event. Oh, here‘s one early expression of their goals:

There are three projected outcomes to this summit:
— The creation of an online community of Iraqi and American women who wish to exchange ideas and disseminate information through the medium of a website. This website can facilitate communication and provide opportunities for women from the United States and Europe to support their counterparts in Iraq with their resources and their expertise.
— The establishment of a Women’s Faith Forum in Iraq to discuss women’s issues from different religious perspectives – with the aim of garnering greater acceptance for a diversity of views.
— Issue a statement on the need to heal divisions between the Sunni and Shiite communities in Iraq and worldwide. [HC question: why should people from, of all non-Iraqi societies, the US think they have any particular role to play in this process?]
The ultimate success of this Summit, however, shall depend upon the emergence of spontaneous relationships and the open and frank exchange of ideas as well as of the expression of commitment of the participants to the amelioration of the condition of women in Iraq.

One of the main things that struck me this morning was the strong divergence in the narratives of the Iraqis who spoke… Not just about current events or current political proposals– but their narratives of the past, and even the terms they used for everything.
Zakia Hakki, for example, talked at length about the degree to which Iraqis suffered under Saddam Hussein. She was effusive in her thanks to the Americans “who gave me refuge from Saddam’s brutality and who then came to liberate our people”. And she talked about the real present dangers from “the Baathists… the fascists… the terrorists”, explaining that because of those dangers the US troops should stay. (Though she did also voice some pointed criticisms of some US actions in Iraq, including the public, high-level role that Zal Khalilzad has taken in trying to influence the government-formation process.)
Shahla Ali, who works for a human-services NGO called Counterpart International, talked about the mistakes the US had made by trying to pursue a top-down transformation of Iraqi society. She said the attempt to install full democracy was too rapid, and that the process would take more time…
Then Faiza spoke– really well, imho. Here’s a digest of what she said:

Right at the beginning, she stressed that she was, “speaking on behalf of the unknown Iraqis, who lived under Saddam and stayed there and survived there and survived sanctions and the invasion while staying inside their own country… ”
“This war changed my life. After the war I stopped working as a business woman and a civil engineer and I thought about the future of my country and my people, who have been dying for three years…
“After three years we have the right to evaluate the war. The Iraqi people are the only ones who have the right to do this evaluation…
“Now we are living in darkness; it was not just under Saddam Hussein.”
She talked about her feeling of great helplessness in 2004, when her car was stolen and she found she couldn’t get any help from either a US patrol that wass nearby or from any Iraqi police, and realized that everyone in her country was very vulnerable… and how that feeling was compounded last year after her son Khaled was arrested from the university and taken away to a secret prison. “We paid thousands of dollars to release him… But then I thought what about the poor Iraqi people, who couldn’t do that– who will care about them?”
At one point, she said, “Saddam Hussein stole Iraq from the Iraqis, yes; but then the occupation also stole Iraq from the Iraqis.”
She said that from her travels around the US, she had seen the degree to which the US public is not in support of the war– “but the situation in Congress is very different.” She also said– with Elizabeth Vargas sitting right nearby, nodding sagely, that “The media here are the partners of the government in the war… They will never tell you the truth about the war.”
She accused the US authorities of having fanned the flames of sectarianb and ethnic division in the country, underlining her own rejection of such an approach by saying three times, firmly, “I am Iraqi, I am Iraqi, am Iraqi.” (She got some applause for that from a good proportion of the Iraqis in the room.)
At the end, she said, “The US should simply leave Iraq. leave Iraq for the Iraqis.”

The next speaker was Pascale Warda, the head of the Assyrian Women’s Union, and a former minister in the Iyad Allawi government. She went out of her way to deny the thesis that Iraqi Christians should be considered pro-American (by anyone) simply because they are Christians. “We are not the creation of the Americans,” she said. “Our people were Christians in Iraq long before there was any United States of America, and before there was any Islam, even.”
Next was Noha al-Agha, who works with a number of human-services NGOs. One interesting story she told was that she had started a “pen-pal” exchange between kids in some US schools and kids in some Iraqi schools… “But the American kids just wrote about all the fun things they were doing– pajama parties and going bowling and playing sports– and it made the Iraqi children very sad because they don’t have the opportunity for such things. So I had to write to the principals of the American schools and ask them to ask the kids not to write about such things.”
Then came Rashad Zaydan, whose version of Islamic hijab was almost exactly the same as the pious Sunni women I saw in Gaza. (Faiza and Shahla Ali were also wearing hea coverings that completely hid their hair. Zakia Hakki had a loose scarf over her hair that had some glittery beads in it. The other two women were bare-headed.)
Zaydan also introduced herself as “speaking for all the Iraqis who never left the country.” (This is understandably a big issue in intra-Iraqi discussions… “Where were you in the 1990s, during the tough days of sanctions?”)
She started with a long Muslim greeting and talked about t all the rights given to Muslim women in Kor’an… She also talked the generally high status given to women during the Baathist era in all fields including education. But she did note that under sanctions the situation of women, kids, and girls had deteriorated.
She said the three years of occupation had brought huge numbers of dead, detained, missing, and wounded. (She actually gave concrete numbers there, but I couldn’t write them all down fast enough… I’ll try to get ’em from her later.) She said she herself had to close down the pharmacy business she formerly ran because she cdn’t drive there any moredue to the rampant insecurity; so now she works with a charitable society.
She laid out a six- or seven-point program for what she wanted the US to do now. These were the first three points:

(1) establish a timetable for complete withdrawal of troops;
(2) provide reparations for all the damages caused by the troops; and
(3) commit to real aid for a major reconstruction effort in the country…

The last speaker was Dr. Saeb Gailani, a phsyician who’s a member of the Baghdad City Council. He estimated the number of dead since March 2003 as “more than 100,000.” He referred to the period of mid-1970s through mid-1980s almost as a kind of “Golden Era”– with very high levels of education in Iraqi society, and Iraqis able to aford interesting international travel, large numbers of Iraqi grad students studying overseas, especially in England, etc.
He said, “The US designed the breakup of the country… How can you make a country if every region, every governorate has the right to have its own representatives in foreign embassies, or to make its own constitution, or to make deals with outsiders. The dictatorship of the Saddam days has been replaced by another kind of dictatorship which is the theocratic dictatorship… ”
The first question asked was what the panelists thought about issue of the withdrawal of US troops.
Zakia Hazzi talked about how women’s rights had deteriorated under Saddam (from the Golden Era she claimed, back in the late 1950s). Referring to the Baathists repeatedly as “fascists”, she also repeated a number of times the anti-fascist mantra of “Never Again!” Yes, she admitted we need a timetable. But not now. “Before the timetable, we need two things: the Iraqi Army should stand on its toes, andf the ‘reconstruction aid’ must really start to get through. Now, there is corruption from both sides, which we have to stop.”
American mothers, she said, “should be proud of their soldiers in the miliary, because they are building a new future for Iraq.”
Anyway, I probably better get back up to the conference room there…