… Monday afternoon, I took a bit of time out from the US-Iraq women’s
conference I was at to sit in a wifi zone in the hotel there and write up this JWN
post about the conference. It seems that while I was away, the
differences of opinion that I had noted there between the Iraqi
invitees– and principally, the difference between those who stayed in
Iraq throughout the whole sanctions era and those who lived as exiles
in those years– became much more pointed… to the extent that
participants in this “peace” gathering had been standing up, yelling
at each other, and threatening to walk out.
I guess the organizers and a couple of the US invitees intervened to
try to calm things down. When I got back there, the Benedictine US nun
Sr. Joan Chittester, one of the organizers, was saying some pacific
things about “well, now you’ve seen how democracy works. Everyone
has to at least stay and listen to everyone else’s point of view.”
That evening, there were a lot of inter-religious peacemakery things
organized. I’m not entirely sure about the cultural context of
having people watch two women performing a classical Indian dance…
The dance was fairly pretty to watch, but personally I was extremely
hungry at that point (7:30 p.m.) having been up since 6 a.m.
Then yesterday morning we were back in the conference room again.
For that session, which was billed as lasting from 9 a.m. through 1
p.m.–with no break anywhere along the way! can you imagine?–
the moderator was Kate Snow, another rising female star at ABC News who
co-anchors the weekend edition of their morning show and was previously
their White House correspondent.
Snow is another smart young network-groomed woman, like Elizabeth Vargas
yesterday. But completely out of her depth in this context, since
it didn’t take long before the (purely rhetorical) sparks began to fly
there. This session had been billed as having six Iraqi women
speakers talking about “Fostering people-to-people dialogue: Changing attitudes
and misperceptions”.
The third of the speakers was Dr.
Katrin Michael, a Christian woman from the north of Iraq
who had joined the Kurdish opposition in 1982; fled the country in 1988
after having survived a chemical weapons attack (date and details of
which, uncertain); ended up in Algeria; barely escaped the
fundamentalist violence there; ended up as a resettled refugee in
Washington DC in 1997… Where she still lives. Nowadays,
she does research there on Iraqi women’s issues.
Her presentation was stridently “exilist”. She ended up
making a loud appeal for Americans to join in fighting against the
“terrorists” in Iraq, and said “we Iraqis are in the front line against
the terrorists”. (She didn’t note that there had been no jihadist
militants in Iraq prior to the US invasion of 2003, whereas now,
evidently, there are… )
She declared loudly a number of times that “I have forgiven” the
people who had harmed her earlier. But honestly, the general
tenor of her very accusatory presentation indicated strongly to me that
there are plenty of people whom she has not even come close to
forgiving. Again and again, at one point, she said “I am a
victim; I am a victim; I am a victim!” (I felt like saying to
her, “Katrin, my dear, I heard you the first time. You are a
victim. But you know what? At this point, everyone in Iraq
is feeling very hurt, wounded, and fearful. Everyont there is a
victim. And you’re living there in Washington DC… “)
Michael, Lamia Talebani
(who spoke a little later) and
Judge Zakia Hakki (who spoke Monday– and again yesterday) were the most ardent representatives of what I
call the Iraqi “exilist” viewpoint, that is, the view of those
who (1) had spent the 1990s in exile, (2) had been among those most strongly
advocating the use of US power to overtthrow the Saddamist regime, and
who (3) until today remain supportive of the 2003 invasion even if
criticial of some of the details of subsequent US actions in
Iraq. (Hakki did voice some such criticisms; so did
Talebani. They have both lived for at least part of the time
since 2003 inside Iraq. Katrin Michael, who has not spent time in Iraq since 200,3 did not voice any such
criticisms .)
But before I describe the argument, let me give a quick digest of
what all the speakers on the main panel said.
Continue reading “US-Iraqi women’s conference– Part 2”