Pacific Views

Another one of Dubya's 'commas'.

A couple of weeks ago, our Dear Leader told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that, in years to come, the current violent period in Iraq will be regarded as a 'just a comma' on the road to democracy.

A comma? That's easy to say if you're a privileged world leader living thousands of miles away from Iraq. But things look very different if you are one of the millions of Iraqi women, as this report by Baghdad correspondent Peter Beaumont shows.

Iraqis do not like to talk about it much, but there is an understanding of what is going on these days. If a young woman is abducted and murdered without a ransom demand, she has been kidnapped to be raped. Even those raped and released are not necessarily safe: the response of some families to finding that a woman has been raped has been to kill her.

Iraq's women are living with a fear that is increasing in line with the numbers dying violently every month. They die for being a member of the wrong sect and for helping their fellow women. They die for doing jobs that the militants have decreed that they cannot do: for working in hospitals and ministries and universities. They are murdered, too, because they are the softest targets for Iraq's criminal gangs.

Iraq's women live in terror of speaking their opinions; of going out to work; or defying the strict new prohibitions on dress and behaviour applied across Iraq by Islamist militants, both Sunni and Shia. They live in fear of their husbands, too, as women's rights have been undermined by the country's postwar constitution that has taken power from the family courts and given it to clerics.

Beaumont offers a ton of details to back up those words, which you can read if you go here.

Via UK Observer.

Posted by Magpie at October 11, 2006 04:25 PM | Women | Technorati links |