I knew there was a reason I stopped listening to Laura Flanders' show on KALW in the morning--- it gets me all riled up before I'm even at my computer.
Today the amazing Ms. Flanders covered the issue of women's rights in Iraq.
I learned that years ago Iraq surpassed the US for supporting women's equal rights, at least on paper. In 1959 they passed a family law (Personal Status Law) considered one of the most progressive in the Middle East. It...
...protected women, favoring the woman as children's guardian in divorce cases. It also conditioned polygamy on the agreement of the first wife.
In other reading I see that it also protected the women from being divorced simply by the husband announcing three times that they were divorced. Also, women, if divorced, could stay in the house where they were living, and the husband would have to leave.
And now the US is helping them build a new constitution... and sift out the rights of women their old constitution protected. Women currently comprise 65% of the population (no doubt partly as a result of Hussein's external wars and internal security campaigns, expending the lives of more men than women). And while the two women appointed (by US officials) to the new Iraqi Interim Governing Council were out of the room, the council passed Resolution 137, a resolution which puts the slippery Islamic code of laws Sharia into force in place of previous family law, and so a resolution which...
...could give self-appointed religious clerics the authority to inflict grave human rights violations on Iraqi women, including denial of the rights to education, employment, freedom of movement and travel, property inheritance and custody of their children. Forced early marriage, polygamy, compulsory religious dress, wife beating, execution by stoning as punishment for female adultery and public flogging of women for disobeying religious rules could all be sanctioned if the Resolution is upheld.
...So says the NGO Madre in their statement opposing Resolution 137.
One of the people interviewed on the show was Yanar Mohammed, the founder of the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, who is currently receiving death threats for her public opposition to Resolution 137.
For some reason I can't find the Madre call for letters demanding her protection on the Madre website-- get the address for the US administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer and a sample letter here at the Occupation Watch website. You can also sign petitions in support of Yanar and against Resolution 137 here at the Iraqi Women's Rights Coalition website.
Now what is CEDAW and what does it mean that Iraq ratified CEDAW and the US didn't (and probably won't)? Iraq ratified CEDAW-- the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, also called the International Treaty for the Rights of Women-- in 1986. They were one of the first countries to ratify it. The US has not and does not intend to ratify it. There are currently 175 ratifying states. CEDAW is not a panacea, but the fact that the US doesn't even want to show INTENTION of supporting global equal rights for women is truly shameful. We are the control freaks of the world, unwilling to sign any treaty or convention that might allow our citizens any rights above those supposedly guaranteed in our own national constitution. Now, it's not like Iraq was some haven of lavender-tinted feminist perfection, but according to Human Rights Watch, historically, Iraqi women and girls have enjoyed relatively more rights than many of their counterparts in the Middle East. And more rights, constitutionally, than women in the US! HRW continues-- "The Iraqi Provisional Constitution (drafted in 1970) formally guaranteed equal rights to women..."
Now where did we put our Equal Rights Amendment...? I remember seeing it around here somewhere...
The Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1923, is still not part of the U.S. Constitution.
(...says equalrightsamendment.org.)
Ah, yes, that's where we left it.
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