In March 2004 George W Bush made the claim that, "the advance of freedom in the Middle East has given new rights and new hopes to women… the systematic use of rape by Saddam's former regime to dishonour families has ended." The truth is that even under the dictator Saddam Hussein Iraqi women were considered to be the among the most liberated in the Middle East and now the situation is much worse.
Yes, the new Iraqi constitution reserves a quarter of the 275 seats in the parliament to women. But even these women need armed guards to escort them. In 2005 one female MP, Lamia Abed Khadouri was shot and killed in front of her own house! So bad is the situation that sometimes women MPs organise their meetings outside the country altogether.
At least they have this privilege! Most ordinary women do not. Since the 2003 invasion, the plight of women has worsened terribly. In 2006 there were 400 cases of the burning of women in Sulaimaniyah alone. In Iraqi Kurdistan in the first six months of last year 255 women were killed, 75% of them burned to death. In fact since the US-led occupation began in 2003 honour killings have increased every year.
To make matters worse there has been a change to family law, embodied in Article 41 in the new constitution. The old law (Law 188) was replaced by Article 41 where such matters as marriage, divorce, custody over children and inheritance rights are decided according to the different religions and sects that people belong to. Surely that 25% of women in parliament should be up in arms about all this? Well… not quite! Many of them were elected on tickets of the more conservative religious parties.
In spite of this, now women's groups in Iraq are clamouring for the old "Iraqi Law of Personal Status" (Law 188, introduced in 1959) to be reinstated. In fact these women quite rightly recall that back in 1970 ‑ under the terrible Saddam Hussein ‑ the Iraqi Provisional Constitution formally guaranteed equal rights to women. Other laws were passed that ensured women the right to vote, attend school, run for political office, and own property. These laws guaranteed Iraqi women greater rights than women in any other country in the Arab world.
No one denies that the Saddam regime was a terribly brutal one. But now things for ordinary people are actually much worse. And women are feeling this more than any other layer in society.
Hundreds of women are being raped in a technique developed to humiliate and terrorise whole communities. The different warring factions are all involved in this. But surely Bush' army is doing its best to stop all this? Well… again, not quite! There have been numerous allegations against US soldiers who have been accused of rape and abuse of female prisoners.
Don't take our word for it. Last year the Pentagon itself came up with its "Taguba report". This was the result of an investigation into what had been going on at Abu Ghraib prison. It revealed that US military personnel had videotaped naked female prisoners and in one case at least admitted that one guard had had "sex with a female detainee." That's one way of putting, we suppose.
Then there was the famous and tragic case of the rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza at the hands of US soldiers.
Yes, George W, you really have done a marvellous job!
