The Iraqi Elections: Will Women Be the Biggest Losers?

By Mona Eltahawy

Come election time in Iraq, remember Wijdan al-Khuzai. Her violent death is a brutal warning that although Iraq's Sunnis are said to have the most to lose, it is in fact women, from all sects, who could be the biggest losers of the Iraqi election.

The body of Khuzai, an election candidate running on a secular platform, was found near her house on Dec. 25. Khuzai was determined to overcome what she described as the strict social and religious curbs on women in Iraq.

The sons of two other female candidates have been killed to punish their mothers for their electoral ambitions, and another female candidate was kidnapped and released only after her family paid a ransom.

Even female candidates who have been more overtly religious have not been spared. Earlier this month, Salama al-Khafaji, a prominent female Shiite candidate escaped assassination when her bodyguards returned fire at gunmen who ambushed her car. It was the second attempt on her life since May, when her son and one of her bodyguards were killed in an ambush of her convoy.

The invasion of Iraq could never be dedicated to the liberation of the country's women in the way the war in Afghanistan was. Iraq did not have the Taliban's hated misogynists, and for long periods, Iraqi women had enjoyed rights their Arab sisters could only dream of.

Nevertheless, state-appointed rapists terrorized female dissidents in Saddam Hussein's jails, and his alliances with Sunni fundamentalists reined in many of the gains women had made.

From the outset, the U.S. administration has given Iraqi women mixed signals, showing little willingness to defend their rights in the face of conservative clerics and yet encouraging them to a public activism that is almost impossible to practice safely.

Perhaps the harbinger of what was to come occurred in July 2003, when the U.S. Marine colonel supervising the reconstruction of Najaf backed down from appointing the city's first female judge because of fatwas deeming it against Islamic law. Two of the fatwas came from Shiite clerics likely to play leading roles in post-election Iraq - Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most revered Shiite cleric, and Moqtada al-Sadr, today probably the most feared.

Sunni religious leaders have been no kinder to women. When he was president of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council last year, the Sunni hardliner Mohsen Abdel-Hamid proposed replacing the civil law that had been used in Iraq's family law courts with Shariah. It was only when women from Iraq's different religious sects denounced the decision in street protests and conferences that Shariah was listed as just one of several sources of legislation in Iraq's temporary constitution.

One must question how seriously to take the State Department's $10 million "Iraqi Women's Democracy Initiative" to train women ahead of the polls on Sunday. Consider a recent meeting in which U.S. lawmakers were to teach 20 Iraqi female candidates the basics of campaigning.

USA Today reported that the women had to travel to Jordan because it was too dangerous to be seen meeting Americans at home. The House members showed up with banners, bumper stickers and T-shirts as examples of election paraphernalia. One congresswoman even brought a sponge bearing her name, by way of example. Had they bothered to read up about Iraq, they might have learned that most names on election lists are kept secret to protect candidates' lives.

A recent survey by Women for Women International, a nonprofit organization that helps women in war zones, found that a majority of Iraqi women wanted the right to vote on the final constitution and believed that women should take part in local and national councils. But the group warned that the limited role women have had in the new Iraqi governing bodies leaves little room for cheer.

The United States appointed only three women to the 25-member Interim Iraqi Governing Council, and they did not have the right to serve on the Presidential Council. No women were appointed to be governors of 18 provinces in Iraq, nor were any appoint-ed to a committee overseeing the drafting of the new Iraqi constitution.

If the elections are to signal any kind of new beginning for Iraq, women - many of whom risk their lives to take part - must help shape that future.

Mona Eltahawy is a columnist in New York for Asharq al-Awsat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. Her website is at www.monaeltahawy.com.

This article was first published in the International Herald Tribune. It is republished by permission of the author.