We are writing you regarding the massacre against LGBT people in Iraq that started in Baghdad on February 6 and continues to be escalated.  The victims will reach one hundred soon and the government has not only turned a blind eye but denies it altogether. We are working on documenting names\pictures of the victims and circumstances of the killings.

Sign our petition to tell the Iraqi government to stand up for the LGBT community and prosecute those who have a hand in this massacre. Our statement is attached below and is a few days old so the numbers are even higher. Please help us spread the word about these atrocious and unconscionable killings.

As we celebrate International Women’s Day by raising awareness on injustices against women, let us stand with our persecuted brothers and sisters in their struggle for rights and dignity.

Best Regards,

Yanar Mohammed, Organization of Women’s Freedom In Iraq, March 8, 2012

Campaign of Iraqi gay killings by smashing skulls with concrete blocks

New barbaric attacks started against Iraqi LGBT people in many cities, like Baghdad and Basra, using inhumane methods such as hitting the head and body parts of gay victims with building concrete blocks repeatedly till death or by pushing them over high building roof (in Basra city). The killing, torture, and dismemberment of people described as “adulterous” by Islamic Shia militias, as well as hanging lists on the walls of several sections in Al-Sadr city and in Al- Habibea region, are terrorizing the society at large and the Iraqi LGBT community in particular because the attacks are directed against anyone suspected with gay practices or appearance.

The first killings took place on the sixth of February 2012 and have been escalating since. One of the lists hung in Al-Sadr city included the names and addresses of 33 people, while lists in other areas named many more. News has confirmed that 42 gay men were tortured and killed so far, mostly by concrete blocks, while some by dismembering.

Islamic militias in Iraq believe the religious family should consist of a male husband and a female wife, and is the cornerstone of building a pious Islamic society. Such an institution is handed to males to rule and control, and denies the right-to-life, or rather commands a death sentence against all who do not fit under the religious description of a family.

Based on these rules campaigns of honor killings happen against women and LGBT people. Just as women face honour killings as a result of extra marital affairs, lesbian and gay people are persecuted for their sexual orientation and are facing the same fate.

We call on all freedom-lovers of the world, the women’s and human rights organization and governments in the advanced world to put pressure on the Iraqi government to provide protection for LGBT people in Iraq, establish legislation to defend their right to life, and criminalize all aggressions against them. We also demand a full inquiry into the groups and criminals behind the killing campaign and their full punishment from the legal and correctional system.

Iraqi LGBT\ Madi Al Iraq \Ruby Al Hurriya

Organization of Women’s Freedom In Iraq\ Yanar Mohammed

Iran

We hear from Iranians that women there conducted small, short, scattered demonstrations on March 8, attempting to evade the government’s on-going repression of all protests. Fearful that the uprisings in the Middle East will spread to Iran, the government has intensified the crack-down it began against the mass protests following the stolen election of June 2009. The regime not only jails and tortures protesters, but also executes many prisoners. See the news on  radiozamaneh.com and iranma.org, which published an “Iranian Call for Global Action for IWD.” Following are excerpts from the Call’s appeal to the United Nations:

• “Stop gender-based apartheid
• Stop the incessant execution of political prisoners
• Stop the stoning of women
• Send a delegation to Iran to investigate the conditions of the prisoners”

“Fact sheet on the discriminatory laws in Iran:

1. Testimony of two women is equal to one man.
2. A man can marry a female child as young as nine years old.
3. A female is considered male property and subservient to him even in matters of sex
4. Forceful sex by a husband is not recognized as rape.
5. Divorce is the right of man.
6. The custody of children is the right of man.
7. Men have the right to have up to four wives and many female concubines.
8. Inheritance right of a male is twice that of the female.
9. Mandatory Hejab (covering of women) with no freedom of clothes for women.
10. Honor killings of the women have increased in Iran. Iran Human Rights reported <http://iranhr.net/spip.php?article803> on November 29, 2008: “A high ranking official in the Iranian police said in an interview with the daily newspaper Etemaad that there have been 50 honor killings in the last 7 months.”
11. Article 1117 of the IRI constitution empowers the husband to forbid his wife from accepting a job.
12. Article 1005 of the IRI Constitution dictates that the husband has the right to control his wife’s freedom of movement and behavior.”

Egypt

The participation of women in the revolution was unprecedented, and WSS will carry a report of a recent talk on it by Nawal El Saadawi, the feminist-socialist writer. We heard about the “Million Women March” held on IWD, just a few weeks after the Mubarak dictatorship fell, from both her and from Ahdaf Soueif, another world-famous Egyptian writers, both of whom had just participated in the revolution:

Soueif, speaking in New York on March 8, was asked about reports that the march had been attacked by Mubarak-associated government “thugs.” She replied that she heard the march had only 200 women, and “they should not have gone out with so few.” She also stated that all the Egyptian women’s NGOs had maintained throughout that the revolution was about economics, justice, and equal rights of citizenship, and not about gender issues.

El Saadawi, speaking a few days later, had a different report of IWD. She said that several thousand people had marched, the majority of them young men. The demonstration had been planned by young men who were protesting the military’s appointment of a committee to revise the constitution that contains no women and no young people. And only one woman was appointed to the new cabinet, to a minor post. There was no attack on the march, El Saadawi said, but after the women went home, the young men resumed camping out in Tahrir Square in order to give notice to the military that the people intend to move the revolution forward. It was those young men who were attacked that night by “thugs.”

She also said that “legal” NGOs had worked with Mubarak, while the Egyptian Women’s Union, with which she worked, was banned.

Ukraine

The first-ever IWD demonstration in Ukraine was held in Kiev on March 8. It was called Feminist Ofenzyva, “protest against exploitation of and discrimination against women.”  Short videos can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/user/BRYUKHOVETSKA

Peru

Peruvian feminists marched on IWD under this banner: "Women of all races and desires, fighting for our rights!"

Peru has a long-established, vibrant feminist movement. For IWD, a coalition marched and proclaimed: “Women can change Peru! If we change the lives of women, we change the world.”

A Peruvian friend of MHI who is active with women’s groups sent us their proclamation:

We are feminists, grass roots and peasant groups, unemployed, housewives, women who work in homes, indigenous women and women of African descent, homeless women affected by political violence, lesbians, workers in unions, students, writers, artists, disabled, people living with HIV.  Being more than half the population and the electorate, we say to vote your conscience in the coming elections!

The proclamation includes a list of 10 demands, which are partially summarized below:

1. a political system, free of male bias, that guarantees women’s participation and interests
2. an economy that recognizes women’s domestic and voluntary work
3. decision-making power over our lives and our bodies
4. eradication of violence against women, lesbians, and transgendered people; an end to sex trafficking and exploitation, prostitution, and race and gender discrimination
5. sexual and reproductive rights, eradication of maternal mortality, decriminalization of abortion in cases of rape and other cases
6. truth, justice and reparations for women survivors of political or sexual violence
7. education without discrimination and that helps to eradicate machismo and includes the indigenous
8. an end to the corruption and impunity of the State, and for transparency and a public ethic
9. faced with climate change, we want policies of prevention, mitigation and adaption
10. we demand our right to engage in social struggles and an end to criminalization of protests. ­­­

Exclusive interview by MHI with Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), which she co-founded shortly after the US invasion in 2003.

Iraq is fast becoming a forgotten story to the rest of the world, but women continue to be killed in the streets of Baghdad simply for being women. OWFI activists are still in constant danger of assassination by political Islamists. I still have to sleep in secret locations and travel with guards, and we need guards to protect our office. Fortunately, we share a building with the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI), who support all our endeavors, events, and programs.

One of our new projects is organizing women workers to lay the groundwork for unionization, a joint project with FWCUI. Few women in Iraq are in unions, and most other unions have shown little interest in bringing them in. Our project, called “Women at Work,” consists at this stage of finding interested nurses in private hospitals and helping them learn leadership skills, so they are able to start preparatory committees toward unionization. They are now organizing for a nurses’ annual conference. We found some “experienced” women who were union leaders under Saddam, but they tend to be nationalistic or patriarchist; we want to help new left-leaning leaders to emerge.

In October, we started experimenting with airing programs on our new radio station. I am really excited about that, because radio and TV were so important to letting people know about OWFI and raising discussion on women’s rights in general. After the government censored OWFI on their affiliated TV stations, we begin to need our own media outlets. We are already swamped with applications from groups wanting to put on programs. Our rule is that all the material we broadcast must be secular, egalitarian and women-friendly.  It is important to move the material people hear to the left, that they  hear something besides the religious programs that are all there is on the radio now.

We recently completed an anti-trafficking report that made a big splash. The study detailed the huge trafficking networks in Iraq who kidnap and smuggle girls and women to other countries where they are sold into prostitution. One line of trafficking takes girls ages 11 to 15, who are considered especially desirable in some other countries. We wrote a big report, and then we didn’t know what to do with it, because the Iraqi government will not admit this problem exists. When we sent an OWFI activist out of the country to announce the report on a TV station, the Iraqi government spent the next three days denouncing us on its television station, Al Iraqia. They kept showing a picture of “the woman who calls Iraqi women prostitutes,” which of course makes her a clear target for the Islamists and nationalists.

The government often denounced us before, but the extent of this campaign seems disproportionate to our threat to it. In fact, people have warned us that if we do anything further with this report, we surely will be assassinated by the trafficking networks!

OWFI continues to publish our newspaper, “Equality,” and to run shelters and safe houses for women fleeing the threat of “honor” killings. We now have three secret safe houses in Baghdad and suburbs. They are run by teams of families whom we train.

OWFI is not involved in the coming national elections. Some members were going to run on slates of individuals under the slogan “freedom and equality,” but now they are not going to participate, since we read the newly legislated election law, which is tailored to bring forward religious and ethnic groups to have full control of their areas. The last election was completely dominated by parties formed on religious and ethnic bases, and look what has happened.

It is completely untrue that women or men have benefited from the more than six years of foreign occupation. For example, the new constitution contains Article 41, which allows Sharia law to supersede the previous family law known as the “personal status law.” Another example: unionization is still illegal for public sector workers, who are a large part of the workforce.

In terms of how we live, Baghdad buildings, which received normal electrical service before the invasion, since it receive electricity for only one hour in the morning and one hour at night. If you want electricity the rest of the time, you have to buy it at a high price from a private seller. Fuel of all kinds is as expensive as it is in New York-a taxi ride costs about the same. The condition of women has deteriorated greatly from the dangers of war, lack of security and ascendancy of political Islam, especially because so many girls no longer get an education. In fact, I estimate that twenty percent of OWFI members are illiterate, especially the younger women.

For more information, see OWFI’s  website: www.equalityiniraq.com

One Comment on “Iraqi Women Still Fighting for Freedom and Equality”

1. 1Stéphane said at 2:44 pm on December 11th, 2009:translated in french at http://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/les-femmes-irakiennes-luttent-toujours-pour-la-liberte-et-legalite/