Hillary: Iraqi Women Better Off Under Saddam

[KMAN]

I am embarrassed for Hillary.

Friday, Feb. 27, 2004 11:11 AM EST
Hillary: Iraqi Women Better Off Under Saddam

Sen. Hillary Clinton said this week that Iraqi women were better off under Saddam Hussein, arguing that when the brutal dictator ran the country women were at least assured the right to participate in Iraq's public life.

In comments that went unreported by the mainstream press, the former first lady told the Brookings Institution on Wednesday that since Saddam's removal from power, Iraq's post war governing councils had engaged in "pullbacks in the rights [women] were given under Saddam Hussein."

Sen. Clinton noted that while Saddam had been "an equal opportunity oppressor," women were at least assured certain constitutional guarantees.

While ignoring reports about the brutal dictator's rape rooms and other forms of persecution that were routine for women under his regime, Sen. Clinton insisted: "On paper, women had rights."

And for Iraqi women, those paper promises translated into real benefits, she claimed.

"They went to school; they participated in the professions, they participated in the government and business and, as long as they stayed out of [Saddam's] way, they had considerable freedom of movement," Clinton insisted.

But since Saddam's removal, the plight of Iraq's women has taken a significant turn for the worse, she contended.

"Now, what we see happening in Iraq is the governing council attempting to shift large parts of civl law into religious jurisdiction," Sen. Clinton explained, saying the loss of Saddam's guarantees amounted to a "horrific mistake" for women.

During her trip to Iraq last November, Clinton said Iraqi women told her personally how they felt less safe since the U.S. deposed Saddam.

"Women tell me they can't leave their homes, they can't go about their daily business. And there is a concerted effort to burn schools that are educating girls [and] to intimidate aid workers who are women," the leading Democrat complained.

The former first lady called on President Bush to issue a statement that the U.S. "will not become the vehicle by which women's rights in Iraq are turned back."

A full transcript of Sen. Clinton's remarks is available on the Brookings Institution Web site at: http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/comm/events/20040225.pdf. Her remarks on the worsening plight of Iraqi women can be found on pages 36, 37, and 38.

 

[JudgeWapner]

And there is no truth to these statements?for the record,I'm just asking because I honestly don't know.

 

[xpanda]

I posted an article about this about a month ago. Apparently, under Saddam, Iraq was secular and women thus had property rights and such. They haven't officially lost them yet, but it is appearing more and more that Sistani will win an election there, and that Muslim law will supercede the autonomy women have enjoyed there for the past 40 years or so.

As an additional point of interest, having a Muslim-based government will also prove to be the US's worst nightmare. This shitstorm that Bush was trying to 'liberate' is probably going to be a whole lot worse in a few years, once insurgencies become more divisive.

 

[Massmilwaukee]

There is truth to these statements... Xpanda posted this about three or four weeks ago.

Women in Iraq Decry Decision To Curb Rights
Council Backs Islamic Law on Families
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 16, 2004; Page A12
BAGHDAD, Jan. 15 -- For the past four decades, Iraqi women have enjoyed some of the most modern legal protections in the Muslim world, under a civil code that prohibits marriage below the age of 18, arbitrary divorce and male favoritism in child custody and property inheritance disputes.
Saddam Hussein's dictatorship did not touch those rights. But the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council has voted to wipe them out, ordering in late December that family laws shall be "canceled" and such issues placed under the jurisdiction of strict Islamic legal doctrine known as sharia.
This week, outraged Iraqi women -- from judges to cabinet ministers -- denounced the decision in street protests and at conferences, saying it would set back their legal status by centuries and could unleash emotional clashes among various Islamic strains that have differing rules for marriage, divorce and other family issues.
"This will send us home and shut the door, just like what happened to women in Afghanistan," said Amira Hassan Abdullah, a Kurdish lawyer who spoke at a protest meeting Thursday. Some Islamic laws, she noted, allow men to divorce their wives on the spot.
"The old law wasn't perfect, but this one would make Iraq a jungle," she said. "Iraqi women will accept it over their dead bodies."
The order, narrowly approved by the 25-member council in a closed-door session Dec. 29, was reportedly sponsored by conservative Shiite members. The order is now being opposed by several liberal members as well as by senior women in the Iraqi government.
The council's decisions must be approved by L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, and aides said unofficially that his imprimatur for this change was unlikely. But experts here said that once U.S. officials turn over political power to Iraqis at the end of June, conservative forces could press ahead with their agenda to make sharia the supreme law. Spokesmen for Bremer did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.
"It was the secret way this was done that is such a shock," said Nasreen Barawi, a woman who is Iraq's minister for social welfare and public service. "Iraq is a multiethnic society with many different religious schools. Such a sweeping decision should be made over time, with an opportunity for public dialogue." There is no immediate threat of the decision becoming law, Barawi said, "but after June 30, who knows what can happen?"
In interviews at several meetings and protests, women noted that even during the politically repressive Hussein era, women had been allowed to assume a far more modern role than in many other Muslim countries and had been shielded from some of the more egregiously unfair interpretations of Islam advocated by conservative, male-run Muslim groups.
Once Hussein was toppled, several women noted wryly, they hoped the new authorities would further liberalize family law. Instead, in the process of wiping old laws off the books, they said, Islamic conservatives on the Governing Council are trying to impose retrograde views of women on a chaotic postwar society.
Although it remained unclear which members of the council had promoted the shift of family issues from civil to religious jurisprudence, the decision was made and formalized while Abdul Aziz Hakim, a Shiite Muslim who heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was chairing the council under a rotating leadership system.
This week, several moderate council members spoke strongly against the decision in public forums, calling it a threat to both civilized progress and national unity. Nasir Chaderchi, a lawyer and council member who heads the National Democratic Party, criticized the council's action at a professional women's meeting Thursday. "We don't want to be isolated from modern developments," Chaderchi told the gathering of the Iraqi Independent Women's Group. "What hurts most is that the law of the tyrant Saddam was more modern than this new law." He said he hoped women would continue to protest until the order was reversed.
The council's new policy decree was brief and vague, mentioning neither particular family issues nor individual branches of Islamic law that would replace current civil law. But lawyers and other experts from Iraqi women's groups said the ambiguity of the decision was especially worrisome, since rival Islamic sects in Iraq espouse different policies for women's legal and marital rights.
Some critics said the proposed law might exacerbate tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, already divided over other power-sharing issues in postwar Iraq, and could even destroy families that have intermarried between the two strains of Islam. Under Hussein, they said, the universal application of civil family law prevented such issues from sparking sectarian strife.
Zakia Ismael Hakki, a female retired judge and outspoken opponent of the new order, said Thursday that since 1959, civil family law had been developed and amended under a series of secular governments to give women a "half-share in society" and an opportunity to advance as individuals, no matter what their religion.
"This new law will send Iraqi families back to the Middle Ages," Hakki said. "It will allow men to have four or five or six wives. It will take away children from their mothers. It will allow anyone who calls himself a cleric to open an Islamic court in his house and decide about who can marry and divorce and have rights. We have to stop it."

 

[KMAN]

Liberals = Pessimistic

Conservatives = Optimistic

I think that is the best way to describe each side.

 

[Wynn]

Maybe the new Iraqi Council found out how Hilary handled the US Health Care System overhaul in the 1990's and decided to lock their women up before it happened to them!

 

[Phaedrus]

posted by KMAN:
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>
Liberals = Pessimistic

Conservatives = Optimistic

I think that is the best way to describe each side.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

See that country over there, the one with the godless towel-heads? I think it might, at some point, possibly be planning to do something bad to us, or support someone who might or might not eventually do something bad to us. Two things I can say for certain -- they're brown and they don't watch 'American Idol.' Plainly, they have to go, for freedom's sake.

That is a very strange new definition of an optimistic point of view there KMAN.


Phaedrus

 

[Oceans11]

All these huge articles.

Are you like thick or something??

Under islam, women have zip rights.

Under a different regime, like Ghadaffi or Saddam, women have value and become a part of the system.

What is it?
Are you utterly clueless?
Is this like an international culture of stupidity?

Hello.
I'm from America and I am just finding out about the real world...

 

[chonce]

I concur with Phaedrues.

THe conservatives were pretty pessimistic when they concluded we must throw hundreds of billions of dollars, the lives of american soldiers,and the lives of Iraqi civillians, just on the off chance that they MIGHT someday do something bad.

What about these fruitless terror alerts? Isnt that pessimistic?

I just dont think you can paint the two parties into with such a broad brush here.

They both engage in pessimism, and optimism, when it is politically helpful to themselves.

However, the way KMAN speaks so proudly of the conservative party, I am surprised he didnt label them

COnservatives = perfect

Liberals = Minions of Satan