Dr. Shier Gharib remembers women coming to her home in Kifri, Iraq, begging for an abortion because they knew their unborn child would eventually starve or die of a preventable childhood disease. She remembers women dousing themselves with kerosene and lighting a match because of society's tacit approval of the spousal abuse they faced.
Gharib, a general practitioner who left Iraq in 1997 and now lives in Winnipeg, could not remain idle. In 1992, she and 7 others founded the Independent Women's Organization (IWO) to defend women's rights and their struggle for equality. The organization was born the year after Iraq brutally suppressed rebellions in Kurdistan and President Saddam Hussein changed the law to allow honour killings — the murder of women who bring “shame” to their family. The IWO has since saved about 250 women from honour killings.
At its height, between 1994 to 1999, the IWO had about 2000 members. There are fewer members today and its women's shelter has closed, but those at risk in Kurdistan are still being hidden. Women living elsewhere are not as fortunate. “In the centre and south of Iraq, the dictatorship [was] so strong that we [were] unable to function,” says Yanar Mohammed, an architect who founded IWO's Canadian committee in 1998.
Some say the situation facing women was even grimmer in the south, but there is scant information. Amnesty International says dozens of women accused of prostitution — including obstetrician Najat Mohammad Haydar — were beheaded without judicial process in October 2000.
Gharib says Iraqi women are second-class citizens. A man can kill a woman who commits adultery, widows must wait 7 years before remarrying, and 2 women equal 1 male witness in court. “[The laws] are just an excuse to control women,” says Gharib.
Economic sanctions imposed following the first Gulf War have also taken a toll. The cost of an IUD — the preferred method of birth control among rural women — increased sharply.
Without birth control, the number of unwanted pregnancies increased, but abortion is prohibited. “I had patients — hundreds — crying in my clinic for an abortion.” Some nurses and midwives performed illegal abortions, while other women relied on folk remedies and wound up in hospital.
In 1996, when Gharib worked with Save the Children on the border of Iraq and Iran, she treated up to 4 victims of land mines every day. “They were young people with no hands, no legs.”
What fresh horror will the latest war bring? “Right now I'm more scared about the postwar situation than the war,” says Gharib, 33. “We are used to being bombarded, but afterward, it will be a terrible, unstable situation.”
She fears that tribalism will take hold in Kurdistan, while Mohammed predicts that Islamic fundamentalism will sweep through the south.
Iraq was once a symbol of modernity in the Arab world, Gharib and Mohammed recall fondly. The 1960s and 1970s were a “golden age,” when education and medical care were free, women accounted for 40% of public sector workers, and the literacy rate surpassing 80%. Mohammed, 42, says wars and economic sanctions have destroyed most of those gains.
Gharib has spent years working at odd jobs, such as cleaning rugs and houses, as her husband seeks to become eligible to practise in Canada. In April, she was studying for her own entrance exam, caring for her 7-year-old son and watching the war on CNN. “I'm still suffering here,” she says, “but in a different way.” — Barbara Sibbald, CMAJ