“Liberation” is a sham

Published on 9 March 2007 in General. 1 Comment

Haifa Zangana, Guardian Comment is Free, March 6:

The regime in Baghdad’s Green Zone is busy organising a celebration of a different kind for this year’s International Women’s Day on 8 March. Among its highlights will be the execution of four Iraqi women. This follows on from its decision to honour four of its Iraqi officers accused of raping a young woman Zainab Abbas Hussain al-Shummary. The office of prime minister had forged an American medical report. Long gone are the colourful parades of Iraqi women commemorating their achievements. Now we only have parades of death, where the “liberated” and “empowered” Iraqi women and girls, covered head to toe with hijabs and abayas, will queue at police stations, prisons, detention camps, hospital’s “fridges” and crowded morgues looking for the disappeared, kidnapped or their assassinated loved ones. 

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1 Responses to ““Liberation” is a sham”

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  • Addamo
    9 March 2007 at 11:31 am

    While on the subject of women’s rights, here is a pearl.

    We’ve long know that women in the US military were treated appallingly, but this is quite a revelation from Col. Janis Karpinski being questioned by the law professor Marjorie Cohn.

    Because the women, in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the portoilets or the latrines, were not drinking liquids after 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. And in 120-degree heat or warmer, because there was no air conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep. And rather than make everybody aware of that, because that’s shocking — and as a leader, if that’s not shocking to you, then you’re not much of a leader — so what they told the surgeon to do was, “Don’t brief those details anymore. And don’t say specifically that they’re women. You can provide that in a written report, but don’t brief it in the open anymore.

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