Sisters in War

by Christina Asquith

  AS SHE THOUGHT over her new assignment, Heather’s excitement grew. She envisioned nine sunny, airy “Iraq Women’s Centers” in neighborhoods across Baghdad, with computer rooms, conference tables, and an active membership of neighborhood women who would use the centers as a hub for their activities. Women would receive job training, network, organize political campaigns, and support one another. She imagined leaving Baghdad and being able to say, “I created nine women’s centers.” That would be a tangible accomplishment.

  But she wasn’t sure where to start. Did Iraq have any local women’s groups, and did they already have centers? She had no idea. She emailed Sloan, Stephanie, and Ester and asked them to partner with her.

  “Let’s do this!” she said.

  Sloan applied the brakes. He was a former civil affairs officer, like Heather, and had spent most of his twenties and early thirties living abroad and working in war zones.

  “Whoaa. These things take time,” he said.

  Sloan wanted to flesh out the details. Heather had few contacts among Iraqi women, and little expertise in launching aid programs. Given the increasingly tight security restrictions, she wouldn’t be able to get out of the Green Zone regularly enough to execute the plan. Many of the international aid organizations that she could have turned to were packing up and leaving due to the bombing of the UN headquarters—and others viewed soldiers like Heather as the enemy.

  “We need someone on the ground,” he said. “You should meet Manal Omar.” Heather had already heard about Manal through the grapevine, and the way Sloan raved about her only heightened what was becoming legendary status. She spoke Arabic; she was Muslim; and she was living alone in a house in downtown Baghdad. (Among the hundreds of eager Americans locked in their palace offices, proximity to and acceptance by the locals carried a large measure of clout. And here was Manal, not only living like the locals, but living among them, socializing with them, and gaining their respect and trust. There was a popular story circulating about Manal, that, following a back operation, she was unable to attend one of the weekly meetings of Iraqi women’s groups. Instead of proceeding without her, all the women moved the meeting to Manal’s house.

  That was influence.

  Since Manal couldn’t come to the palace to meet with them, because of that operation, Heather’s group arranged a conference call with her.

  MANAL ROLLED HER eyes as she hung up the phone. Women’s centers? she thought. That was such a typical U.S. government project—they just loved bricks-and-mortar buildings that they could point to as accomplishments. The aid world had long moved beyond dropping buildings into communities as a way to help them. That was so 1980s. And why had a rookie soldier been put in charge of more than a million dollars, when she knew nothing about women’s rights?

  Sloan had promised her that Heather was not another “bright idea fairy,” Sloan’s term for the people inside the CPA with millions to spend, dozens of big ideas, and absolutely zero expertise. Manal could tell the soldier was intelligent and grounded, but that was hardly enough.

  “We want a safe space for women to go to discuss social and political ideas,” Heather had explained on the phone. “We see about nine centers across Baghdad, and we have funding for each of them.”

  Manal had not been polite.

  “So we’re just talking buildings?” she said. “Have you thought about what will go on inside them? Where’s the softer side of your plan? Where’s the human resources development, the capacity building, the sustainability, the community ownership?”

  At one point, Heather had suggested the centers could be a place to do Internet training. Manal barely contained her exasperation.

  “If you’re talking about computers, you’re talking about the elite,” Manal said. “Most women I work with don’t have electricity in their houses, let alone a computer. They wouldn’t even know how to work one. What will the center do for poor women?”

  Heather hadn’t had an answer.

  In recent months, and especially since their help with the young prostitute Muntaha, Manal had tried to soften her perception of the military. Many of the people involved had good hearts, and while as a body they represented the brutal edge of Bush’s foreign policy, Manal had learned that most individual soldiers cared little about politics. Unlike the Republicans in the CPA, they got their hands dirty each day and were on the streets and in the neighborhoods, and she respected what Heather was trying to do. Nonetheless, the wall that separated aid workers from soldiers existed because the military did still shoot at people—whether they had to didn’t matter. Everything they did, even rebuilding schools, was to advance a military and political agenda. Heather was doing aid work, but as a military appointee to the CPA, she still used her title, wore a uniform, and carried an M16 rifle. Whereas Manal was there to help women for women’s sake—whether or not it served the USA’s political agenda in Iraq.

  Another reason to keep her distance was that the military, even civil affairs, wasn’t trained in aid work. Just because the soldiers were good enough to pick up the slack left by the CPA’s incompetence didn’t mean that they were doing humanitarian work correctly. Too often they assumed aid work was about donating pencils or bags of flour, but in fact helping people was incredibly complicated and, Manal knew, usually done wrong. The field of international aid work was as old as the Marshall Plan in the 1940s, but had really taken off in the 1980s with the widespread publicity given to the famines in Africa. Billions of dollars of aid had poured into Africa, and legions of do-gooder institutions with utopian plans and millions of dollars had descended on the continent, and yet, twenty years later, the problems persisted. Some in the aid world, including Manal, had incorporated the lessons learned: now, instead of just trying to feed hungry mouths or construct buildings, aid workers were being trained to help people help themselves. Rather than descending on communities with a we-know-best attitude, aid programs now sought to empower locals, let solutions percolate up from indigenous communities, and take into account cultural and political norms. Sustainability became the buzzword; programs had to be able to continue after the international aid community moved on.

  Perhaps women’s centers sounded good on paper, but what real assistance was being delivered, how would it be sustained when the Americans moved on, and was it even really needed? How did Heather know what was needed, and how would she assess her program and readjust when necessary? None of this had been thought through, and Heather, for all her good intentions, intelligence, and organizational skills, was way out of her depth.

  So Manal had just wished them luck and hung up the phone.

  AS HEATHER SLINKED back to her office, she felt embarrassed. She was the deadweight in the group, she knew, even though Manal had been diplomatic about it. She knew she was just the money gal. And yet, she wasn’t ready to throw up her hands.

  Within hours of their first phone call, Heather had called Manal back to make her case. Manal had the expertise to create programs, the contacts to give it legitimacy, and the freedom to move around the city; Heather had the money and the power inside the CPA to get property. Together, they were the perfect team, she argued.

  But Manal again refused.

  “In the development world you have to let the women decide what they want to do and form their own group to do it,” Manal explained. “You wait and let them lead you. It’s dangerous to put faith in bricks and mortar and think they will come.”

  This time, Heather had another answer.

  “What you’re talking about is fine if we had all the time in the world. But we don’t. We have a window of opportunity for women and it’s closing. The first Iraqi government has been picked and there were only three women in it. Women weren’t organized and they missed their chance to lobby for better representation.”

  Now Manal was listening.

  There are more big decisions coming, Heather continued, and Iraqi women have to be prepared. The first elections were scheduled for the following year
. The constitutional committee was being selected, and the ink would be dry on a new Iraqi constitution by 2005. Judges were being picked for indefinite seats. Iraq’s justice system was an open book at the moment, and this was the best time to effect legislation regarding “honor killings,” divorce, and the role of Islam in women’s lives. Now was the time for change. They had to seize the moment. If women’s groups didn’t act fast, decisions would be made without them and it would be five times harder to reverse them. The window would close.

  Heather insisted, “We’re looking at a short time frame to get women mobilized to participate in the political process. The centers could be a springboard for them to organize.”

  Heather spoke of the postwar period as a golden opportunity for Iraqi women, comparable to the 1770s in America, and she imagined that if women had been sitting at the table when the U.S. Constitution was being written, perhaps it wouldn’t have taken them 150 years to gain the right to vote.

  Manal paused, and then repeated something she’d said earlier. “Women for Women focuses mostly on poor women,” she said. “If you’re talking about women in government, you’re talking about the elite.” She could be convinced this might be a good idea, but she certainly wasn’t interested in working with the sophisticated Iraqi expats or the suits sent over from Condoleeza Rice’s office.

  But Heather didn’t recognize the distinction. Helping get women in government would, eventually, help poor women, she was sure.

  “Look at Afghanistan in 2002,” Heather pushed, getting passionate. “We did it the right way, we waited for these ideas to come from the grassroots, and we missed the window. By the time they were organized, the constitution, the loya jirgas, the things that needed to have women’s voices had already happened.”

  Yes, that was a good point. Manal had to consider, though, that teaming up with Heather would effectively make her a pariah in the international aid world. She was already an outcast just for being in Iraq. Working with the military on a project meant knocking down a big safety wall. Manal believed that civilians ought to feel that aid was coming from an impartial source, with no strings attached.

  Still, Manal liked Heather. She spoke some Arabic, knew the history of Iraq, and struck Manal as someone with heart.

  Manal also felt affected by the assassination of Aquila al-Hashimi, which Manal agreed had probably been done to send a message to women’s rights activists. Women had to fight back. Iraqi women did face an unprecedented opportunity to enshrine their rights in the law and constitution, a goal that would help them all. And she certainly wouldn’t be able to make such a difference alone. Women for Women was a small organization, dependent on grants and donations, working with almost no security. Manal thought of the poor women in the Shia south who needed more programs, training, and aid than Manal could offer in her current situation. Heather had $1.4 million to start building nine women’s centers, with more money promised. Who would Manal be helping if she refused to get involved? Women needed these centers, and the male-dominated Iraqi government had already shown its unwillingness to help.

  “You know, as much as I don’t like it, and it’s not the way to do this, it does make sense,” Manal finally said. She had to take the idea back to Women for Women International’s main office, but she was feeling convinced. “What kind of timeline are you thinking?” Manal asked. Heather held her breath as Manal’s tone changed. They were going to be a team.

  After six months of failed initiatives, Heather was determined to get something done quickly. She promised it would be an “instant thing.” She figured it’d take two weeks to look at about a dozen sites. They already had the funding, and Sloan Mann’s Office of Transitional Initiatives had agreed to renovate them. The process of obtaining the properties would take about a month, and they could start hiring in the meantime. They would be ready in time for women to use them in preparation for next year’s national elections. But they had to hurry.

  HEATHER THREW HERSELF into the project, immediately scouring lists of possible properties and investigating all leads. She really wanted the women’s centers to work, but it wouldn’t be easy. Plus, her heightened involvement with the problems facing Iraqi women—which she hoped to help address with the centers—had also heightened her staff’s curiosity about her own status as an American woman. Why, they wanted to know, didn’t she have a husband and children?

  Heather preferred not to get into it. In the wake of her parents’ divorce, years earlier, Heather had vowed to never marry or have children. She had career ambitions, and her own mother’s struggles to balance career and family in the 1970s had left young Heather skeptical of the modern-day mirage that women could “have it all.” Raised in Kansas in the 1950s, her mother had been an early feminist pioneer, one of the only women in her high school class to attend college. Hoping to escape the repressive Midwest, she and Heather’s father moved to Berkeley, California, in the 1960s, and Lelia was one of the first four women admitted into the California Institute of Technology’s PhD science program. After graduation, she became one of the first female science professors at Princeton University. When Heather came along, she raised her daughter with stories of bra-burning marches and personal battles against sexist male supervisors (one told her she couldn’t enter his program because the lab had no ladies’ bathroom). Heather still kept a framed photo of her mother on graduation day, rebelliously waving her diploma. She had cut her gown into a miniskirt and worn black fishnet stockings.

  But as Heather’s parents started a family, Lelia’s career lagged as she struggled to maintain her rigorous work schedule with the needs of children, in an era that still expected women to serve a hot dinner nightly and sew their own drapes. As Lelia pushed forty, her husband was openly having affairs, often citing the “free love” language of the women’s movement to justify his sleeping around. Heather still recoiled at the memory of her mother telling her and her sister, “I’m divorcing your father.” It was the early 1980s, and she bore the stigma of being the only girl in her elementary school class with divorced parents.

  From her mother’s experience, Heather concluded that if she wanted to succeed, she had to choose between a career and a husband. By the 1990s, society sent out a more liberating message about modern women’s equality, but personal observation showed otherwise. As she reached her late twenties, she saw her female friends get married, get pregnant, and struggle with their jobs and their ambitions. Despite many gains, American women were still very far from the kind of equality that her mother’s generation had fought for. Heather didn’t believe she could stay compatible with one person over her entire life, and had little interest in starting a family. She had thought long and hard about her choices and she was comfortable with them.

  AS MUCH AS Heather tried to keep her views to herself, however, the fact that she was single and childless was controversial among her staff. Many had only seen Americans portrayed in the movies, and studied Heather with fascination. As they became more relaxed and familiar working with one another, they pried endlessly into her private life. Heather shook her head as nonchalantly as possible. But soon the Iraqis filled the informational vacuum with gossip. Was she gay? A prostitute? Or maybe she hated men. Heather’s top assistant, Thanaa, kept her informed of the rumors. When security in the Green Zone tightened, people who came in for meetings would often stay over in trailers rather than travel at night. Heather could tell by the embarrassed whispers and suggestive looks on her staff’s faces that they assumed the guests were sharing her trailer.

  One afternoon, during lunch, a young staffer let his curiosity get the better of him.

  “Excuse, Ms. Coyne. I am so curious. Why aren’t you married?” he asked nervously.

  Perhaps this was the time to resolve the question.

  “I don’t plan on getting married.” Judging by the silence and shocked faces, Heather realized the impact of her honesty. She tried to explain. “People get married too easily,” she said. “I think only about th
irty percent of people who do get married ought to do it. The rest just do it because they feel like they have to.”

  Still, silence.

  “Then, half of them cheat anyway,” she continued. “If you can’t make that commitment, you shouldn’t enter into the agreement.”

  Thanaa, a veiled twenty-three-year-old, piped up. Heather had watched Thanaa’s confidence soar in recent months as she worked her way up inside the CPA. However, Thanaa always made clear her life goal: to get married and have children, as quickly as possible.

  “Yes, but, Miss Coyne, how could someone not want to get married?” Thanaa asked politely.

  Heather thought she had just explained her answer. She faced enough judgment as a single woman in her thirties in her own Western culture and felt annoyed at having to justify her personal life to prying Iraqi colleagues who would certainly not ask a man such a loaded question. Yet, around the table, the Iraqis were already trying to offer her blessings. “God willing, you will get married.”

  “No, I really don’t want to.”

  “But, miss,” Thanaa pressed, looking increasingly distressed. “How will you have children?”

  Heather said simply, “Oh, I don’t want to have children.”

  Looking around at the stupefied faces of her staff, she tried to lighten the mood. “Children are dirty and noisy. They need to be cared for all the time.”