But few others saw it that way, and by then it was out of Fern’s hands. If Rice wanted to speak, Fern wouldn’t have been able to stop her. Manal saw that Fern, like so many other well-intentioned people and projects in this occupation, was being tugged in different directions by powerful people, and that no progress would be made.
Manal decided not to attend.
HEATHER HEARD A lot about the “Heartland of Iraq” conference as it approached, and, for all that she knew Fern was a controversial figure, she was glad to know someone was making progress on women’s issues. She and Manal had gotten off to a slow start with their own centers, and Heather realized that her estimation of “a couple of weeks” to open the first center had been pure fantasy. A month had passed, Manal still didn’t have Iraqi women for the board of directors, and Heather was bogged down in the process of finding a building.
There were two ways to get property in Baghdad. Either you arrived with guns and thugs and seized it by force, which was how most of the Iraqi political parties operated, or there was the correct way: go through the CPA’s Office of Facilities Management, which tried to keep track of available properties—mostly former offices of the Ba’ath Party, or mini-mansions owned by Saddam’s officials. The Americans now officially owned them and were trying to award them to new political parties or civil society groups like the women’s center. Heather had imagined that she would simply look through the grid coordinates for available properties, visit a few, pick a building, and start renovation. However, Manal recognized that different neighborhoods were dominated by different tribes and religious affiliations, and insisted the Iraqi women have input on every decision.
“You can’t just force a center on women. They have to be part of the process,” Manal said. Heather knew she was right, but it took time. Given the security restrictions on Heather, and the many roadblocks and traffic jams the Iraqi women might face—not to mention the sheer difficulty of explaining directions in a city that didn’t use street names or signs—the logistics of bringing everyone together at a site was overwhelming. Heather had to reserve a convoy of Humvees, then get security clearance to bring the Iraqi “site survey” women into the Green Zone, then find them flak jackets and helmets. One trip to see a building could occupy the entire day.
A few weeks in, they found the perfect building—a former Ba’ath Party office that everyone agreed on. But then an old man suddenly turned up claiming the Ba’athists had stolen it from him. “It was my art institute,” the old man said. “We thought when the Ba’ath Party was gone, we’d get our building back.” He had all the paperwork. Heather gave him back his building, and started the search again.
The next “perfect” building was one that a Kurdish political party also wanted. Heather fought hard for it and won by lobbying her contacts inside the CPA. But when Manal found out that Heather had wrested it from a political party, she backed away.
“We can’t take it from them,” she said to Heather.
“No, don’t worry,” Heather assured her. “We talked to the right people and we’re going to get it. It’s ours.”
But Manal shook her head. Perhaps Heather had the legal authority according to the CPA, but on the streets, muscle mattered.
“If we inherit that building,” Manal told her, “the Kurdish party will move somewhere crappy, then they’ll drive by and see us inside with our lights on and our computers and women going in and out. What do you think they’ll do? Even if the leaders understand, the guards will come after us.”
Heather understood that “come after us” meant physically attack the center. Would the local police department stand up to a Kurdish group to defend a women’s group? Manal doubted it. Was there even a local police department up and running? No one was certain. So it was back to the drawing board. Weeks turned into months. Heather was getting frustrated.
So, when she heard about Fern’s centers in Hilla, she was impressed that Fern had managed to accomplish so much. She knew Manal was not attending the conference, but had assumed she was too busy. Early in the conference, Heather joined a busload of Iraqi women on a morning excursion to see the historical sites of Babylon. Spirits on the bus were high as the women were enjoying a three-day getaway, all meals and accommodations included, with no housework or hovering husbands. This was their chance to participate in the massive changes occurring in their country, which they had only heard about on television. The women clapped and sang songs the entire trip. At one point, they turned to Heather and Stephanie Kuck, who had come with her: “American song!” they insisted. Heather chose Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” It seemed appropriate.
When the conference started and she saw all the attendees, Heather breathed a sigh of relief. At least someone was getting something done. Nice, she thought, looking at the agenda. It was packed with interesting workshops, speeches, and discussions on democracy: How could they ensure women were involved in the new Iraqi constitution? How could they improve women’s chances of getting elected to political positions? The leaflets distributed asked questions such as “What is democracy? Does it mean majority rule, and if so, what protections ought there to be for minorities? Does freedom require the separation of religion and state?” This was exactly what the women needed, she thought happily.
The first day of the conference, the women gathered in the auditorium of Babylon University. One of the organizers asked women from each of the different provinces in Iraq to stand up. Each group had a smattering of women either veiled in colored headscarves, unveiled, or in all-black abayas. However, when the organizer called out the Najaf province, every woman was cloaked entirely in black. Many even wore gloves and hoods, with slits for their eyes. Heather rarely ran into women like this in Baghdad, and seeing them in such force emphasized for her how vast and diverse Iraq’s female population was. It was never going to be easy to do something that would need the approval of such a wide spectrum of women.
She peered curiously toward the women in black. The black cloak was an intimidating barrier to friendly conversation. How could she tell if the woman was smiling, or happy to speak with her? Without being able to see her mouth, Heather feared she wouldn’t understand her Arabic, and the conversation would become awkward. What if I run into her later, and don’t recognize her? It was easier to socialize with the Iraqi women who looked and dressed more Western. From what Heather could see, the Najaf women also stayed in a tight huddle, speaking only to one another. Sometimes she caught them staring at her, though, and she wondered what they thought. She imagined she must look unusual to them, as an American woman in soldier’s fatigues.
The conference hosts were Iraqi women: Rend al-Rahim, Zainab al-Suwaij, Safia al-Souhail, Ala Talabani, and Tanya Gilly. They were mostly expats, professional women who had lived outside Iraq for a decade or more and had contacts inside the Bush administration. One of the first speakers, Rend al-Rahim, looked more like the CEO of a Fortune 500 company in America—nothing like the Najaf women. She told the audience that women’s rights were impossible without democracy. “If women want government to be responsive to their needs, they will need institutions that ensure that their leaders are representative and accountable.” Heather saw some women sitting attentively in the lecture seats, pens at hand and conference literature on their laps. Other women, the conservative ones, sat stone-faced in the back.
Heather drove back to Baghdad and returned the following day. She saw that the organizers had tried to overcome the women’s self-imposed ethnic and religious divisions and force them into collaborative workshops on governance. Someone had brought copies of the Swiss constitution, the only one the organizers could find in Arabic. During lunch, Heather shared a table with a group of Iraqi women, and found herself transported back to high school civics class as she explained the differences between central and local government, and the separation of powers. As the question of freedom in a democracy came up again and again, Heather saw how the textbook philosophy collided with t
he messy reality of life in Iraq.
“Who has which freedoms?” the women wanted to know, and “Where do they end?”
Rather than welcome freedom, the women complained about it.
“Too much freedom is not good because men take advantage of this freedom and rape women,” one participant pointed out to her. Many in the room nodded in agreement.
“Men shouldn’t have so much freedom. They must be controlled,” said another.
“Under Saddam, at least I could leave the house. Now I don’t have the freedom to do that.”
Heather listened empathetically. “Freedom doesn’t come at the exclusion of the rule of law,” she explained, adding, “We’re working on that.”
Throughout the meeting, she caught glimpses of Stephanie Kuck doing the same, and briefly met Fern, who was running around. Her straw-colored hair brushed loosely around her shoulders and she was harried but pleasant. She congratulated Fern on the conference, and they chatted briefly. Fern struck Heather as friendly, intelligent, and passionate about her work.
As she left the university at the end of the day, she noticed Iraqi men protesting outside the gates. They had hung banners across the doorways, but Heather couldn’t read what they said.
Great! she thought. Under Saddam, no one was allowed to protest, but under democracy, they were free to express their voices. Protests show that people feel comfortable expressing their opinions freely. Protests are progress.
THE PROTESTS WERE not good, thought Zainab al-Suwaij. The conference was a disaster and the Americans had no idea.
Manal was not the only woman with strong concerns about how the conference would play in conservative southern Iraq. Zainab was one of the hosts and a speaker, and an acquaintance of both Manal and Fern. A founder of Women for a Free Iraq, she was the granddaughter of a well-respected Shia ayatollah, and had fled Iraq for Boston in 1993. She had worked with Fern to arrange this conference, but had disagreed with her idea to invite such a variety of women. What to Fern was diversity, to Zainab was a toxic mix. Bringing Sunnis and Shias together was a volatile combination, but Fern had gone out of her way to invite the most extremist and intolerant of the Shia groups—even supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fadhila Party, another Iranian-backed group.
Being new to the country and not speaking the language, Fern had little way of knowing that many of the women she had invited were from politically active families who had risen up against Saddam in the 1980s and ‘90s. After he killed hundreds of thousands of Shia after the first Gulf War, and enforced his police state, many disappeared into Iran to hide out and wait. Zainab thought of them as “sleeper cells” waiting for a crack in Saddam’s armor, so they could return to Iraq. The Americans gave them their chance to return to power, but their political goal was not democracy. They wanted to create an Islamic state, dominated by Shias, just like in Iran. They also wanted revenge against those who had supported Saddam and killed their family members. The Americans had helped them do something they never would have done on their own—establish a Shia power in Iraq. Now they wanted the Americans out of the way.
“Fern, don’t let these people into the conference. They will disrupt it,” she had argued. But Fern had insisted. Unlike Manal, Zainab had agreed to attend. And now, of course, they were interrupting and arguing at every turn.
Zainab had agreed to give the controversial talk about the role of Islam in the new Iraqi government and constitution. She was firm on this subject: government and religion should be separate, to maintain the purity of the Islamic religion. Yet, when she broached the topic of separation between mosque and state, the Najaf women objected.
“Does she mean that religious men and women can’t be part of politics?” shouted one black-clad woman in the crowd. “This will make us a secular society—and we will not stand for a secular society!”
Fierce agreement was expressed. “The mosque should be the state,” said another. “Islam is tolerant of other religions, so it should be the official religion of Iraq,” one woman said.
“La, la,” Zainab said, “no, no.” “In Iraq, politics and religion have always been separate.”
But these women seemed to have been prepped with arguments beforehand, as they stuck loyally to their line, “the mosque should be the state.” She overheard them saying, “Democracy means rule by the people. That is forbidden. God must rule, not people.”
She thought to herself, These are extremist ideas from Iran. They want a theocracy and nothing less. The Shia found the notion of the separation of mosque and state outrageous, and interrupted whenever they could.
The Western women weren’t helping matters. Most conservative Iraqi women ridiculed them behind their backs.
“Why are these American women here—why don’t they go home and take care of their children and their husbands? American women are against marriage and families. They abandon their elderly parents and let their children misbehave. Look at how they are dressed—they want to teach our daughters to be prostitutes. Don’t speak to them!”
With each passing day, the male crowds outside the university thickened. Local residents accused the Americans of brainwashing the women. In the evenings, an Islamic scholar arrived at the dormitories, uninvited, and began to proselytize to the women, warning them of “foreign” ideas brought by the Americans. Zainab heard that young clerics loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr spread rumors in their Friday sermons that Americans in the conference were planning to offer “free abortions” to the women and “show porn” to the men.
Zainab and other women stood up to the protesters, and tried to reason with them. This is what freedom means: you have a right to express yourself, and we will listen, but now we have the right to speak too. If you believe in freedom and democracy, if you say you do, then you must let women speak.
But they didn’t care about freedom or democracy. They cared about Islam.
The Americans seemed unaware of the controversies, which unfolded entirely in Arabic. And the Americans understood only Sunni and Shia—not the dozens of different, layered groups that stratified each. If they did hear of complaints or controversies, they characterized them not as serious threats but as freedom of expression—and even encouraged them.
At the end of the conference, the organizers submitted four recommendations to Ambassador Bremer, who had arrived to give the closing remarks. 1. Women should make up 30 percent of all committees responsible for drafting the new Iraqi constitution. 2. All laws discriminatory toward women should be repealed. 3. The future constitution should require that the Iraqi parliament have a quota of no less than 30 percent women. 4. Monitoring committees should be established in all Iraqi institutions to ensure women’s rights are protected and promoted.
The videotape from Condeleeza Rice was shown, a huge coup for the organizers, but Rice was a woman who represented the military occupation to the local women. Zainab saw the Americans congratulating themselves. For them, the four days had been enlightening and educating—they believed that it had raised awareness, organized the women’s groups, and unleashed newfound energy to tackle women’s rights. Zainab, however, thought that although the conference was effective on paper, it had in fact cemented the bitter differences. To the men of Hilla the conference was a slap in the face, and they were furious. Fern would have been much better off lying low and not challenging the Iraqi men so publicly. Zainab’s driver had told her that even the man Fern had hired to operate the sound system had been outside helping hang signs that said THESE ARE FOREIGN IDEAS AND THEY ARE AGAINST ISLAM. DO NOT LISTEN.
She warned Fern about one employee in particular.
“Are you sure?” she said.
“Fern, I don’t know what is going on but this guy is playing double agent with you. He is showing you one face, but what he feels inside is something else. Please pay attention and be careful. You must not trust anyone here.”
But Fern quickly became distracted by all the other things to do. She had a good heart, Zainab tho
ught, but that wouldn’t be enough. Fern had her vision of Iraq, and she had her vision of how this would all play out. She didn’t want to hear otherwise. She listened only to what she wanted to hear.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ZIA JUMPED WHEN her phone rang as she sat in her office. She hadn’t forgotten the crazy taxi driver’s threats, and it made her more nervous than she used to be. For the past several weeks, she had been driving herself to work, since no one took the Green Zone bus anymore. Everyone agreed publicly that their different work schedules made coordination impossible, but that was only part of the truth. A gunman had recently opened fire on a bus of cleaning ladies driving into the Green Zone. No one had been hit, but the message was clear. Zia felt it safer to drive herself.
Right now, though, she had a different thing to worry about.
“Zia, your father is on the grounds!” her friend whispered when Zia answered the phone. “He is asking around for Keith.”
Oh no, Zia thought. Baba knew people at IMN because he had installed the security fence in the fall. Everyone had been gossiping about her and Keith lately, so it was not surprising that one of the workers must have ratted her out to Baba—Arab men always stuck together. She looked out her window and saw Baba standing on the grass, chatting with a circle of workers.
She knew he would be circumspect, not wanting to spread any dangerous gossip about his own daughter. However, simply by being here he was sending her and the office workers a clear message that he was aware of what was happening, and didn’t approve. Zia quickly called Keith.
“Don’t come over!” she said. “My father’s here. He’s looking for you.”
“I’ll come over and talk to him. We should meet,” he said.
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