Heather saw the upcoming constitutional vote in October 2005 as the only way left to save Iraq. The drafting of the constitution was being called the most important event in the country’s steps toward self-governance. If one believed the U.S. rhetoric, the constitution would be the nation’s messiah, rescuing it from the fires of civil war and leading it to a peaceful future. Heather hoped, however naively, that the process of getting Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, and other ethnic groups to the table to talk about the issues could bring about the reconciliation needed to stop the street attacks. Around the U.S. headquarters, workers compared their efforts to America’s constitutional process in the late 1700s. They felt sure this historical document would serve as the supreme law of Iraq. Do this right and Iraq could still be saved. Do it wrong, and it would all be over.
But Iraq was a country long accustomed to a one-leader-one-decision style of rule. Debate and consensus didn’t exist under Saddam. Hence, it took months for the 275 members of the parliament to stop arguing over who would take which government positions, and who would be on the drafting committee for the constitution. After the Shias finally agreed on their government, the Americans tried to drag the Sunni leaders into the process, even though they held only a few seats, having boycotted the election. Instead of solidifying the nation, the drafting process dragged on for months as the politicians shouted at one another; assassination attempts occurred weekly and most politicians had to move their families to Jordan. Heather brought in experts on constitutional law from the United Nations and briefed women’s rights groups on the drafting process to keep them involved. She led the effort to have Iraqi groups do their own analysis and develop strategies, and felt that Manal would be proud of the way she was supporting local groups to solve problems rather than implement her agenda. Yet she knew it might be too late. She worked tirelessly and collapsed into bed at night feeling hopeless. One day this will matter, she thought, not quite believing it.
By the time the government had formed, the team had only six weeks to write the constitution in order to make the Bush adminstration’s target deadline of October. Little time was left for a proper consideration of each article. At the end, many said it was vague and rushed. The negotiations had been antagonistic and brutal, crystallizing differences among the groups rather than bringing them together. The Sunnis and Shias would not agree. Even after four deadline extensions due to lack of agreement, none of the fifteen Sunni members of the drafting committee signed the final document.
By the fall of 2005, the constitution was finalized and presented to the public for a referendum. It described Iraq as a “republican, federal, democratic, pluralistic system …” It opened:
In the name of God, the Most merciful, the Most compassionate. We have honored the sons of Adam. We, the people of Mesopotamia, the homeland of the apostles and prophets, resting place of the virtuous imams, cradle of civilization, crafters of writing, and home of numeration. Upon our land the first law made by man was passed, and the oldest pact of just governance was inscribed, and upon our soil the saints and companions of the Prophet prayed, philosophers and scientists theorized, and writers and poets excelled.
What followed were 144 articles, laying out the separation of powers, rights and freedoms, and the role of justice. It passed the referendum, and the Bush administration heralded it as a victory. But women’s rights activists from both sides were outraged by it.
The so-called secular women made it very clear: they wanted no reference whatsoever to Islam in the constitution. Invoking Islam as a source of law would “take us back to the Dark Ages,” as one women’s rights activist said, and be interpreted as allowing public floggings and the stoning of adulterers. But conservative religious women insisted that Islam be enshrined as “the fundamental source of legislation” in Iraq. They represented the majority in government, and seemed determined to press forward.
The U.S. officials consulting on the process came down strongly that Islam be considered “a fundamental source,” not “the fundamental source.” In order to please both sides and get the constitution signed, compromises were forced. As a result, the language was intentionally vague. By the end, many women considered it a weak document that lacked consensus, and that could be interpreted in wildly contradictory ways.
The women managed to pressure the lawmakers into including a line that the articles forbid “discrimination based on gender.” But the constitution clearly states, “Islam is the official religion of the State and is a foundation source of legislation.” Elsewhere it says, “No law may be enacted that contradicts the established provisions of Islam.” Furthermore, it requires that the federal supreme court be made up of “experts in Islamic jurisprudence.” Women’s rights activists understood this to mean that supreme court judges would all be clerics.
Unless the constitution made perfectly clear, in specific language, the rights of women, then it would almost certainly be interpreted otherwise by the judges appointed under Shia leadership. The progressive women felt that this vagueness left them in an even weaker position than they had been in under Saddam.
“The liberation of Iraq has unleashed the darkest forces in the country,” said Yanar Mohammed, one of Iraq’s best-known women’s rights activists. “We will be losing the basic protections as women and public citizens.”
And Heather knew that not only progressive women felt cheated. Over the past several months, Heather had been working closely on the constitution with Salama al-Khafaji, the leading female conservative Shia assembly member, who had once so controversially told a reporter that Iraqis wouldn’t accept “Western-minded women who came with the occupation, carrying weird ideas and wanting to teach young Iraqis that it’s their right to have premarital sex.”
Heather worked with her because Salama had, much to the surprise of many of the expat Iraqi women and international workers, become the most popular female politician in Iraq. As a Shia woman who had never left Iraq, she had suffered under Saddam, the same way most of her countrywomen had. A year earlier, she had lost her son—as so many Shia women had in Saddam’s wars over the years. She was neither an unveiled Kurdish woman who worked with the Americans nor a fancy expat who was most comfortable with the international press corps. Salama was one of the people, and they loved her for it. Opinion polls called her the most popular woman in Baghdad.
As the top female representative for the majority Shia party in government, Salama was also a leading voice for women as she and her colleagues drafted the constitution. In her capacity as a member of parliament she had begun to work with Heather, and they had become very close. Manal had also since met with Salama and had come to believe that she was opinionated and smart and no one’s puppet.
Though Heather didn’t instinctively agree with Salama’s conservativism, she cared mainly that the political processes were in place to give Iraqi women an equal voice—and if they saw Salama as their spokeswoman, and agreed with her conservative beliefs, then Heather would not interfere. She came to respect Salama as dynamic, intelligent, and aggressive, and she understood that while Salama was a conservative Muslim, she did not want a theocracy. She had faith that although Salama would support Islamic law, she would insist on an interpretation of it modest enough not to allow violence against or oppression of women. As a former dentist and current politician, she was, after all, a working mother.
However, as the constitutional process moved along in 2005, Heather watched in horror as even Salama was edged out of the inner power circle by the male leadership. A constitutional committee was formed of fifty-five members, including ten women. However, a series of closed-door sessions began, with only the heads of the main political blocs. They were nicknamed the “kitchen cabinet.” No women were included in these meetings. Informally, they made all the big decisions. When full parliamentary sessions were called, Salama and the other Shia women were instructed by the leadership to stay quiet and vote with the party. Should Salama protest, she would be forced out. This was
all done in the name of moving negotiations along more quickly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
EACH MONTH AFTER Zia left was bloodier than the one before it. In September 2005, more than 140 died when a suicide bomber detonated himself in the Khadamiya neighborhood, home to the goldsmith Zia and Mamina had visited a year earlier. In November 2005, several suicide bombers killed 60 people in one day. In January 2006, another 150 people were killed in several attacks in Karbala and Ramadi.
News of horrifying violence filled the television screen at night, along with a report that the Sunni insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was linked to Al Qaeda, had declared on his website an “all-out war” against Iraqi Shia. Then, in February 2006, a bomb destroyed the famous gold-domed Shia mosque in Samarra. The Sunnis did it, everyone said. Suddenly, whisperings of a civil war turned into open declarations of it.
In the wake of the escalation in violence, Mamina and Baba spent days scouring the apartment for any evidence of Zia’s time with the Americans, including photos, IMN documents, or souvenirs available only inside the Green Zone. The photo of George Bush was taken out of the closet and burned along with all documentation from the CPA. The family couldn’t let on that Zia was in the States. Word would spread instantly—to the brothers of friends, to neighbors, to other students at the university—and someone might come after her family. They might kill them as traitors, or kidnap Nunu, assuming that a family with relatives in America could afford a rich ransom.
They continued to allow a rumor to spread that Zia had been killed by the militias. For close relatives and friends, they would say she was in Kuwait, a country few Iraqis ever visited. Nunu was surprised, but Mamina even lied to her own sisters, because she didn’t trust their spouses—like Uncle Jalal, the Sunni from Hit. It was strange to think back on those early days of the war; a trip to Hit now would be a death sentence.
Nunu felt sadder each day about her sister’s departure. She was relieved that she was finally safe, and loved hearing stories about her new life in Washington, D.C. But now Nunu felt empty inside, and very alone. Even though for the last year Zia had lived like a refugee in the Green Zone, at least she was still close by. Now she was across the world, somewhere distant and foreign to Nunu.
In her emails, Zia described her wondrous new life, and Nunu tried to live vicariously through her. She was staying in Washington, D.C., with an American friend whom she’d met in Iraq, and she talked of riding a bicycle through the tree-lined streets with no one watching or criticizing. She said everything was massive in the States; even the men were tall. There was a sneaker store so large, she couldn’t see the back of it. The bookstores had escalators inside them; the food markets were all indoors and called Giant and Super. “Everything is at your fingertips when you need it,” she wrote. Houses had laundry machines, dishwashers, microwaves, irons, and blow-dryers. Every home had endless supplies of water and gas, and people left water boiling on the stove or ran the air-conditioning around the clock. In Baghdad, Nunu still had to wake up in the middle of the night to shower because there might not be enough electricity during the day for the water pump. But Zia’s roommates stood under showers for twenty minutes at a time.
Zia sent Nunu pictures of herself in front of all the D.C. monuments they had seen together in movies. She described the thrill of walking outside without the fear of being shot, and of the evenings that felt so silent without Baghdad’s nightly orchestra of booms, rockets, and gunfire. She heard only an occasional police siren or dog barking. She also described American money, which had coins, unlike Iraq. Everything cost extra in Washington, she said—not just because prices were higher but because there was also something called sales tax. Often Zia would wake up in the middle of the night and forget where she was. She called Nunu just to hear her voice, and they chatted until Zia felt sleepy again. Nunu tried to imagine her sister’s new world, but she couldn’t.
…
AFTER ZIA LEFT, Mamina and Nunu made a pact not to burden her with any worrisome news about Iraq. Even as the violence and bloodshed increased in Baghdad, Nunu never mentioned it. She understood that the renewed attacks had something to do with the Sunnis being left out of the government, but none of it made sense to her. All she saw were neighbors turning on neighbors. Every night she wanted to scream at the TV, “Stop this. For God’s sake. Sunni and Shia are brothers, not enemies!” Each day ushered in so much fresh carnage, the news channels couldn’t keep up. Nunu squeezed her eyes shut every morning, wishing the sun would not rise, that they would all be spared from having to endure another day. She wished the Americans would just drop a bomb and destroy everything.
Even the drafting of the constitution—an issue that commanded the nightly news for months—seemed like pure theater; it had nothing to do with Iraqis’ actual lives. Nunu and her family went back to the polls to vote in support of the constitution, but the act held none of the energy or hope of the last election. When the constitution finally passed, it seemed insignificant. None of the Sunni members had signed it, and its promises of unity and equality seemed like the advertisements on television that promised silky hair or sparkling countertops. These were politicians’ promises, and no one believed they would make a difference in their lives—especially the talk of enshrining women’s rights. Stop killing the men, Nunu thought bitterly. That is the best way to help women. We need peace and husbands. The rest will come later.
The fear of suicide bombers kept Nunu in the apartment most days, except when Baba agreed to accompany her outside. But the two of them rarely wanted to do the same thing. Baba wanted to sit with his friends, and Nunu wanted to shop or go to the Internet café to check for email from Zia.
“At your age, you should be going to the cinema and to the markets with your friends,” he said. “If we were in the 1970s, I would let you go out because no one would hurt you; but I can’t let you go alone now and I am too old to take you everywhere.”
Nunu felt sad for her father. Sometimes, when he went out alone to run an errand while Mamina was at school, and the silence of the apartment overwhelmed Nunu, she sneaked out by herself. Relying on Baba made her feel like a child.
One day, she washed and blow-dried her hair, put on jeans, a long-sleeve top, and her gold jewelry, and headed to the Internet café a few blocks from her house. As she walked out the door, she felt brave, like Zia. She was escaping the prisonlike apartment, and standing up to the irhabeen, the terrorists, in her own small way. It was a risk, but her neighborhood was safer than the outskirts of the city, where the militias thrived. Shias, Sunnis, Christians, and even Jews lived in Karrada. Baba and his friends were proud of this diversity and had managed to defend it. The other day, a young man on the corner had cursed at a passing convoy of troops. “Hey, you,” Abu Hassan called out. “Don’t give them problems. They are people of the book.” The young man looked ashamed and apologized.
Nunu enjoyed being outside. Over these months of virtual house arrest, she had missed the small moments of human connection—waving to her neighbors, jostling through crowded sidewalks, exchanging pleasantries with the shop owners she’d known most of her life. Letting boys see me, she added, smiling to herself. Nunu was now twenty years old, and she was beautiful. She’d lost some baby fat around her face, highlighting her prominent cheekbones. Whenever she sauntered down the road or across the Baghdad University campus, she felt the thrill of male eyes on her. She had learned to flick her eyes up at young men as they passed, smile, and then lower her gaze. From a safe distance, she and her girlfriends would then peek over their shoulders to see if the young men were still watching. They always were. Many tried to throw scraps of paper, with their cellphone numbers, onto her armful of books, but Nunu just gasped and brushed the notes away. Shock was the expected reaction of a “good girl,” so that’s what she gave them. But she couldn’t deny that she enjoyed the attention.
Baba lamented her beauty as a mixed blessing. “You are beautiful, educated, and well mannered. We will never
find you your equal.” Nunu wanted only to be free, to enjoy life, and she longed for the day she would feel the thrill of her first kiss. Each passing day, her childhood bedroom felt smaller and smaller.
THE NEIGHBORHOOD INTERNET center was in a shopping complex, up a dingy flight of stairs. The room might have once been an apartment, but now cubicles were arranged around ten computers, and a loud fan blew cigarette smoke out the window. The café was packed with young men, most of whom whiled away the afternoon trying to send instant messages to girls. On a keyboard sticky with spilled tea, Nunu logged on to see if she had any email. There was a joke forwarded by a relative, and an email from Zia, with several attachments. She opened it to see pictures of three different types of curtain, all lace, with different panels and trim, for Zia’s bedroom in Washington. The cost, almost thirty dollars, was exorbitant to Nunu. What do you think? Zia had written. Show Mamina. Zia explained that she had devoted days to visiting the different stores and comparing prices and styles, but that her American friends didn’t understand her fascination. They bought and spent as they pleased. Nunu couldn’t imagine that.
She emailed back that she liked the red curtain because it was cheerful. She saved the images on her memory card, so she and Mamina could go over them tonight on her laptop with Zia on the phone—as they did almost every night. Zia had a long-distance phone card, and they often talked for an hour or two, connecting through the small, familiar details of life; the same sorts of things they had talked about in Baghdad. But now all of Zia’s stories were filled with joy and plenty. Nunu loved hearing about America; it really was just like in the movies. The people were rich and had everything they needed. Even as Nunu missed her, she was excited at her sister’s adventure.
Sisters in War Page 30