Rape and other torture in Iraq
A statement from the Global Women’s Strike
www.globalwomenstrike.net   womenstrike8m@server101.com  
London 12 May 2004      Also in  Castellano   Italian  German    

The present outcry over the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US and UK forces in Iraq would never have happened if the photos had not been published.  Their publication and the impact they have had signal that the biggest anti-war movement the world has ever seen has had a profound effect on everyone.  The US and UK governments ignored it, hoping it would go away but it never has.  It is this movement which has pushed these images onto our screens and front pages across the world.  

Governments tried to claim – as usual – that this exposure of their actions was “irresponsible,” but without the photos the torture and killing that had been documented for a year would never have been available to us: the precondition to our being able to stop it.  In the same way, the anti-Vietnam war movement gave us the tragic photo of the little girl burning from US napalm referred to now as a turning point in ending that war.

1.  Hidden from history – the impact of war and occupation on women and girls
But despite the fact that women have been even more opposed to war than men (our experience and every poll confirms this), the effects of the war and occupation on women and girls, including the torture of women prisoners, have hardly been touched upon.  We know that there are thousands of photos, many of them of women being raped.  (See statement by Black Women’s Rape Action Project and Women Against Rape.)  It has also emerged that most of the thousands of people, including many children, picked up arbitrarily in Iraq, have been imprisoned for months, most for no reason, without their families being informed of their whereabouts.  Mothers, the first carers in any community, and other relatives are left to trudge in the heat from prison to prison searching for their loved ones – another form of torture, characteristic of dictatorship.  And there is clearly no guarantee that no one has been disappeared in the process.

The economic interests behind the atrocities are barely mentioned; their implications for women have been totally hidden.  The privatisation of everything, from oil to water, electricity, etc., imposed by the US as soon as it had occupied Iraq, has given powers to employers they never had before.  Paul Bremer has banned all unions and set public sector wages at $40, less than half the recommended monthly wage of a sweatshop worker in neighbouring Iran.  At Najebeeya electricity plant in Basra, where women make up 10% of the workforce, “the nursery has been turned over to a friend of the boss who has made it into a second home for himself, leaving working mothers to work with their children in tow.”  And of course there is no equal pay and women get $15-25 less than men for doing the same job.  The same is happening in US occupied Haiti, where the US has put sweatshop owners and their friends back in charge.

After seven months of relentless organising, the first conference of workers’ unions and councils in Iraq took place in Baghdad on 8 December, 2003. After discussion, key issues were decided upon: a list of workers’ immediate demands, a draft for a new Iraqi Labour Code and the main outlines of its legislature, as well as the election of the union leadership committee members. The attendees then established the Workers' Councils and Unions in Iraq – WCUI.  Within two days, their offices were raided and destroyed by the US army. 

And what about Saddam Hussein’s informers?  Former women intelligence officers, the same people who handed over lists of suspected "prostitutes" (or resistance activists) to security forces during Saddam's "faithfulness campaign", are among those retrained by the occupation.  At that time, hundreds of women were beheaded in public or strung up outside their homes.  What will happen now?  We have read that girls as young as nine who have been raped have been refused hospital treatment, and that in Basra unveiled female students are being refused entry to university and even attacked with stones and acid.

Women everywhere have a right to know about our sisters and their children in Iraq and elsewhere, and we want to know now.

2.  The context of torture in Iraq – what the US and UK have done elsewhere 
Far from being exceptional, the atrocities we are seeing must be put in the context of what the US is known to have done in Vietnam (where it killed three million people including with napalm and cluster – anti-personnel – bombs), and all over Latin America (where it funded and managed torturers and paramilitaries, and continues to do right now in Colombia – all trained in the US school for torturers, the infamous School of the Americas); the coup it backed against a democratically elected government in Venezuela (2002); (jointly with France) its present occupation of Haiti; and the infamous Guantanamo Bay; and what the British did in Iraq, where Churchill ordered the gassing of “uncivilised tribes”, in Kenya during Mau Mau where rape and other torture were standard, and more recently where hundreds of women were raped by the British army over 30 years, and in Cyprus where the British army is banned from some areas because of its rape and murder of a woman tourist and other violence since – to mention a few.

And what about the north of Ireland, which, we are told, is where the British learnt “to behave”?  What about the torture, shootings and other atrocities they committed there since 1969, in particular the strip-searching (and manhandling) of women at Armagh prison by male guards and soldiers?  It took a women’s movement to bring attention to and halt this sexual assault.

Channel Four News (UK) has reported that at least 12,000 people are being held in US army prisons around the world – in Middle East countries, Diego Garcia (stolen from the expelled Chagossian people with the help of the British government), etc.  (10 May)  We want to know if there are any women among them, why they are being held, the conditions in which they are being held, and whether their families have been notified.  And since the US funds and backs in every other way Israel’s occupation in Palestine (and in Israel torture and assassinations are legal), we also want to know what is happening to Palestinian women and children at the hands of Israeli troops and prison guards.

Also, we want to know about the treatment of civilians, beginning with women and children, in that other occupied country, Haiti, where thousands have already been killed either by US troops or by the gangsters and drug lords they have put in power in that persecuted country.  (Let us remind people that for 200 years, since Haiti’s working people, who were slaves at the time, liberated themselves by throwing out their European masters, Haiti has been invaded, occupied, boycotted and in every way persecuted by the racist US government with the assistance of the racist French government whose Napoleon met his first Waterloo in Haiti all those years ago.)  And we want to know about Colombia, where US-funded and trained government and paramilitaries have been murdering thousands of civilians, including many women, for opposing violence and exploitation.

We know that some women Members of the UK Parliament voted against this war, and some distinguished themselves with their uncompromising opposition.  But most voted for it.  We know that only one congresswoman, Barbara Lee (a Black woman representing a largely Black constituency – the sector of people who have been most opposed to war), voted against the invasion of Iraq.  In fact she was the only US legislator who voted against.

3.  All who accept US leadership share responsibility

• In our view and in the view of increasing numbers of women and of men, what the US does is the responsibility of all those who accept their leadership, as Blair’s government has done with such dogged determination.

• What the US has done in Iraqi prisons is an extension of what they do at home, where two million people, disproportionately Black and Latino, are incarcerated and often tortured, not merely by living under an unjust, repressive and racist regime, but as defined by international standards.  The evidence for this is abundant, as is the evidence that some of the leading people in this present crisis learnt their interrogation techniques as US prison guards.  Women prisoners are raped by male guards; over the years, some cases have become famous – usually when women get justice by physically defending themselves against their attackers. 

• It is an extension of Guantanamo Bay, and of what the US and UK are doing at home accusing Muslim people of terrorism and imprisoning them without charge for an indefinite period of time.  To assume, as the US and UK government do, that only Muslims will be upset by torture and injustice against Muslims is itself a most extraordinary level of racism, which many millions of us are appalled by.

• Torture by US troops and mercenaries (“military contractors”) is an extension of the consistent disregard for human life in Iraq, as expressed in depleted uranium and years of sanctions which, as we all know, together killed and maimed – especially children. 

• We must now see the back of the deliberate or careless disconnection of each form of killing anywhere, each treated as a one-off, an accident, a mistake, an oversight; rather than at best a policy of carelessness about the survival of whole populations.  It is time to put the pieces together and face with what little concern for humanity the world is governed, so we can change the society into one which Invests in Caring and not Killing.

Neither blood nor rape for oil
To Women Legislators of the Coalition of the Willing, Coming clean on rape and other sexual torture of women and girls at the hands of US and UK armed forces or their agents in Iraq and Afghanistan, By Black Women’s Rape Action Project and Women Against Rape, 12 May 2004

Letter to US Congresswomen from International Women Count Network re: suppression of information about rape in Iraq

Excerpts from a paper by Rev. Dorothy Mackey, former US Air Force Captain and Commander who herself suffered rape and sexual assault while a serving officer, at the hands of her colonel and lieutenant colonel. Neither was ever prosecuted.

June 5 Protest in Los Angeles - Neither Blood Nor Rape for Oil

"Rape in Iraq", letter to the Editor from Black Women's Rape Action Project and Women Against Rape, The Guardian (London, England), May 24, 2004

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