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Women’s rights in Iraqi Kurdistan at a
“transformative” stage
25.6.2012 |
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Many Kurdish women can’t
work because their husbands won’t let them have a
job or have money.
June 25, 2012
ERBIL-Hewlêr, Kurdistan region 'Iraq', — Four
afternoons a week, after the children have left for
the day, 60 women take their places at the Mar
Qardakh Elementary School in the Ainkawa district of
Erbil, a cool, airy building brightly painted in a
style that owes a lot to Piet Mondrian. The women
have come to learn English and computer skills to
prepare themselves for Kurdistan’s newly booming job
market.
“Kurdish women are in a transformative stage,” says
Zheela Rashid, program coordinator at the women’s
social development organization START, which
implements the trainings. “We’ve passed that stage
where we need awareness campaigns about women’s
rights. This stage is the empowerment stage, giving
women the tools.”
That’s the goal of the Kurdistan Economic
Empowerment Program, or KEEP, says Safin Ali,
Director of START:
“The idea of KEEP is to help them stand on their own
two feet, to depend on themselves. The aim is to
empower them by teaching them these new skills and
to enter the job market with confidence.”
And it’s working, says 21-year-old Ranit: “The
computer and English language training course is
very good and gives us an advantage. I couldn’t do
Word or PowerPoint before – I only used the computer
for Facebook; but now, yes, I can do it.”
Economy
Half of the students are Internally Displaced People
– Christians from other parts of Iraq who have
sought asylum in Ainkawa; the other half are
economically vulnerable women from Erbil – orphans,
widows and victims of domestic violence.
“They are marginalized groups,” says Ali. “They’ve
been forgotten by the authorities, so we are
bringing them back to the community.”
And being prepared to take advantage of the region’s
rapidly developing economy, he says, will help more
than just their pocketbooks:
“With the stabilized political situation and the
economic boom, more and more women are participating
in economic life, so their voices are being heard.”
Rawa, a 26-year-old woman from Erbil, is one of the
women participating in the KEEP program. She already
has a job but is hoping to get a better one by
improving her skills. Not all women are as lucky,
she says:
“There’s a problem here in Kurdistan. Many women
can’t work because their husbands won’t let them
have a job or have money. But they want to work, to
have money; they want to own their own lives.”
Rawa’s classmate, 52-year-old Khlas seconds that
statement. “I want to get a job so I don’t have to
ask my husband for money,” she says.
Laws
Familial and social pressures can be major obstacles
for women’s emancipation in Kurdistan and Southern
Iraq, says Nona Svijdic, a women’s rights activist
from Bosnia-Hertzegovina, but they’re not the only
ones.
“They are fighting for political participation,
justice, security, education, economy – everything.
The aggravating circumstances that they have, which
we don’t have, are the tribal communities, the huge
impact of religion on different aspects of life, and
civil democracy on the other hand. We have only one
battlefield, the civil battlefield – there are no
other elements.”
Svijdic was in Erbil for a conference organized by
the Swedish Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation that
brought together women living in post-conflict
areas. Another significant difference between Bosnia
and Kurdistan, Svijdic says,www.ekurd.net
is that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)
hasn’t yet implemented many of the international
resolutions on women’s rights.
“Do you think the men in Bosnia are gender
sensitive? Of course not, but they are wise. So
Bosnia-Herzegovina has accepted and ratified all
international documents, all conventions –
everything to please the European Union and the
international community. They would choose not to
but they are politically correct so [these laws]
have to be applied, and that’s a great tool for us.”
The international conventions might not be in place,
but Kurdistan last year passed a homegrown
initiative that outlaws domestic violence, forced
marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM) – a
practice that is still all too common in the region.
“The importance of the new law cannot be
underestimated,” Falah Moradkhin, Iraq Projects
coordinator for the women’s empowerment group WADI,
said in a press release on the first anniversary of
the law’s passage. The law, he said, “is an
opportunity for the KRG to demonstrate that the
region is taking a very positive, important, and
modern step forward.”
But he warned that simply putting the law on the
books is not enough: “In theory, the KRG has a law
against domestic violence. In practice, however, it
has not been implemented within the past year.”
Safin Ali of START says that part of the reason is
that the judicial system and the culture of the KRG
conspire to prevent the law from being put into
effect.
“A woman’s community, her neighbors, might try to
prevent her from lodging a complaint against her
husband because they look down on women that act
like that, that put their husbands in jail. So the
woman will be outcast, she’ll be politically
incorrect. [And if you do go to court,] the judge
could say, ‘I don’t recognize this law; I don’t
believe in this law, I don’t like it,’ and let the
man go.”
Both START and WADI single out the importance of
creating special courts that deal specifically with
cases of domestic violence, and provision is made
for such courts in the 2011 bill.
“Special institutions to support this law are very
important,” says Safin Ali. “The personnel working
in these institutions should be trained, should know
the details of this law. It’s a matter of convincing
the executive powers and authorities that they
should implement it. We need all the forces, all the
efforts to bring this in.”
Islam
One vital force that women need on their side, says
Nona Svijdic, is religion.
“I’m a Muslim, but my life differs very much from
the lives of Muslim women in this area,” she says.
“When I compare my life as a Muslim, I have a lot of
freedom. First of all, the school I go to, when I
marry, who I marry, when I have my children, if I
have my children; I have the freedom to spend time
with whoever I want, to travel when I want. The
women here face different practices, like honor
killings, or genital mutilation or forced pregnancy.
This is not the Islam that I know or the Islam that
I am practicing.”
How Islam is practiced in Kurdistan is evolving says
Mullah Basher Al-Hadad, head of the Endowment and
Religious Affairs Committee at the Kurdistan
parliament.
“I support the idea that our interpretation [of the
Koran] should be different from 50 years ago. The
texts are sacred but the interpretations are not.
There are scholars who are bound to the old
interpretation of the sacred texts and are not able
to give them a new interpretation, but a lot of our
scholars nowadays have a better understanding of the
texts that’s in keeping with the principles modern
life; Islam should cope with modern life and all the
principles are found in our religion.”
And indeed the 2011 Anti-Domestic Violence Law
explicitly cites as part of its justification the
fact that domestic violence is “in contrast to what
divine religions and principles of human rights
dictate.”
“If a mullah says domestic violence is OK,” says
Mullah Basher, “he doesn’t understand religion at
all. We would ask the ministry of Religious Affairs
to take away their license because violence is not
part of Islam – Islam is against domestic violence.
People [need to] distinguish social customs from
religion and eliminate those cases from the society”
Religion can be an obstacle, says Safin Ali, but
START’s philosophy is ultimately pragmatic:
“This is an Islamic society and you have to work
under the ceiling of that. Let’s think about how we
work under that ceiling, to not let this society go
to the far right, or towards fundamentalist Islam,
as some scholars try to do. Let’s work under this
ceiling and make women aware of how to use the
positive sides of religion in their favor.”
Religion is elastic, he says, and you have to pull
it and push it the way you want.
“Some Islamic scholars are against FGM, some are for
it,” he explains. “Women’s organizations push the
Islamic Union to issue a fatwa against FGM, but in
our campaign against FGM, we brought a mullah with
us to argue against it – with what? With the verses
of the Koran and the sayings of Mohammed. So you
have to be smart; you have to approach these issues
in a way that helps women.”
At the end of the day, he says, you have to remember
what you’re fighting for:
“What do we want for women? To have equal rights,
equal job opportunities in the workplace, in
education, in politics; to marry who they want, and
so on. We don’t want everyone deciding their future
for them. So we can work on that – by bringing some
Western ideas, some Islamic ideas and some Kurdish
ideas.”
By Hermione Gee - Rudaw
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