Iraqi women to lose rights
So what happens when on the one hand the UK and US are trying (imperfectly, but they are trying) to promote autonomy and democracy for the people of Iraq, and on the other, said autonomy and democracy leads to things like this?
A working draft of Iraq’s new constitution would cede a strong role to Islamic law and could sharply curb women’s rights, particularly in personal matters like divorce and family inheritance.
The document’s writers are also debating whether to drop or phase out a measure enshrined in the interim constitution, co-written last year by the Americans, requiring that women make up at least a quarter of the parliament.
The draft of a chapter of the new constitution obtained by The New York Times on Tuesday guarantees equal rights for women as long as those rights do not “violate Shariah,” or Koranic law.
Recently, our local SWP accused me of using women’s rights as a figleaf for supporting Bush and Blair against the supposedly anti-imperialist “resistance”; I guess now it’s even more important to support the women’s movement and trade union movement in Iraq.
They didn’t say “shibboleth”? Wow, they’ve failed to follow party orders then. Idiots.
It’s quite an interesting question in all decolonizations: who will suffer most in the space between the imperfect and largely irrelevant application of good civil rights by occupying powers, and the proper protection of those rights by indigenous governments, given that the interim period is likely to be a long period of interim governments enforcing crappy civil rights.
And, after thinking about that, are women’s rights more important than decolonization? If so why, and if not why not?