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Friday, July 18, 2003

Rape (and silence about it) haunts Baghdad

Please read this in its entirety. It´s unbelievably hard to attach comments to such an article. This is horrifying, and even more horrifying is the fact that people don't seem to know this is going on...or care to know that they don't know. And perhaps more insidious are those who would chalk this up as something we Westerners need to "correct", rather than viewing the more complex web of reactions that has exacerbated this problem...most notably, the United States' war on Iraq. It certainly speaks to Jeanne d'Arc's observation awhile back that no Iraqi women seem to be involved in the political reconstruction of their country. I hope the story is getting at least a fraction of the attention it deserves from our narcissistic media...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 15 — In her loose black dress, gold hairband and purple flip-flops, Sanariya hops from seat to seat in her living room like any lively 9-year-old. She likes to read. She wants to be a teacher when she grows up, and she says Michael, her white teddy bear, will be her assistant.

But at night, the memory of being raped by a stranger seven weeks ago pulls her into its undertow. She grows feverish and has nightmares, her 28-year-old sister, Fatin, said. She cries, "Let me go!"

"I am afraid of the gangsters," Sanariya whispered in the twilight of her hallway. "I feel like they are killing me in my nightmares. Every day, I have these nightmares."

Since the end of the war and the outbreak of anarchy on the capital's streets, women here have grown increasingly afraid of being abducted and raped. Rumors swirl, especially in a country where rape is so rarely reported.

The breakdown of the Iraqi government after the war makes any crime hard to quantify.

But the incidence of rape and abduction in particular seems to have increased, according to discussions with physicians, law-enforcement officials and families involved.

A new report by Human Rights Watch based on more than 70 interviews with law-enforcement officials, victims and their families, medical personnel and members of the coalition authority found 25 credible reports of abduction and sexual violence since the war. Baghdadis believe there are far more, and fear is limiting women's role in the capital's economic, social and political life just as Iraq tries to rise from the ashes, the report notes.

For most Iraqi victims of abduction and rape, getting medical and police assistance is a humiliating process. Deeply traditional notions of honor foster a sense of shame so strong that many families offer no consolation or support for victims, only blame.

Sanariya's four brothers and parents beat her daily, Fatin said, picking up a bamboo slat her father uses. The city morgue gets corpses of women who were murdered by their relatives in so-called honor killings after they returned from an abduction — even, in some cases, when they had not been raped, said Nidal Hussein, a morgue nurse.

"For a woman's family, all this is worse than death," said Dr. Khulud Younis, a gynecologist at the Alwiyah Women's Hospital. "They will face shame. If a woman has a sister, her future will be gone. These women don't deserve to be treated like this."

It is not uncommon in Baghdad to see lines of cars outside girls' schools. So fearful are parents that their daughters will be taken away that they refuse to simply drop them off; they or a relative will stay outside all day to make sure nothing happens.

"Women and girls today in Baghdad are scared, and many are not going to schools or jobs or looking for work," said Hanny Megally, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. "If Iraqi women are to participate in postwar society, their physical security needs to be an urgent priority."

Beyda Jafar Sadiq, 17, made the simple decision to go to school on the morning of May 22 and never returned. Her family has been looking for her ever since. They have appealed to every international nongovernmental organization, the Iraqi police and the American authorities. Her eldest brother, Feras, 29, has crisscrossed the country, visiting the morgue in Basra in the south, traveling to Amara and Nasiriya on reports from acquaintances that they saw a girl who looked like Beyda.

"I just want to find her," said Beyda's mother, Zakiya Abd, her eyes swollen with grief. "Whether she's alive or dead, I just want to find her."

Some police in Baghdad concede that at this point, there is little they can do to help. Their precinct houses were thoroughly looted after the war. Despite promises from the American authorities, Baghdad police still lack uniforms, weapons, communications and computer equipment and patrol cars.

"We used to patrol all the time before the war," said a senior officer at the Aadimiya precinct house. "Now, nothing, and the criminals realize there is no security on the streets."

The Human Rights Watch report alleges that sometimes when women try to report a rape or families ask for help in finding abducted women, they are turned away by Iraqi police officers indifferent to the crimes. Some law-enforcement officials insist abduction and rape have not increased, while other officials and many medical personnel disagree.

Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner and now an adviser to the Interior Ministry, told of recently firing a precinct chief when he learned that the official had failed to pursue a family's report of their missing 16-year-old daughter. "The biggest part of the issue is a culture that precludes people from reporting," Mr. Kerik said. "It encourages people not to report."

If an Iraqi woman wants to report a rape, she has to travel a bureaucratic odyssey. She first has to go to the police for documents that permit her to get a forensic test. That test is performed only at the city morgue. The police take a picture of the victim and stamp it, and then stamp her arm. "That is so no one else goes in her place and says that she was raped, that she lost her virginity," said Ms. Hussein, the nurse.

At the morgue, a committee of three male doctors performs a gynecological examination on the victim to determine if there was sexual abuse. The doctors are available only from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. If a victim arrives at any other time, she has to return the next day, without washing away any physical evidence. Hospitals can check victims only for broader trauma, like contusions and broken bones.

Dr. Younis said she had seen more rape cases in the months after the war than before. Yet even when women come to the hospital with injuries that are consistent with rape, they often insist something else happened. A 60-year-old woman asserted that she had been hit by a car. The mother of a 6-year-old girl begged the doctor to write a report saying that her daughter's hymen had been ruptured because she fell on a sharp object, a common lie families tell in the case of rape, Dr. Younis said.

Shame and fear compel the lies, Dr. Younis said. "A woman's father or brother, they feel it is their duty to kill her" if she has been raped, Dr. Younis said. "It is the tribal law. They will get only six months in prison and then they are out."

Sanariya's family took her to a doctor three days after her attack only because the bleeding had not stopped. She had been sitting on the stairs at about 4 p.m. on May 22 when an armed man dragged her into an abandoned building next door. He shot at neighbors who tried to help the girl. He fled when she began screaming during the assault.

Her mother refuses to let her outside now to play. Fatin lied to her family and said an operation had been done to restore Sanariya's hymen. But when her eldest brother, Ahmed, found out otherwise, he wanted to kill Sanariya, Fatin said.

Out of earshot of her family, Sanariya said she feels no better now, two months after the attack. "I don't sleep at night," she said in the hallway. "I don't sleep."

Tomorrow, I shall post something a bit lighter than this...but for the time being, please share this with others.

posted by Jenny at 2:36 PM |

Greetings all...illness and a lightning blast to our phone system have set me back from blogging for a couple of days--I had the good sense to disconnect my computer as the first rumbles approached, but sadly, my DSL modem was at the end of the circuit, and got fried...so I have to use somebody´s else´s computer to get online (and it´s a PC to boot...the blogger interface is MUCH cooler for PCs, folks). At any rate, I will get some posts cranked out over the weekend! In the meantime, in case you were wondering, Hurricane Claudette did mow directly through my hometown...another reason why I´ve been incommunicado. Thankfully, none of my immediate family and friends were hurt, but the damage is extensive and the communities were hardly given a warning.

Meanwhile, I´ll post one excellent (if heart-rending) article before signing off for the day...please stay tuned, it´s really something that everyone should read. Back in a bit...

posted by Jenny at 9:09 AM |

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Freep in the Heart of Texas

Thanks to skippy, here's a poll from the Austin American Statesman, just waiting for your click! And the question is...

Did President Bush lie about Iraq's weapons to justify war?

posted by Jenny at 8:40 AM |

And yet another reason why blogging kicks ass (as if you needed any more!)...

posted by Jenny at 8:36 AM |

The Bush Family Book of Virtues

"I had had sexual intercourse with perhaps three or four - I don't remember the exact number - women at different times," Neil Bush said during his just-leaked deposition. It was videotaped last March as part of the couple's divorce proceeding.

He said the trysts happened while he was in Southeast Asia several years ago. "In Thailand once, I have a pretty clear recollection that there was one time in Thailand and in Hong Kong," Bush said. "And you were married to Mrs. Bush?" a lawyer asked. "Yes," he replied.

But at least his daughter, "stunning Tommy Hilfiger model Lauren Bush", gives those all-important prom dresses to the poor! Next thing you know she'll be training them in debutante ball etiquette...!

posted by Jenny at 8:34 AM |

"Amputee Wannabees"

Every so often something comes along that completely takes me by surprise.

Baz remembers first seeing an amputee when he was a 4-year old boy in Liverpool. By the time he was 7 he had begun to think, "This is the way I should be." It was not until Baz was in his 50s, however, that he actually had his leg amputated. Baz froze his leg in dry ice until it was irreversibly damaged, then persuaded a surgeon to complete the job. When he awoke from the anesthetic and his left leg was gone, he says, "All my torment had disappeared."

Whole, a riveting new documentary by Melody Gilbert that recently premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and will soon be shown at festivals in Calgary and London, is about an increasingly visible group of people who call themselves "amputee wannabes." Wannabes desperately wish to have their healthy limbs removed, and some have succeeded in having it done. Kevin, a university lecturer and one of several wannabes featured in the film, had his leg amputated by Robert Smith, a surgeon in Scotland who has amputated the legs of two otherwise healthy people. George Boyer shot his own leg off with a shotgun. Others have used chain saws and homemade guillotines. Why? Nobody really knows, including the wannabes themselves, who often say they have had the desire since they were children. "It's obviously peculiar," admits Kevin. "But knowing it is peculiar and saying it is weird does not do away with the problem."

posted by Jenny at 8:24 AM |

South Knox Bubba has just updated the Bush Administration Record of Accomplishment...check it out! Meanwhile, he notes that the Department of Homeland Security is "fighting terrorism through superior graphics!" Woohoo!

posted by Jenny at 8:20 AM |

Monday, July 14, 2003

Heh...well, soon after I posted one Maureen Dowd column, saying I don't normally do this, here's the second, sent to us by Ash and recommended by the estimable Cursor.

National House of Waffles

And speaking of the waffles, you can read more about them on today's links at the Cursor...it's a virtual bonanza of dissemination and lies, all taken apart, bit by disgusting bit. Especially engrossing are articles here and here...

posted by Jenny at 3:38 PM |

Quote of the day

Found by Jake of LMB at this blog:

Look motherfucker, you don't need a Humvee.
Not at all.
Not even the pretty yellow one.

You're a dentist, not the right leg of Voltron.

And, in related news...

posted by Jenny at 2:33 PM |

Fascinating.

Westminster is to hold a world-first tonight, when around 120 bloggers descend on parliament for a discussion on how politicians can best use the "blogosphere" to further policy and public interaction.

It is also believed to be the first time any national parliament has set up a wi-fi zone, although the security implications mean that the wireless internet zone will be dismantled after the meeting.

Among the guests will be Britain's first MP to write a weblog, Tom Watson, and Stephen Pollard, one of the few Fleet Street political pundits to have embraced the web.

James Crabtree, the organiser of the seminar and head of the Voxpolitics project, says the idea of the evening is not to evangelise the case for weblogs - a form of online diary and comment site with links - but to ask what they can do well, and what they are not useful for.

He points out that as recently as 1995 only one MP had a website, and now they are universal, and predicts the same uptake for blogging.

"If you look at Tom Watson, six months ago nobody had heard of him. Now, if you type 'Labour MP' into Google, you get Tom Watson, not Tony Blair."

This sort of gigantic cyberspace recognition is not directly translatable into votes and campaigning, believes Mr Crabtree, but many MPs' attention will have been caught by the stateside success of Democratic challenger Howard Dean, whose campaign - and donations - have caught fire thanks to a personal weblog.

It seems we are witnessing the not-so-slow institutionalization of the blogosphere...if the landscape of blogtopia (y!sctp!) is being transformed from a string of temporary autonomous enclaves to mainstream networking. And when we are fully mainstream (something that began, I think, with blogads and also the competitions as to who gets the most links, etc., etc.), some great things will happen, like political and ethical innovations will be shared with a wider audience...but, on the other hand, some things will be lost as well--and, like every other media paradigm, some voices will be drowned out in the regulatory processes that separate the "mainstream" wheat from the "chaff"...(according to whoever arbitrarily decides something is chaff...or something like that).

posted by Jenny at 1:35 PM |