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Rasheeda Bhagat

"I DON'T believe America loves us so much that its soldiers are coming to bring democracy to Iraq and the rest of the region. It would be nice, but I don't think it will happen", said Fatima Ayyad, a psychology professor at Kuwait University, to BBC correspondent Caroline Wyatt at a meeting in Kuwait last week.

Adds the report: "A fluent English-speaker in her mid-40s, she likes the West and approves of its liberal values. Her son has just come back from studying in the US. But she worries that ill-judged interference in the region by the US could radicalise another generation of young Arabs. Fatima already believes that the growth of Islamic fundamentalism is setting back the gains her generation of women made in the 1970s. Another war could only make things worse... "

Said another smartly dressed woman in her 50s, Fatima Abdulaziz, at a meeting of about a dozen Kuwaiti women, "Should 1,000 or 10,000 Iraqi women and children die, all for the death of one man? There has to be a better way. Don't misunderstand me — I would love Iraq to be rid of Saddam Hussein. But can't the US just take him, instead of bombing and killing the innocent too?"

Of course, one or two women at the meet disagreed, with one comparing Saddam Hussein to cancer; "we didn't get rid of him before so now he has to be cut out properly. There's no other choice." But most of them had doubts over the US' real motives in the region. This is what well-educated and well-to-do women in Kuwait have to say about the impending war in Iraq.

Ms Welmoed Koekebakker, a Dutch social researcher who works with the Danida project in India, recently went to the Kurdish areas of North Iraq, to assess the emergency situation resulting from a war in Iraq and the extent of humanitarian assistance that would be required.

Having covered gender issues and conflict situations for years, Welmoed was in northern Iraq for 18 days from January1. Armed Kurdish groups helped her cross the border from Iran into northern Iraq.

As can be expected, it was the men who did most of the talking on how much they hate Saddam Hussein, how the US bombings will affect the people in this region and how they expect Saddam Hussein to use chemical weapons against them. Having done so before, he will do it again, they were sure. Welmoed stayed in the house of a foreigner and men armed with Kalashnikovs provided her security cover when she moved around.

But then it was time to talk to the women. "I organised two big conferences and since it is still a very traditional society, 99 per cent of the people talking at these conferences were men," she told Business Line.

"But then what happens? You go to the toilet and suddenly all the women want to go to the toilet and then they all want to talk. a woman even knocking on the door of my toilet cubicle because she wanted to talk to me! You look in the mirror and find tired faces."

When she asked them the reason for the exhaustion reflected on their faces, particularly the eyes, "they told me that: `Oh, that is because we haven't slept for months.' But these men... and I talked to lots and lots of men about what the war would mean to them... most of them don't talk like that. Nor do they show that they haven't slept for months!"

But once she managed to get access to the Kurdish women, even if only in the toilet, it was as though a torrent had been unleashed.

"I found the women were much more open about how the war affects them emotionally and psychologically and how scared they were. Their biggest problem is that they have known for long that the war is coming, but have nowhere to go. If you or I know a war is coming, we can flee, but these women have no option. Where can they go?"

It was depressing for Welmoed to note their sense of helplessness. "They kept saying `what option do we have?' The men pick up the arms and go... but where can the women go? One out of eight women told me that they feel there are no men in the area. The sense I got from my 18-day stay was that there were five women for every man in that region."

But, then, any conflict situation affects women and children, particularly women, in ways very different than it affects the men. Once the attacks begin, and people flee their homes in the battle zone, the number of refugees will mount. The initial estimates range between "60,000 to 1.5 million, but as nobody believes that a US attack on Baghdad will be just a surgical operation and are sure that a range of conflict scenarios will follow, who knows what the final number of refugees will be?"

As a veteran who has researched the social implications of war and conflict situations before, she has been "telling people working in that region that once the strikes begin and the people are on the move, fleeing from the battle zone, please distribute food to the women, don't give it to the men. We've seen in so many conflict situations that if relief agencies give food to the men, often the women can only get it from them by paying through sexual favours."

A valid observation indeed. She witnessed such scenes in Kurdistan a decade ago. And the world knows only too well how during the long regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan, women, who were forced out of educational institutions and well-paying jobs, were literally reduced to the status of beggars. Those with little children to feed could not get enough food through begging and were converted into prostitutes by some Taliban rulers, and for a pittance too.

Welmoed too fears that this is bound to happen to women refugees, though the women she talked to did not say it in so many words. "In such situations we know that there are people killing each other for food so how do the women get the food... that is the biggest problem. But there are these golden rules in giving aid; the Sphere standard, an international standard of dos and don'ts in providing minimum food security to refugees."

Many of the women Welmoed met did speak English and she communicated with the rest via interpreters. "They were mostly employees of NGOs or working for the UN or some health organisations; others were simply living as refugees in camps. There are lots of camps in this region, and some of them as old as 10 years, but of course there is constant movement from and to these camps."

Her assessment is that if there is a war, there will be shortage of everything — tents, food, water, sanitation, blankets, clothes, kerosene, and medical aid. "It will be impossible to give refugees the protection they need and some sections of the population, particularly women, will be extremely vulnerable," is her assessment.

What disturbed the Dutch woman the most was that, as a foreigner, she was approached by many women asking if she had any news about their husbands or sons who have been missing for over 10 years. "I visited refugee camps with thousands of refugees in tents or dwellings of piled bricks and plastic roofs. I saw villages destroyed and hundreds of kilometres of minefields that will claim their death toll throughout the coming century."

These people have been inflicted untold suffering by Saddam and are now bracing themselves for more suffering, says Welmoed.

While this is the situation in northern Iraq, it is well known that Iraqi women in Baghdad and other big cities are better educated and more emancipated than their sisters elsewhere in the Islamic world. A few months ago The New York Times carried an article on Iraqi women playing football. While at Kuwait's stock exchange, for the first time women are allowed to trade only at the Ladies Trading Floor, "across the border in Iraq, women can already participate fully in the surprisingly booming Baghdad stock exchange, and without having to use a Ladies Trading Floor either," commented a recent article in the Guardian.

Another article in the same newspaper, dated September 21, 2002, came down heavily upon the US President, Mr George W. Bush, for claiming that one positive outcome of the war would be "respect for women... in the Middle East and beyond."

Says the article, "Just as he bombed Afghanistan to liberate the women from their burkas (or, as he would have it, to free the `women of cover'), and sent out his wife Laura to tell how Afghans are tortured for wearing nail varnish, so now Bush has taken on the previously-unknown cause of Iraqi women to justify another war. Where next? China, because of its anti-girl one-child policy? India, because of widow-burning outrages? Britain, because of its criminally low rape conviction rate?"

Added the writer acidly, "At home, Bush is no feminist. On his very first day in the Oval office, he cut off funding to international family-planning organisations which offer abortion services or counselling (likely to cost the lives of thousands of women and children) and compared abortion to terrorism."

(Response can be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in)

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