In this age when feminist movements started to take big steps towards attaining their rights of equality, freedom and dignity, it is different in Iraq, where women find themselves in a dark abyss and have no right to decide their own lives because of the laws of successive governments under occupation. Islamic opposition groups and governing institutions and the militias have committed widespread massacres and organized mass murders against “minorities” and activist women and driven many other young women to group suicide. What all of these savage and abject practices have in common is hatred towards women and such primitive practices are the main characteristics of tribal and Islamic governance. Occupation forces empowered the most backward social groups that stand against any social development. Freedom of women is a reflection of social liberation in general, and therefore Iraqi women’s status witnesses unprecedented regress in the current post-occupation times. The Islamic governing institutions, ISIS and government affiliated militias have imposed an erosion of the status of women that has never sunk as low in the history of Iraq.
In a few months, organized brutal and misogynistic crimes of unspeakable cruelty have occurred. ISIS slaughtered fifty Yazidi women, six young women committed mass suicide in a government rehabilitation shelter and militias assassinated six activist women. The Iraqi government and the responsible parties did nothing about these crimes. In the meantime, various Islamic groups have been busy purchasing bourgeois governmental positions so as to guarantee their access to stealing the wealth of Iraq. They divided all of these positions between radical Sunni and Shia groups that are planning to impose the Jaafari laws that guarantees them the right to rape children and to turn women into slaves whose jobs revolve only around domestic service and reproduction and who are legally private property that can be disposed of whenever appropriate for the male owner. Based on these concepts, Iraqi lawmakers are trying to set a trap for the future of Iraqi women.
The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq rejects and condemns the misogynist agenda that the Iraqi government is trying to forcefully impose. We call on all Iraqi women to stand and rise up against the patriarchal regime that is imposing poverty on working class people and hatred and discrimination on religious, racial and ethnic ‘minorities’, such as Yazidis and the Black community in Iraq, and especially women of those ‘minorities’. This is the time to stand together with all of the people in these communities to make a great difference for humanity, freedom and equality.
Long live March 8, the symbol of the struggles of women and freedom-lovers for women’s rights and equality. It is the time to unite the women’s and working class’ struggles with the struggles of the minorities that have suffered from the repression of Islamic and bourgeois parties which are supported by the occupation.
Long live equality, long live freedom, and long live March 8
The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq 6-3-2019