Long Black Veil:
Iraqi Women's 'Liberation' Nightmare
Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Monday, 08 May 2006
Many of the worst extremist gangs have been directly empowered by the American occupation ? indeed, in their guise as government "security forces" and police brigades, they have been armed and trained with millions of American taxpayer dollars. [I'll be writing more on this theme in this week's Moscow Times column.]
A female Iraqi filmmaker has gone undercover ? literally so, for there are now vast quadrants of Iraq where women who go unveiled are at grave risk of attack ? to show the reality of women's lives under the Bush-imposed regime. As in so many other cases, a despairing consensus emerges: "It's worse than under Saddam." Think about that: worse than life under one of the worst regimes in modern history. That's what Bush has accomplished in Iraq. That is his true legacy.
Bush's father once famously declared that Saddam was "worse than Hitler." Now the judgment of history is already clear: his son is "worse than Saddam."
Natasha Walters reports in The Guardian: 'No one knows what we are going through.' Excerpts:The film-maker, who lives in Baghdad, wants to keep her identity secret because she fears reprisals, so I'll call her Zeina. When I spoke to her by telephone, the first first thing I asked her was why it is that she feels she has to hide her identity, and in her answer she does not distinguish between the government and the insurgents, in the way that we are taught to do here. "I feel the threat from the government and from the sectarian militias," she says. "The danger in Iraq comes from the Americans, from the sectarian militias - and, of course, it also comes from the crime, the gangs, the random kidnappings."
She decided she wanted to make this film because the things she saw every day were not being seen by the outside world. "No one sees what we are going through. All Iraqis are psychologically traumatised by what is happening. I have seen an eight-year old child who has involuntary tremors, whenever she hears an aeroplane or sees soldiers. I have seen families displaced. I have seen women forced into prostitution because of the poverty of their families."
Zeina was not a supporter of Saddam Hussein's regime. During his rule, she worked as a journalist and a translator of literary criticism. "Politically, before the war, I was not happy," she says. "So many things were not right. We had no freedom of speech, no freedom of expression. But I never imagined the change would be this way, so bad. I never imagined that at all"?.
The film is particularly good at capturing the texture of family life lived in such insecurity, and one effective section concentrates on the tale of a young girl, just eight years old, who was picked up by American troops after an attack on the car in which she and her father and other Iraqis were travelling. The troops first took her to a military hospital, but then her family say she was held for three months. They were not informed of her whereabouts and she was interrogated by being asked to identify Iraqi corpses in photographs. Her grandfather eventually tracked her down in Baghdad, and as we see her weeping in his lap we sense her family's frustration at having no accountable authority to whom they can take their anger?.
Zeina says the responsibility for these developments squarely at the feet of the occupation - it has given sectarianism the opportunity to flourish. She simply laughs when I ask her whether she feels grateful for the democracy that America has given Iraq. "Democracy? What democracy? We do not have democracy. This democracy that Bush talks about - it is a completely empty structure, based on sectarian and ethnic interests. How can you have democracy when you are afraid that your life will be threatened, or your husband will be killed if you express yourself freely? It is a bad joke."
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