This interview is brought to you thanks to Sara Burke, Editor at Peacework Magazine.
Bill Weinberg, editor of the online journal World War 4 Report (ww4report.com), interviewed Houzan Mahmoud on March 21, 2006 on WBAI radio, and Peacework Magazine editor Sara Burke corresponded with her by e-mail in May. Portions of both conversations are included here. To learn more, visit Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq [OWFI] at www.equalityiniraq.com, or visit Houzan Mahmoud’s blog at http://houzanmahmoud.blogspot.com. Published in Peacework, June 2006.
Houzan Mahmoud is the Head of Iraq Freedom Congress-Abroad and one of the leading figures of the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. Women’s organizing has been key to the development of Iraq’s secular resistance, as women know that they are the most vulnerable to persecution and repression in a militarized, Islamist nation.
Here’s Houzan…
Bill Weinberg: A lot of people are afraid to take a position of immediate withdrawal of US troops. They’re afraid that will plunge Iraq into the abyss. So, I’d like to hear your response to that.
Iraqi society is already being smashed down — by the occupation itself, by the chaos that has been created, by the lack of security and stability for the Iraqi people, by imposing a puppet regime on the Iraqi people which is heavily divided on the basis of sectarian lines. And you know, so many of them are criminals, they have to be brought to justice, but instead they are actually being imposed on us. There are all these armed militias on the ground; they have just brought a civil war, a sectarian civil war, a religious war. We have seen the occupying forces there for the last three years. Every day we see the situation is getting worse; I think we haven’t seen any week or any day in a month that there haven’t been hundreds of people killed — suicide bombings, terrorist attacks — and they are using occupation as a pretext to justify these criminal acts. Having the occupation there is not solving any of this, actually. It’s just deepening the problems, just deepening the division among people. So therefore, I think the withdrawal of troops, actually, is going to ease a lot of problems. The majority of Iraqi people want to see every soldier leave Iraq. And these armed militias — what other excuse will there be to terrorize people or to kill them or to kidnap them? What other excuses will they have? It’s occupation. So therefore I think it’s wrong, that notion that pulling out will create more problems. I think it will not. It won’t be worse than this, in my opinion.
BW: So you think a US withdrawal will actually open more space for the existence of some kind of secular civil alternative?
I think it will then be us and them.
BW: And who are the “them� that you mean?
Armed militias and Islamists, terrorist networks, who basically have no other excuses to be there, apart from using the occupation as a justification for their criminal acts.
BW: You say it would just be you and them. Is that necessarily a good thing? No mediating force?
The US and the occupying powers, in my opinion, are protecting terrorist networks, rather than secular, progressive movements inside Iraq. The occupying forces were the first to prevent the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq from having a demonstration against the rapes and abductions. We were told that we are not allowed to have a demonstration without their permission. The first Union of the Unemployed in Iraq sit-in strikes in Baghdad, in the very beginning of the occupation — its leaders were arrested by the US occupying powers. So they don’t want to see any progressive, militant, secular, egalitarian movement inside Iraq with a vision for a better future, for an alternative, for a government that is not a puppet of the US. They just want to put puppets there, they don’t care what’s happening to the society... what they care about is just their own interest. We are not protecting their interest, we are protecting the interest of the Iraqi people; that’s why they don’t want us to grow and they won’t be any support to us at all.
BW: The second argument which I frequently get, is that we have to support the insurgents, because the insurgents are the actually existing resistance to US imperialism. That supporting a civil or secular movement is a distraction, and that we have no right to tell the Iraqi people what form their resistance will take.
I myself have been told so many times abroad in various meetings and seminars, “Why are you not allying with the so-called resistance, and fighting together against occupation?� I think this question is either very naïve, or it’s actually stupid, just to think about that. They are Islamists who are killing women and beheading them for not wearing the veil. How can I, in any sense, as the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, go into alliance with the enemy of women in Iraq? Or with those Islamists who have no eye to see a secular person, who consider anyone who is secular as infidels who therefore have to be killed? How can I form any alliances with these kinds of people? And plus, what is their social program? You need to have a social program to agree on — is just fighting occupation everything? Do I have to sacrifice women’s rights, do I have to sacrifice workers’ rights, secularism, and my rights as a human being to fight the occupation? I don’t. I think it’s a historical mistake and it’s suicidal for my movement inside Iraq to go that route, just to please some marginalized leftists in the US or Europe, for their fantasizing or romanticizing the issue of resistance against imperialism.
These Islamists have no sense of anti-imperialist vision. They have no sense of working class struggle or anything like that. They are people who have primitive notions of running societies, you know? The Talibanization of Iraq, that’s what they want — I don’t want to be part of that destructive agenda. The best thing in Iraq that has ever happened are these movements that we are leading. I think if we are progressive people, if we are from an egalitarian point of view, we have to promote something that is for women’s rights, for workers’ rights, that promotes secularism — and we shouldn’t support bigots, we shouldn’t support reactionary movements who are oppressive in any way.
Sara Burke: Can you tell us about organizing for women’s rights in the context of the larger struggle for a secular Iraq?
In Iraq we have Islamists who have been imposed and empowered in the so-called parliament by the US government and are implementing Islamic Sharia law. We have other Islamic armed groups who are calling themselves a “resistance� but which are just another version of the Taliban; they have turned Iraq into a battlefield and enslaved women by veiling them and preventing them from attending university or going to work. This is the situation we are faced with in Iraq under occupation.
In this context, the proper and active participation of women in civil life is made almost impossible. Imagine how it is to organize, when women cannot go out alone with out an armed male relative due to the lack of basic security, and everywhere there is the presence of reactionary, right-wing political parties who do not consider women human beings! It has taken away the confidence of women to take part in politics.
In the Iraq Freedom Congress [IFC], we start from this point: that the presence of women in our movement is a pre condition for achieving equality and freedom. Our movement is distinguished by its progressive outlook toward women’s liberation and equality. The high rate of women leaders and activists in our movement is very visible compared to all the other groups.
SB: How do women’s rights under Iraq’s Islamist-leaning government connect with movements for change in the US?
The occupation of Iraq is not a local issue; it has to be viewed in a global scale. Whatever happens in Iraq will affect us all. When the US government brings religious reactionaries to power and violates women’s rights, this will not only affect our rights in Iraq but the rights of women in the US, too.
The US is bringing in many laws against the rights and civil liberties of the people of the US, under the pretext that “We are at war� and “this is to protect Americans.� So people in the US, and we in Iraq, have been subjected to brutalization, random arrests and imprisonment, and the curtailment of women’s and workers’ rights under the same pretext. It seems that not only Iraqis are a “threat� to US security.�
Therefore having international solidarity with secular, progressive, and pro-women movements is vital. Our movement in Iraq is part of a wider international struggle against war, oppression, and inequality. So therefore we have the same route to go to fight in the same ranks to liberate humanity.
SB: How are women organizing, either within or outside the IFC program?
IFC is striving for an egalitarian, secular society and a state system wherein all humans are considered equal. So our women who are active in the IFC and the women’s movement are considered the most courageous women who are fighting for secularism and equality in the face of growing Islamism and chaos in Iraq. Despite the danger, they are organizing and mobilizing other women and men against both the occupation and the ongoing sectarianism in Iraq. They work at all levels in the community, in the schools and factories, to spread the word and promote this movement.
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This article was very interesting, thank you. I've been sharing some of the information from this interview with others over the last couple days. It is amazing what women in oppressed countries are doing to gain or re-gain their rights. They are literally giving up their lives. I often wish there was some of that passion, that steely determination, that will to fight, without shame,...here in America.
Indeed, if only more of our representatives or fellow Americans read this interview or Peacework Magazine.
I opposed immediate withdrawal until I read this article, precisely because I thought it would put the country in the hands of the Badrists and Ayatollah al-Sistani. Now I'm not so sure.
This is something to mull on. Thanks for posting it.
Cheers,
TH