'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

US-Iraqi women's conference-- Part 2

... Monday afternoon, I took a bit of time out from the US-Iraq women's conference I was at to sit in a wifi zone in the hotel there and write up this JWN post about the conference.  It seems that while I was away, the differences of opinion that I had noted there between the Iraqi invitees-- and principally, the difference between those who stayed in Iraq throughout the whole sanctions era and those who lived as exiles in those years-- became much more pointed... to the extent that participants in this "peace" gathering had been standing up, yelling at each other, and threatening to walk out.

I guess the organizers and a couple of the US invitees intervened to try to calm things down.  When I got back there, the Benedictine US nun Sr. Joan Chittester, one of the organizers, was saying some pacific things about "well, now you've seen how democracy works.  Everyone has to at least stay and listen to everyone else's point of view."

That evening, there were a lot of inter-religious peacemakery things organized.  I'm not entirely sure about the cultural context of having people watch two women performing a classical Indian dance... The dance was fairly pretty to watch, but personally I was extremely hungry at that point (7:30 p.m.) having been up since 6 a.m.

Then yesterday morning we were back in the conference room again.  For that session, which was billed as lasting from 9 a.m. through 1 p.m.--with no break anywhere along the way!  can you imagine?-- the moderator was Kate Snow, another rising female star at ABC News who co-anchors the weekend edition of their morning show and was previously their White House correspondent.

Snow is another smart young network-groomed woman, like Elizabeth Vargas yesterday.  But completely out of her depth in this context, since it didn't take long before the (purely rhetorical) sparks began to fly there.  This session had been billed as having six Iraqi women speakers talking about "Fostering people-to-people dialogue: Changing attitudes and misperceptions".

The third of the speakers was Dr. Katrin Michael,  a Christian woman from the north of Iraq who had joined the Kurdish opposition in 1982; fled the country in 1988 after having survived a chemical weapons attack (date and details of which, uncertain); ended up in Algeria; barely escaped the fundamentalist violence there; ended up as a resettled refugee in Washington DC in 1997...  Where she still lives.  Nowadays, she does research there on Iraqi women's issues.

Her presentation was stridently "exilist".  She ended up making a loud appeal for Americans to join in fighting against the "terrorists" in Iraq, and said "we Iraqis are in the front line against the terrorists".  (She didn't note that there had been no jihadist militants in Iraq prior to the US invasion of 2003, whereas now, evidently, there are... ) 

She declared loudly a number of times that "I have forgiven"  the people who had harmed her earlier.  But honestly, the general tenor of her very accusatory presentation indicated strongly to me that there are plenty of people whom she has not even come close to forgiving.  Again and again, at one point, she said "I am a victim; I am a victim; I am a victim!"  (I felt like saying to her, "Katrin, my dear, I heard you the first time.  You are a victim.  But you know what?  At this point, everyone in Iraq is feeling very hurt, wounded, and fearful.  Everyont there is a victim.  And you're living there in Washington DC... ")

Michael, Lamia Talebani (who spoke a little later) and Judge Zakia Hakki (who spoke Monday-- and again yesterday) were the most ardent representatives of what I call the Iraqi  "exilist" viewpoint, that is, the view of those who (1) had spent the 1990s in exile, (2) had been among those most strongly advocating the use of US power to overtthrow the Saddamist regime, and who (3) until today remain supportive of  the 2003 invasion even if criticial of some of the details of  subsequent US actions in Iraq.  (Hakki did voice some such criticisms; so did Talebani.  They have both lived for at least part of the time since 2003 inside Iraq.  Katrin Michael, who has not spent time in Iraq since 200,3 did not voice any such criticisms .)

But before I  describe the argument, let me give a quick digest of what all the speakers on the main panel said.

First up was Adiba Hussain, a business woman and property owner who started off by saying "I never left Baghdad... even in 2003 I stayed in Baghdad."  Her presentation was mainly on the needs of women business owners.  She said quite forthrightly that the main thing hapering all business owners in Iraq was "the terrible effects of insecurity on the whole business community."  She mentioned the widespread climate of threats made against the persons and properties of business owners and the resulting flight of large amounts of Iraqi capital to neighboring countries.

The next speaker was Zainab al-Suwaij, the Iraqi-born executive director of the American Islkamic Congress, which she described as promoting a liberal version of Islam.  She had been born in Basra and had joined the uprising against Saddam that the Shiites there had launched in 1991, fleeing after it was violently suppressed by Saddam.

I should say that though; Suwaij had almost certainly been one of those exiles advocating  the US invasion of Iraq, she did not present herself as ideologically strident. At one pouint she said quite calmly (and probably, accurately),

She said the AIC has been running programs in a number of parts of the country since 2003:

She said the AIC had also lobbied during the Constitution-writing process for a quota for women in all governorate councils of 40%.  ("But we only got 25%.")

Suwaij concluded by saying the Iraqi women's two main needs at this point are: (1) economic empowerment, and (2) building a women's peace movement, "to help us resolve the post-conflict situation and to help us heal us heal our souls."

Then, there was Katrin Michael.

Then we had Buthaina Suhail, an extremely elegantly hijab-ed woman, described as the President of the "Iraqi Family Society".

She told us her uncle had been killed by Saddam Hussein in Lebanon.  She said, ""Most of the Iraqi people are with the new government..." The general tenor of her presentation was to admit that,  yes, it's true there are people who have been made into widows and orphans since 2003-- but there many more who suffered those things before 2003.  "And now at least we have women who are ministers and MPs; women allowed to travel, and so on."  She made an appeal against the "terrorists", but it was far less strident than Katrin Michael's.

Then we heard from Lamia Talebani, an agronomist who is also an artist who had spent most of the years 1963-2003.  (Apparently also a relative of PUK head Jalal Talebani.  I wish I'd asked her to confirm this in person.)

She made an eloquent and well organized presentation in which she talked about Iraq's neighbors thus:


She warned about the danger that, "the Americans are trying to have relations with people who hate America, and have even started talking  with the  terrorists who are fighting them rather than supporting their natural cultural allies."

Her category of 'America's natural cultural allies' was an interesting one., that I would have liked to probe more.  It seemed (by inference) to comprise mainly secular-minded liberals.

But she was clearly feeling under threat.  She said, "The only option for people who are American cultural allies in Iraq today is to choose between death, exile, and silence."

She did however say soon after that she judged that "civil war is impossible. There have always been conflicts in Iraq between culturally liberal people and religious extremists-- since the 1940s."

The last speaker was a  very elegantly dressed (no hijab) younger woman called Murooj Muneeb al-Hadethee, who said she had lived in Iraq "for the past five years".  She is a partner in a company called the Collage Group, which is (I think) mainly Indian in ownership.  She said that  one of the main grievances in the Iraqi business community was that the big US prime contracting firms ("Bechtel, for example") don't issue subcontracts directly to Iraqi firms for all their projects in Iraq, but rather, issue them to firms from other countries, inserting sometimes several layers of sub- and sub-contracters between the sums that Bechtel has to spread around and the Iraqi firms that are left at the bottom of the heap.

Anyway, the morning's discussion was supposed to be mainly about identifying and discussing the concrete needs of Iraqi women's organizations, so that in the afternoon the US invitees could start discussing how they could start to help meet some of these needs.

But we never really got to the discussion planned for the morning, at all.  Katrin Michael and Zakia Hussain got into a real shouting match against Faiza al-Araji and a woman called Entisar al-Ariabi, who has been here in the US for activities organized by the strongly anti-war organization Code Pink. 

Ariabi was every bit as strident-- speaking from the floor-- as Katrin Michael was, from the panelists's elevated dais. She stood up at the table where she was seated and started objecting to the use of the term "liberate" and other claims that Michael had made.  She said all Iraq's probalems had stemmed from the occupation and called for the withdrawal of US troops.

I was seated at the same table as Zakia Hussain.  She rose to her feet and started yelling back, acusing everyone who called the US presence of being an "occupation" of ignoring Saddam's  many crimes and indeed of having profited personally from them. 

Faiza stood up and said, "I'll say it again: I am glad that Saddam is gone-- but how many times do you want us all to say that? We didn't have to have a US invasion to get rid of him.  And now look what the US occupation is doing to our country.  The US troops should get out-- now!"

Poor old Kate Snow, sitting there in front of us in her fastidiously streaked and coiffed hair, had completely lost control of everything... And indeed, though the discussion stumbled along a little more after that, it completely fizzled out before noon and we were all given a very long lunch break....

In the afternoon session, the organizers made an attempt to get people refocused on "concrete projects".  I have to say I'm very familiar with this tactic, which was one of the main organizing principles of Search for Common Ground, when I was trying to run their non-governmental conflict resolution project in the Middle East  back in 1991-93.  Sort of, "If the big political conflicts look unsolvable let's try to 'build relationships' through working on some uncontroversial (and often fairly trivial) things instead."

I'm still a believer in some parts of this approach.  But I really don't think-- whether with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the intra-Iraqi conflict, or probably, conflicts anywhere else-- that you can do anything of lasting value through such projects unless the "big" political conflict is also resolved, too.  Exhibit number 1 in theis regard: the whole flurry of post-Oslo 'confidence-building' ventures at all levels.... and the collapse they all experienced with the collapse of the official peace talks in late 2000.

Also, though I believe strongly in talking to and listening to everyone, including those with whose views I very strongly disagree, still, I think when you're building a coalition to actually do something, especially something political like building a coalition against war and military occupation, then you shouldn't plan on including absolutely everyone within this coalition; otherwise you (we) would end up getting nowhere..

I'm not sure how the end of the conference came out, since I had to leave at 3:45 p.m.  People were sitting around tables again at that point, with each table hosting a discussion on possible projects in specific sectors  I am still not sure what was actually agreed.  GPIW has nothing up on their website yet about that.  But I'll try to let you know as soon as I learn anything.

... Anyway, I have lots more thoughts based on my experience at the GPIW conference.  One has to do with the absolutely necessary, organic link between any attempt to impose rule through foreign military domination and the spreading of financial corruption amongst all participants in this venture.

A number of the Iraqi women at the conference spoke about the debilitating effects-- for business owners and for all other Iraqis-- of the corruption that has become so omnipresent in their society since 2003.  It was the same story with the Fateh-led administration in post-1994 Palestine, of course.

Well, what do you expect-- if you have a governing mechanism that is not, actually, accountable to the people over whom it rules and whose interests it claims to represent-- but whose interests it is actually, on a daily basis, continuing to ignore?  Such a governing mechanism is one that is built centrally on a lie.  And participants in it cannot afford to allow the light of day to shine on the various payoffs and bribes they have received, that induced them to participate in it...