IPS News
International Women’s Day:
‘War on Terror’ Brings No Relief
March 5, 2004
Katherine Stapp

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NEW YORK, (IPS) – It was about five in the morning when Nahla al-Arian woke to thunderous pounding on her front door.

Within minutes her husband Sami al-Arian was being dragged from their home in Tampa, Florida State, by federal agents, accused of raising money for the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

A year later, al-Arian, once a tenured computer science professor at the University of South Florida, remains in jail under a controversial “pre-trial detention” policy, although he has not been convicted of a crime.

His supporters — who range from academic freedom groups to leading Muslim-American organisations — say he is a political prisoner who is being punished for his outspoken advocacy of Palestinian causes. Although he has lived in the United States since 1975, al-Arian has been repeatedly denied U.S. citizenship.

“We were so traumatised,” Nahla al-Arian told IPS. “I like to refer to myself and the children as ‘collateral damage’.”

“I don’t work, and I’m not sure I’d even be allowed to with my headscarf and my last name,” she said. “Sami lost his job, I’ve lost my health insurance, and it’s a real struggle to pay the bills each month.”

“One of the worst parts is that I’ve lost any sense of security or privacy. I always feel like someone is watching me.”

Twice a week, al-Arian drives an hour to the maximum-security prison in Coleman, Florida, where her husband spends 23 hours a day in a windowless two by four-metre cell. Sometimes she brings their three children still living at home, but she does not want them to miss too much school.

Nahla has to talk to Sami by telephone through a plastic partition, even though other inmates — all convicted felons — are permitted to have contact visits with relatives.

He will not go on trial until February 2005, so she has at least another year of this routine before any hope of a reunion.

“I feel completely cut off from my husband. I miss him so much,” Nahla said. “At one point, they took away his calling privileges for six months. When he finally telephoned me from jail, I asked who it was; I didn’t even recognise his voice.”

On the eve of International Women’s Day, activists are asking whether the “war on terror” — at home and abroad — waged by the George W. Bush administration has made the world a safer place, especially since women’s suffering was used to whip up support for U.S. military actions in the Middle East.

For most, the answer is a resounding “no”.

“In many ways, the Bush administration has carried out the war on terrorism on the backs of Afghan and Iraqi women,” said Jung Hee Choi of the Women of Colour Resource Centre in Oakland, California.

“But it has failed to produce any significant gains for women’s rights in these countries,” she added in an interview. “Many fear that the rights of women will roll back further than before the occupation, especially in Iraq, where women held more equality rights than in most countries in the Middle East.”

In fact, this is precisely what has happened, says Jodi Evans, the co- founder of Code Pink for Peace, who returned in February from her third trip to Iraq in the last year.

“Women are worse off now than they were under Saddam,” Evans said flatly. “One million widows from the Iran-Iraq War have been evicted from their state-subsidised housing, rape is widespread, there’s a 70 percent unemployment rate and a lot of abuse in the home that didn’t exist before.”

“Just while we were there, 12 prostitutes were shot and killed,” she told IPS.

On Monday, Evans will present a report to some members of Congress detailing the abuses she found in the U.S.-occupied country and urging them to hold the administration accountable for failing to take the protection of women seriously.

“Honour killings are also rising in Iraq,” noted Vivian Stromburg, the executive director of MADRE, an international women’s human rights group. “Women activists are getting death threats. This discrimination is having an impact on women’s lives in every area.”

“The rise of fundamentalism in religious circles — of all religions — has wreaked havoc on women around the world,” she added in an interview.

The news from Iraq is not entirely bleak. This week women won a guarantee of 25 percent participation in the country’s Transitional National Assembly, according to the interim constitution, which still needs to be adopted.

And a resolution by the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council that replaced a liberal family code with a form of stricter Islamic law was voted down after local activists launched a vigorous opposition campaign.

In post-war Afghanistan there is also some good news. The country’s newly approved constitution states clearly that both men and women are “citizens of Afghanistan” and have full and equal rights and duties before the law.

In the lower house of parliament, at least 64 delegates — just over one-quarter of the total — will be female.

But away from the paper guarantees of the supreme law, gender equality seems more remote than ever.

Most Afghan women still must wear the suffocating head-to-toe burqa, and the United Nations and human rights groups report increased incidents of beatings, kidnappings and rape by U.S-backed mujahideen and local militias.

Activists complain that President Hamid Karzai has resurrected the infamous Taliban-era Department of Vice and Virtue, dubbing it the “Ministry of Religious Affairs”.

Co-ed classes are illegal, women’s ability to travel is officially restricted, and women have been banned from singing in public. Last November, a 1970s law barring married women from attending high school classes was upheld.

“The U.S.-supported militia groups don’t have better human rights records than the Taliban,” said Laila Al-Marayata of the Los Angeles- based Muslim Women’s League.

“Bush takes credit for liberating the women of Afghanistan, which I find ironic,” she said. “Women’s rights are never an issue themselves, they are used as bargaining chips”.

“The fact that it took Sep. 11 to get rid of the Taliban is a sad statement on where we stand in terms of women’s rights around the world,” added Al-Marayata in an interview.

Washington refuses to reveal how many “terror” suspects or “material witnesses” rounded up after the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 remain jailed in the United States, so it is impossible to know how many women are living an experience similar to that of Nahla al-Arian.

But war and militarism have also brought direct consequences for non- Muslim women in the U.S., activists point out.

“The four women who were all killed at Fort Bragg in 2002 by their military partners who just returned from tours of duty in Afghanistan was no coincidence,” said Choi, citing research by the Miles Foundation, a support group for military families, that found domestic violence rates are two to five times higher in military homes than in the general public.

“The recent reports of the high incidence of rape and sexual assault of U.S. military women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of their male counterparts also raises grave concerns about not only how women are treated in the military, but about how militarism creates conditions of increased violence against women,” she added.