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UN: Women Better Off Under Saddam
Despite widespread reports of Iraqi women being brutalized in rape rooms before the U.S. liberation, the United Nations is now claiming that women were better off when Saddam Hussein was in power. In a report issued this week, the Integrated Regional Information Networks, a U.N. news agency covering sub-Saharan Africa, maintains: "Women's basic rights under the Hussein regime were guaranteed in the constitution and more importantly [they were] respected, with women often occupying important government positions. Now, although their rights are still enshrined in the national constitution, activists complain that, in practice, they have lost almost all of their rights." The UN group also complains that more men are ordering women to "take the veil" (wear coverings from head to toe), and fewer women are working in professional jobs than when Saddam was in power.
Story Continues Below The UN report stands in marked contrast to the accounts of victims of Saddam's regime, whose stories were recounted in testimony to the House Committee on International Relations in Nov. 2003. Introducing the hearing, Rep. Ileana Ros Lehtinen noted that before the U.S. liberation: "Women were brutalized partly in an effort to control their husbands, partly out of a mere uncontrolled hostility. Rape was a State policy and at times videotaped and sent to women’s families in order to intimidate them. At other times, the rapes were intentionally committed in front of the families. Women were denied equal education and the basic legal protections." One particularly gruesome account came from Marine Corps Major Alvin Schmidt: "They would take young female children, sometimes pre-teenage years, and take them and systematically rape them until they became pregnant and execute the baby in front of the female and threw the remains of the baby into a cell where there were prisoners that were starving." Maj. Schmidt said that according to what he heard: "The prisoners would eat the remains and then [Saddam's guards] would either execute the young lady at that time or send her home with a psychological damage that had occurred from that series of events."
Editor's note:
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