Two Women in the Service of Ba’athism

 

November 10, 2003

 

 

Two Iraqi women Amal Al-Khedairy and Nermin Al-Mufti have been in the United States recently claiming they represent Iraqi women and giving presentations about the current situation in Iraq.

 

Americans are entitled to know who these two women really are so that they can assess the credibility of their message.

 

Both Ms  Al-Khedairy and Ms Al-Mufti flourished under Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime

 

Ms Nermin Al-Mufti is described as: “an internationally recognized Iraqi journalist. Through scholarships and invitations, Ms. Al-Mufti has received fellowships in international journalism from Hungary and the UK. For more than 20 years, she has served as a consultant and writer for many international media agencies. Until this year, Ms. Al-Mufti produced weekly columns on corruption, environmental issues, gender issues, contemporary literature human rights, education, nutrition and disease for a well known Iraqi weekly.”

 

In fact, Nermin Al-Mufti was a propaganda hack for Saddam’s regime. Her weekly column appeared in Al-Thawra newspaper, the official mouthpiece of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party. Al-Thawra newspaper, the Pravda of Iraq, stopped publishing after the US liberated Baghdad.

 

Amal Al-Khedairy has long had a reputation as an apologist for Saddam’s regime. Ms Al-Khedairy is from a wealthy, landowning family. Her father had a reputation as an Arab nationalist and chauvinist. Under Saddam’s rule, Ms Al-Khedairy taught Arabic literature at Baghdad University.

 

Ms Al-Khedairy operated her own salon and gallery in an expensive district of Baghdad on Abu Nawas Street, overlooking the Tigris, where only immediate  members of Saddam’s family and some close relatives were allowed to own property. The gallery was uniquely permitted by Saddam. Ms Al-Khedairy owns a luxurious house in Shamasiya, a residential district of Adhamiya in Baghdad, which has a huge garden that overlooks the Tigris.

 

Ms Al-Khedairy was close to the public relations apparatus of the Ba’athist regime, hobnobbing with the top Ba’athist apparatchiks and received all the special privileges, such as permit to travel and buying luxury goods without paying taxes, granted only to top Ba’athist leaders. She assisted the regime by posing as an ‘intellectual’ mixing with foreigners and spinning the party line to the foreign media. Members of her family enriched themselves through their Ba’athist connections and by operating UN Oil-for-Food contracts on behalf of Saddam’s notorious sons, Uday and Qusay.

 

In an article in The New Yorker, Ms Al-Khedairy made some revealing comments about her nostalgia for Saddam’s regime and her bigoted attitude to the Kurds. She chillingly tried to excuse her lack uncaring attitude to the Kurdish victims of Saddam’s rule by falsely claiming that she had a Kurdish grandmother (see IRAQ’S BLOODY SUMMER, BY JON LEE ANDERSON, THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 11, 2003). Here are some excerpts:

 

I noticed that she (Ms Al-Khedairy) never mentioned Saddam Hussein, and the last time we’d met I had asked her opinions of him. “There is something Americans never understand,” she had said. “ And that is that the President is from these people, and he understands them. He shares their values. This country needs to be ruled with firmness, you know. And this firmness needs a little bit of cruelty.”

 

I was curious to see if Amal (Ms Al-Khedairy) would speak differently about Saddam now.” Let’s not say it all bad,” she said, when I asked. She spoke of how Saddam had modernized Iraq, and mentioned the wonderful new highways that had been built. I said that she sounded like the Italians who praised Mussolini for making the trains run on time, but she ignored me. She talked about a trip to Kurdistan she had made in the early eighties with her children, how good the new roads were, and how safe and beautiful it had all seemed. “Until 1991, I thought he could still do some good things, and even afterward, but it didn’t turn out that way.” Somewhat shocked, I asked Amal, “ What about the Anfal campaign?” – when Saddam sent his Army to raze Kurdish villages, and killed tens of thousands of civilians with guns and poison gas. “Even after that, you were O.K. with what he was doing?” Amal nodded. “You know, the Kurds are a difficult people, and can be quite cruel themselves,” she said. “I know, I have a Kurdish grandmother.” She laughed and began talking about the Kurdish persecution of Christians, and how, if I liked, she could introduce me to many Christians in Baghdad who had been forced to flee the Kurds. “One day, you’ll have to hear the whole story,” she said.

 

I asked Amal (Ms Al-Khedairy) how she felt about Uday’s and Qusay’s deaths. She looked glum, and didn’t reply. I mentioned that people around my hotel had gone crazy when they heard the news, and that dozens of guns had been fired into the air in celebration. “It may have been a mixed thing, you know,” she said. “In Iraq, they shoot at weddings and also at funerals.”

 

Amal (Ms Al-Khedairy) said that she was thinking of going to Switzerland or the Czech Republic for the mineral baths and the cool mountain weather.

 

The Ba’athist record on women’s issue

 

• Women were systematically raped in Saddam’s prisons by intelligence operatives whose job it was to be a “violator of women’s honor”. The regime would send tapes of these rapes to family members to intimidate them.
• Saddam sought to bolster his position in the 1990s through an "Islamisation" campaign, which included laws that struck at some fundamental women's rights.
• A 1992 law banned the foreign travel any woman not escorted by her father or her husband. An Iraqi woman married to a non-Iraqi could not pass her nationality on to her children.
• Under Saddam's rule women suffered increasing job discrimination in government ministries in the 1990s, though exceptions were made for female Ba’ath party members.
• The first woman to be hanged for political activism in the history of Iraq was under the Ba’ath Party. Layla Kassim, a 20-year sophomore art student at Baghdad University, was executed by the Ba’athist regime in 1974. Layla Kassim was a Faili Kurd (a Baghdad community of Shi’a Kurds who were later expelled to Iran in 1980).