Time for a new wave
Stop the war on women
By Minnie Bruce Pratt
Washington is waging a war on women at home
while hypocritically claiming to be "liberating" women in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
This domestic war is not new. During every
administration--from Reagan to Bush, to Clinton to
Bush--right-wing fanatics have bombed women's clinics and
killed abortion-provider doctors while those in office looked
the other way. Impoverished women lost access to abortion
decades ago, with the 1977 passage of the Hyde Amendment under
Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
With the declaration of President George W. Bush's "endless
war," billions of dollars have been funneled into so-called
Homeland Security and the cost of militarily taking over
Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time, here in the United
States basic human services, health care, education and housing
are cut to the bone. Services for women, including funding for
emergency shelters, domestic violence centers and rape crisis
hot lines, are hit hard.
In response, the International Action Center is rallying to
unite the fight back against the two-pronged war--domestic
economic oppression and imperialist war--as part of the ANSWER
Coalition (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) contingent at
the April 25 "March for Women's Lives" in Washington, D.C.
Selling Afghan women's lives
The United States justified its invasion of Afghanistan with
a barrage of publicity that claimed the "collateral benefit" of
a regime change would give women new rights. The actual goal?
To support the interests of energy corporations like Uno cal in
getting a pipeline for fossil fuels from the rich Caspian sea
region through Afghanistan.
The Carter administration had armed and backed reactionary
forces like the Taliban. The CIA orchestrated a war in 1978
against the young socialist government that claimed the
resources of Afghanistan for its own people. This revolutionary
government had banned the bride price, established special
literacy programs for women, and sent brigades of women into
the countryside to provide medical services to poor women.
Years of terrible suffering for women have followed the
counter-revolutionary overthrow of the socialist government.
What is life like for Afghan women today as the feudal
landlords have strengthened their grip and Washington has
invaded, destroyed much of the infrastructure and is continuing
its assaults? Women are still being beaten, harassed, and raped
by the militias of U.S.-backed landlords.
Girls' schools have been burned, co-education banned, and
married women forbidden to attend high school, a heavy blow to
the many under-age girls in forced marriages. There are 593
maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in some
provinces.
What few rights women have retained are actually being taken
away. Washing ton's handpicked titular President Hamid Karzai
appointed fundamentalist Fazl Hadi Shinwari as chief justice of
the Supreme Court. Hadi Shinwari has brought back the Taliban's
Department of Vice and Virtue. Renamed the Ministry of
Religious Affairs, its stated purpose is to control women's
public dress and behavior.
U.S. war on Iraqi women
In a recent news conference, Bush claimed that the United
States is waging war in Iraq against a "fanatical political
ideology" that seeks to "oppress and persecute women."
The reality? Life is far worse for women in Iraq since the
first Gulf War, the imposition of U.S. sanctions and now the
imperialist occupation.
After the Iraqi national revolution of 1958 overthrew a
monarchy and feudal landlords who had been supported by U.S.
and British economic interests, some of the profits from the
country's oil fields finally went to its people rather than to
U.S. and British corporations. There was free education through
the university level, encouraging families to keep daughters in
school; guaranteed jobs for women who wanted to work; and equal
pay for equal work. Health care was free, mothers had pre- and
post-natal care, and working women had six months of paid
maternity leave. There was subsidized basic food and housing,
and subsidized child care in most work places. (Madre)
And after the "liberation" of the U.S. invasion? According
to the Independent, "U.S.-led forces have killed more than
10,000 Iraqis since the onset of the invasion--the highest
civilian casualty rate of any war waged by the West since
Vietnam." (Feb. 8)
Many of these must be women, given that 80 percent of small
arms casualties in any war are women and children. (United
Nations Human Rights Commission)
Women are now forced to spend hours hauling water from
streams choked with raw sewage. Meanwhile, U.S. tax dollars
have paid the Bechtel Corp. $3 billion to repair Iraq's water,
electricity and other infrastructure--but only as needed by
other corporations and the U.S. military.
Farmers, many of them women, cannot grow food because of
unexploded cluster bombs in their fields.
One-third of all clinics offering family-planning services
were destroyed during the war, while the U.S. works to turn the
Iraqi health system into a profit-making machine. (Madre)
The occupying U.S. Coalition Provi sional Authority has
refused requests from Iraqi women's groups "to create a women's
ministry; appoint women to the drafting committee of Iraq's new
constitution and guarantee that 40 percent of all CPA
appointees are women, [and] pass laws codifying women's rights
and criminalizing domestic violence." (Madre)
The next wave of women's liberation
Washington's propaganda about "freedom" for women in
Afghanistan and Iraq is camouflage for its military control of
territory that will give its corporate bosses access to new
markets, bigger profits and cheaper labor--much of it by poor
and working women.
Women's liberation can only be advan ced in the context of
the battle against capitalism and its imperialist military
aggression. Otherwise, the powers that be will manipulate
legitimate anguish about atrocities and injustices against
women into support for actions that actually bring more
oppression and exploitation.
A women's movement independent of capitalist interests and
their big-business political parties is essential. The great
victories of women's liberation in the past have been won not
by the vote, but by mass action and mass organizing.
Working together with a strong anti-imperialist, anti-war
movement, women's liberation can surge forward in a bold new
wave.
Reprinted from the April 29, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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