Women in Iraq fear that the American occupation may have replaced one kind of tyranny with another, writes Graham Usher in Baghdad "I will have to take this off," says Yanar Mohamed, mid-way through our interview in her sandbagged offices in Baghdad. She slowly pulls away a bulletproof vest, so padded it nearly doubles her size. She has been wearing it for a month -- ever since she received a death sentence from the "Chaperons of the Prophet", a radical Islamist group based in Pakistan with links to Al-Qa'eda and now, apparently, operating in Baghdad. "I have to take the threat seriously," she says. "These are ones whose bombs kill 50 people in a single blast in Iraq. They wouldn't think twice about killing me." Yanar earned the charge of apostasy for campaigning against Resolution 137, passed by the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) in December. This replaces Iraq's old civil code with Islamic Shari'a law, allowing Iraq's clergy to rule on matters to do with marriage, divorce, inheritance and the custody of children -- all issues critical to the status of women in the new Iraq. "The old civil code wasn't ideal; it was still based on Shari'a," says Yanar, an avowed secularist. "But there was a formal equality between women and men. Women had full access to education, full access to jobs and equity of salary for the same work, something that hasn't been achieved in the West. A man could take a second wife only with the approval of his first. And there was a minimum age for marriage." To implement Resolution 137 the signature of Paul Bremer, chief American administrator in Iraq, is required. He has refused to give it. But, speaking at a newly opened women's centre in Karbala last week, he conceded that once "there will be a sovereign government on 30 June Iraqis will have responsibility for their own country". For women like Yanar the fear is that that government will roll back the very real rights women achieved in the old Iraq, including under Saddam Hussein. Nor does she have much faith in Iraq's new American masters to stem the tide, despite Bremer's veto. In August -- four months after the US army invaded Baghdad -- she fired off a letter to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) complaining that its negligence in providing law and security in Iraq had allowed "an unprecedented explosion of violence against women, with 400 being killed, abducted and raped". She received no reply. She also implicitly blames the US for Resolution 137, since it was America's allies in the former Iraqi opposition and now on the IGC that mustered a majority to pass it. "The US could never find a homogenous group to transfer power to in Iraq. The old opposition was made up mainly of Islamist and Kurdish parties. And it is these parties on the IGC that today are creating a new Iraq divided along sectarian and ethnic lines. Most urban, secular Iraqis are unhappy with this formula. And women know they will be the biggest losers, since their rights will be subordinated to religious and ethnic ones. We have already had experience of how the 'secular nationalist' Saddam used Islam against us once he saw his power slipping." This is why Yanar is against elections in Iraq any time soon: "it would only empower the Islamists, who have the most funds and are the best organised," she says. Instead, she and the group she represents, the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq, advocate a strategy of raising the awareness of Iraqi women, "so that we can break out of the isolation imposed on us by 35 years of dictatorship, war, sanctions and occupation. We need to tell Iraqi women not only about rights taken for granted in the West but also about rights once taken for granted here." She knows it is a hard road ahead but in the "newly-shaped future of Iraq" there is no other for women to travel: "We are at an intersection. Either we organise and practice our social and political freedoms or we give way to a theocracy and the institutionalised and legalised oppression of women in Iraq."
