I found it impossible to read Women in Iraq by Yasmin Husein al-Jawaheri and put out of my mind the words spoken on 12 May 1996 by Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the UN, when interviewed for CBS News' ‘Sixty Minutes' programme. The presenter, Lesley Stahl had asked, referring to the effects of sanctions on Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright responded: “I think this a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” If she has read Iraqi-born writer and academic al-Jawaheri's definitive book, which is subtitled ‘The gender impact of international sanctions', I wonder if Albright feels that the price also paid by Iraqi women of all ages was worth it? In the chapter ‘The Psychological Impact of Sanctions of Iraqi Women' the author reports: “Unprecedented and devastating scenes became common in Iraq under sanctions. Iraqi women sat openly in the streets, with their tiny malnourished children lying quietly in their laps, begging for the fees of a private physician and medicines for their desperately ill children. These sights of mothers with dying children were evidence of many tragic tales.” For her meticulously researched and referenced work, al-Jawaheri studied 227 Iraqi women aged between 15 and 55 from three differing Baghdad residential areas through surveys (assisted by female students from two Baghdad universities), open-ended interviews and case studies, carried out in the 2000s while the sanctions were still in place. Even for those readers less interested in the specific gender implications than in the overall tragedy of modern Iraq and its people, this book provides a thorough and detailed summary of the events leading to the US induced United Nations imposed sanctions on Iraq from 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. They continued until 2003, when the US-UK coalition bombed (again), invaded and occupied Iraq. The author also examines the later infamous intricacies of the UN Oil for Food Programme (OFP) of which the prime beneficiaries were Saddam Hussein and his henchmen and henchwomen. Al-Jawaheri presents and analyses the social changes that occurred in Iraq in the 1970s and their positive effects on women's lives, rights, education and employment and gender relations. The then optimism of women before Saddam Hussein assumed power in 1979 and led Iraq into the 1980-1988 war with Iran that lasted eight years, when their downward trajectory began, is eloquently expressed by one of the writer's very diverse interviewees. Then in her 50s, she was a social scientist and Baghdad University lecturer. She stated that if she had been asked then about “how I envisaged the conditions at the onset of the twenty-first century, I would have given you a very bright and positive picture, a picture that is difficult even to speak about now…. During the 1970s we studied at the universities side-by-side with men colleagues, and went out to work on an equal footing with men, but we were never subjected to the types of harassment that most of us are suffering from today.” Having detailed the dangerous and life-threatening conditions for women, which still prevail today, especially for those who have to go outside their homes, she remarked: “It's hardly surprising that economic deprivation and impoverishment have caused such wide-scale social distortion. The Iraqi society today is a masterpiece produced by the United Nations sanctions…. It's true that the whole society is suffering, but it is women who are the prime victims.” The story of ‘Halimah' epitomises that of so many Iraqi women who have known the best and the worst of circumstances. She married in the late 1970s at the age of 17, after finishing intermediate level school. Both she and her husband worked and they led a happy and comfortable life until he had to return to military service, because of the Iraq-Iran war, in which he was killed in 1983 when she was five months pregnant. She worked hard to raise her daughter and managed her home and life well until 1990. “Within two months of the impositions of sanctions, Halimah's monthly income had become insufficient to buy food for her family.” She subsequently lost her job because the school, in which she worked, had been severely damaged by the bombing in 1991 that targeted and devastated so much of the civilian infrastructure of Iraq, and was unable to find other work. After many months of eating only bread and dates, she and her family existed with difficulty by having to rely on the nominally priced state monthly ration. However, the system was internationally acknowledged for its efficiency in sustaining the survival of Iraqis suffering extreme poverty during the years of sanctions, when inflation and food prices were rising astronomically. By the time that al-Jawaheri encountered Halimah; she was reduced to stoically begging for the sake of her daughter, so that she could finish her education. “In spite of the weakness in my legs I stand for hours in the street until I have gathered enough food for the day.” Women in Iraq was first published in 2008 (I.B. Taurus, London, New York) and is distributed in Egypt by the American University in Cairo Press (paperback, 250 pages, LE 190), but has acquired more rather than less relevance since that year. It is one of those rare books that every paragraph of its exemplary text demands your attention, and enhances your knowledge and understanding of the cruel effects, notably their gender impacts of the unjustifiably extended and punitive sanctions on Iraq with all their ramifications that al-Jaweheri details with great clarity. She also reminds the reader that the sanctions were prolonged because of Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), of which not a trace had been discovered by the inspection teams by 2005, when the UN terminated the work of the inspector – two years after Bush and Blair rounded up their allies to wage war on and then occupy Iraq to intensify the people's suffering.
