WP: Iraqi Women See Little but Darkness

[kskiska]

Advocates Skeptical That Approval of Constitution Would Improve Their Lives

BAGHDAD -- Three school years' worth of unbaked clay pieces have piled up in Hanna Milla's darkened office at Iraq's National Museum of Modern Art: rounded vases, stern masks, a lumpy hawk on its post, all shaped by the hands of young students and smoothed by Milla's coral-tipped fingers. And all waiting to be fired in kilns that have sat without reliable electricity for two years.

Teachers in the museum's warren of classrooms and halls last ran the kilns in January 2003, as students and instructors prepared for what would be their last exhibition as war closed in.

(snip)

President Bush has said women's rights is one of the reasons Americans are fighting in Iraq. A Western official in Baghdad said Friday that the proposed constitution was "a good constitution for women, and very frankly that's something we were very insistent upon."

The draft going before voters Saturday specifies equality regardless of a person's sex and aspires to reserve 25 percent of the seats in the National Assembly for women.

But it also gives each Iraqi household the option of using religious law to decide matters of inheritance, divorce, alimony and other family issues. Rights advocates have said they fear women will be coerced by male relatives into accepting the least favorable interpretations of religious law -- forbidding divorce without a husband's permission, for example, or cutting a daughter's inheritance compared with a son's.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/14/AR2005101402232.html

[texpatriot2004]

1. I can't imagine the horror of their lives. Do they have water yet?

Or electricity?