IRAQI WOMEN SPEAK OUT

Amal Al-Khederi and Nermin Al-Mufti, two Iraqi women touring the U.S. to speak about Gulf War II and the American occupation of their country, gave their first of three scheduled talks in Chicago at UIC on Wednesday night. The forum, sponsored by Students for Social Justice, Free Society, Campus Anti-war and the International Social Club, took place at the Rafael Cintron-Ortiz Latino Cultural Center.

Al-Khederi, herself a director of a cultural center in Baghdad, told of how her center was damaged during Gulf War I (Desert Storm), rebuilt and served as a cultural refuge throughout the crippling economic sanctions of the 1990s, only to be reduced to rubble entirely by U.S. bombs last spring. Al-Khederi said 14,000 treasures were looted from the Baghdad Museum while U.S. troops watched from their tanks. And she described the humiliation Iraqis have endured throughout the past 13 years as their standard of living and level of education has dropped from one of the highest in the region in the 1970s to one of the lowest today.

The capture of Saddam Hussein, worries Al-Khederi, who sees it as furthering the already fueled cycle of violence by those Iraqis who feel their honor has been tarnished.

Nermin Al-Mufti, a journalist, also bemoaned the security breakdown in Iraq. Many Iraqi women and girls have been kidnapped and raped in Baghdad—four hundred rapes in two months alone in June and July of this year.

Al-Mufti also told of a new chemical weapon used by the U.S. to raze buildings in Baghdad. She described it as perhaps a new kind of napalm—a yellow powder that when thrown into a building produced intense heat, then white smoke followed by black smoke and, in a matter of hours melted six stories of a shopping center, leaving only the roof on the ground intact. Al-Mufti said other shopping centers were destroyed by such means as well as 7 Iraqi policemen in Faluja. In the case of the policemen, only a couple of body parts were found after witnesses said they were hit with a yellow powder.

When asked if Iraqi could govern themselves, if the U.S. were to end the occupation, both women agreed this would be not only possible but desirable. Al-Mufti said furthering the occupation and rule by a puppet government that does not represent the people is sewing seeds, discontent and future civil war in Iraqi.

Al-Mufti mourns a whole generation lost she said, killed for nothing by Gulf Wars I and II and she said the best way that Americans can help the Iraqi people is to take back our own country from the elite one percent who run the U.S.

Al-Khederi and Al-Mufti will be speaking Thursday night, 12/18/03 at the Chicago Temple, 77 West Washington.