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04/16/2006:
"‘Our childhood is killed in Iraq. It is killed’"
The question to the group of women delegates from Iraq was “What would you like to see come out of this meeting?”I was not prepared either for the answer or for its explanation: “What we need now,” one of the Iraqi woman said, “is the end of the blood-letting. Women are very necessary to this operation. Fifty-five to 60 percent of Iraqis are women. The minority is ruling ... Women must interfere in the affairs of men. We should take over.”
It was hardly a statement I expected to hear in this place from these women. But I couldn’t forget it.
“The minority is ruling.” Right. And not too well, it seems, either here or there.
When men sit down to negotiate peace treaties -- when there’s even someone to negotiate with, which, given al-Qaeda, is not a luxury we seem to have anymore -- they disband armies and guard borders and hold military tribunals and form new governments and punish old ones. But they put no faces on the victims.
When they tote up the cost of the war, they do not include the number of women raped, the number of families displaced, the number of schools bombed, or the number of babies without milk.
The victors take their spoils, monitor the guns, forget the defenseless and leave the people to clean up the rubble. War becomes the daily dirge of the anonymous victims.
But when you bring women together to discuss the effects of war, the things that need to be changed, the real problems of a war-torn society, the conversation takes a sudden turn.
At the first Iraqi-American dialogue convened by the Women’s Global Peace Initiative in New York on March 29, the differences were plain. The women’s first agenda did not concentrate on who did what or who profited or lost by the doing of it. “Take the oil. We don’t care about the oil,” one woman called across the room. “We never got any value from it anyway,” she went on. “Never mind yesterday,” another woman said in answer to the Sunni- Shi’ite tensions. “Forget who did what to whom. We must turn the page now. We must rebuild the country.”
“And what is the first thing that must be done to rebuild the country?” we asked them. I sat with my hands over the keyboard, sure that the list would be long and varied. I was wrong. To a woman, the call was clear: “Take care of our children.”
It was a sobering moment. Take care of our children. “Oh, them,” I thought. “The tiny, the forgotten, targets of this war.”
nationalcatholicreporter
