Widows
Become The Silent Tragedy
By Dahr Jamail &
Ali Al-Fadhily
08 December, 2006
Inter
Press Service
BAGHDAD, Dec. 7 (IPS)
- Hundreds of thousands of widows are becoming the silent tragedy of
a country sliding deeper into chaos by the day.
Widows are the flip side
of violence that has meant more than a million men dead, detained or
disabled, Iraqi NGOs estimate. These men's wives or mothers now carry
the burden of running the families.
"The total figure of
men who have been killed, disabled or detained for long periods of time
adds up to more than one and a half million," Khalid Hameed, chief
of the Iraqi al-Raya human rights organisation told IPS. "The average
number of Iraqi family members is seven, so about ten million Iraqis
are facing the worst living circumstances."
In these circumstances, he
said, women have had to "search for ways to survive and support
their families at a time when not much help comes from the international
community."
Most international NGOs left
the country by last year apparently on the advice of governments of
their countries pointing to growing violence and dangers to NGO members.
"International NGOs
were conducting support projects for Iraqi women before they suddenly
quit and left the country in a rush in October 2005," Faris Daghistani,
who was project manager at the Baghdad mission for the Italian humanitarian
aid organisation in Iraq INTERSOS told IPS.
"There was a wide focus
on working women and how to support them by training and providing them
with necessary tools to raise income on their own," he said. "It
is a pity that most of our productive projects have stopped, and we
had to leave women to face their fate on their own."
The violence since the invasion
of Iraq in 2003 is not the first to have taken its toll. Hundreds of
thousands of men were killed, taken prisoner or disabled during the
1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq.
"We have never lived
our lives as human beings should live," 42-year-old Dr Shatha Ahmed
told IPS at her home in Baghdad. "The Iraq-Iran war took our fathers,
and now the Bush war is taking our husbands and sons."
Women now face a long struggle
surviving and bringing up families on their own, she said. "We
could not even dream of developing our own skills."
Dr. Shatha's husband, also
a doctor, was killed by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army in September this
year when he was leaving the Ministry of Health offices in Baghdad.
She now has to support her family, and her husband's parents as well.
Some help is on offer to
widows through groups such as the Iraqi Red Crescent, the Islamic Party,
the Muslim Scholars Association and non-governmental organisations.
But this support is not well organised, and is insufficient to help
the growing number of widows.
The Social Affairs Office
of the government has started paying the equivalent of about 100 dollars
monthly to widows. But this payment cannot support whole families, given
particularly the shooting inflation.
And the payment is not easy
to get. "I had to pay a lot of money as bribes to government officials
in order to get the monthly support payment, and that is not enough
to support my big family," 47-year-old widow Haja Saadiya Hussein
from Baghdad told IPS.
"Americans killed my
husband last year near a checkpoint, and now I have to work as a servant
in government officials' houses to earn a living for my six children.
I have stopped them going to school, to cut my expenses."
Some widows have attempted
to remarry in order to find support. Some second husbands, who are usually
older, offer to take care of their new sons for religious reasons.
"There can be no compensation
for losing a husband," a spokesperson from the Iraqi Red Crescent's
social support department told IPS. "The world is responsible for
these women who lost their spouses in the name of the international
community."
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