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No Reason to Celebrate

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This past Thursday marked International Women’s Day. Women and men across the world commemorated the day in a variety of ways. In the Philippines, women protested against new anti-terrorism laws. In Bangladesh, women’s groups organized rallies. In Nablus, the West Bank city recently paralyzed by an Israeli invasion, hundreds marched on a military checkpoint and demanded a lifting of the international boycott on their government.

International Women’s Day is not simply a celebration of women. Rather, it is a political holiday that was originally declared by the Socialist Party of America in 1909. A strike by women textile workers on that day in 1917 marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution — an uprising that, before Stalin’s counterrevolution, granted full rights to women including communal childcare, the right to divorce and free abortion on demand.

International Women’s Day is a day to celebrate the strides that women have made towards equality and to bring awareness to the struggles that still exist for women’s liberation.

One look at the news coming out of Iraq shows us why this continued struggle is necessary.

The gender composition of the U.S. Armed Forces has changed dramatically in the last century. Today, more women serve in the military than in any other time, with more than 160,000 having served in the Middle East since 2003. Unfortunately, not all the numbers on gender coming out of the military are so positive — most notably, those on rape and sexual assault.

The U.S. military, given its desperate need for new recruits, is happy to welcome women into its ranks. However, it appears that there is no guarantee that these women won’t be abused because of their gender.

A Senate hearing in 2004 listened to testimony that the military was grossly negligent on the topic of sexual abuse in the armed forces. Emergency care and rape kits were almost impossible to come by, and allegations were barely investigated.

However, this negligence is not due to a lack of incidents. Statistics on rape are exceedingly difficult to tabulate, especially within the military. However, one study of earlier veterans of war found that around 30 percent of women were raped or sexually assaulted by one of their fellow soldiers. A study done in 2003 at the Air Force Academy in Colorado found that one-fifth of female cadets had been the victim of at least one completed or attempted assault.

Reports within Iraq tell a similar story. Last year, it was reported that U.S. female soldiers were dying of dehydration in their sleep. In order to prevent dehydration in the searing heat of Iraq, it is necessary to drink a great deal of water. However, reports found that many women stopped drinking liquids around 4 p.m. Why did women specifically do this? Female soldiers reported they were afraid to get up in the middle of the night to use the latrines alone after hearing that men waited nearby at night, abusing and raping women that passed by themselves.

Members of the military are beginning to come forward to report their own sexual assault experiences. Army Specialist Suzanne Swift was recently released from military prison after refusing to be redeployed in 2006. Her primary reason for resisting: Swift says she was sexually abused by her commanding officers while in Iraq. She says that she tried to report abuse, but the Army took no action on her case. When she was arrested for refusing deployment, one of the officers who had abused her was put in charge of her supervision. Now out of prison but forced to remain in the Army until 2009, she encourages other women to stand against sexual abuse.

It is not just the woman within the U.S. military that are victims of this gender-based violence. Despite Bush’s proclamation that, after U.S. “liberation” of Iraq, “there won’t be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms,” the women of Iraq are telling a different story.

One gruesome example — a group of at least three American soldiers stationed near the town of Al-Mahmudiyah stalked, raped and murdered 15-year-old Abeer Kasim Hamza, only after killing her father, mother and 5-year-old sister. In an attempt to cover up what they had done, the soldiers set the lower half of Abeer’s body on fire. Abu Firas Janabi, a cousin of Abeer’s mother, who saw the bodies, said, “Never in my mind could I have imagined such a gruesome sight.” Originally, the military attributed the killing to “insurgent activity.”

We hear much boasting from the Bush administration about the Iraqi security forces that the U.S. is training. Unfortunately, it appears they are learning how to abuse women from the U.S. military forces as well. Recently, 20-year-old Sabrine al-Janabi told al-Jazerra about her brutal gang rape at the hands of three Iraqi policemen. Despite being dismissed by Prime Minister al-Maliki as “a liar,” the New York Times reported that the Iraqi nurse who treated Janabi found signs of sexual assault.

Riverbend, an Iraqi woman who writes a blog about conditions in the country since the invasion, wrote passionately, “Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but [Janabi] is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name … She’s just one of tens, possibly hundreds, of Iraqi women who are violated in their own homes and in Iraqi prisons.”

We have been told by the Bush administration that we went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq in part to “liberate” the women of those countries. However, how the military has treated women, both those within its ranks and those it supposedly sought to free, shows its complete lack of respect for women as equals in this world.

Laura Taylor is a senior in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She can be contacted at lat34@cornell.edu. Kind of a Big Deal appears Tuesdays.

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