KARBALA, Iraq – In the midst of the daily violence in Iraq, the effort to seed democracy goes on. It is painstaking and incremental work.
On Monday, U.S. civilian administrator for Iraq Paul Bremer packed his full security detail onto a Black Hawk helicopter and flew 60 miles south of Baghdad to visit 80 black-veiled women in the city of Karbala.
In the heartland of Shiite Muslim fundamentalism, the women have done something improbable, founding the Karbala Women’s Rights Center with a $163,000 grant from the U.S. government. Bremer came for its official opening.
Most of the women are impoverished, having been widowed or left without fathers and brothers to support them after Iraq’s wars and Saddam Hussein’s killings of thousands of Shiite men. The women came to the center with a single goal: to learn a marketable skill.
For most of them, notions of democracy are secondary.
“This is only my third visit here. I came because they told us they would give some training, they would teach us and support the Iraqi women,” said Nawal Jabar, 44, whose husband was killed more than 15 years ago in the Iraq-Iran war, leaving her to care for their five children.
Like most widows, she must rely on the support of male relatives, leaving her all but powerless in her society.
“It’s a very bad situation … but I am hoping I can get a job here so that I can support my children. I will do anything to support my family,” she said, adding, like many of the women, that she planned to take sewing classes.
Bremer toured the center’s Internet cafe, library and sewing room. He said afterward that women need to play a significant role in Iraq’s new government.
“In order for women to have the authority that they are in many ways asking for … you have to get more than token participation,” he said. “It has to be a critical mass, where the women have enough other women so they draw confidence from each other’s presence.”
Nevertheless, Bremer said that he was uncomfortable with a provision in the draft law for governing Iraq after the United States hands back sovereignty that would require 40 percent of the representatives in a transitional assembly to be women. The assembly is to be chosen in June.
“I’m uneasy with quotas as a philosophical matter,” he said, but added, “if the consensus is that we should have quotas, I’m prepared to go along.”
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