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Five women confront a new Iraq
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The judge who returned from the US
In real life, not all losses can be restored. But they can be compensated. Perpetrators can be punished. People can be treated as equals before the law.
Those were Zakia Hakki's ideals when she decided to go into law half a century ago. And they are what she had to believe was possible when she agreed to leave the US to help rebuild the legal system of a country she fled.
Ms. Hakki, who worked in Baghdad as a lawyer and judge for many years, left in 1996 by bribing her way out with a valuable carpet and the help of family members who had already escaped to the US. But for Hakki, the struggle began long before the Baathist regime came to power.
When she graduated from law school in 1957, she was one of five women in a class of 350 men. Even then, she was always a minority within a minority. "When you are a female, that's one count against you. When you are the wrong race, a Kurd, that's two. And when you're the wrong religion, Shiite," she says, that made three strikes against her.
Today she wonders how she muscled her way into the law - and a prominent place in Iraqi Kurdish politics. "Maybe I was young and I didn't care about these dangers. Maybe I was a little crazy," grins Hakki, leaning back into one of the regal armchairs in the Republican Palace.
The opulent building is now the home of the US-led administration in Iraq - as well as the temporary offices of each of the Iraqi government ministries. "In my wildest dreams I couldn't imagine I would be working in this palace," says Zakki, who peppers her speech with terms of endearment, calling others "habibti" and "hayati," or "my love" and "my life."
Hakki is now an adviser to the Ministry of Justice from the Iraqi Reconstruction Development Council, a US-funded panel of Iraqi-Americans. She is working on revamping courts and laws. She oversees the process of selecting new judges and staff the ministry. And she will be involved in plans to convene a constitutional convention, which would draft a constitution and send it to the Iraqi people in a referendum before elections.
Hakki remembers discrimination from an early age. When she was little, a tough question came up in Arabic class. No one knew the answer but Hakki, and the teacher berated the others, saying, "You allowed a Kurdish girl to answer this question?"
As early as the 1950s, Hakki smuggled documents into the US Embassy about the treatment of Kurds in Iraq. She had become involved in the Kurdistan Democratic Party [KDP], keen to gain attention in the West. "We were trying to tell them that there is a Kurdish people here, and we need tobe equal in front of the law."
Hakki became a judge, and was a founder and president of the Union of Women of Iraqi Kurdistan; in the mid-1970s, she became the only woman in the leadership of the KDP. But the regime placed her under house arrest, and later she other KDP leaders who could fled to Iran. She was put up in a beautiful house by the Shah, she recalls, but didn't want to live "on the Shah's charity." I said, 'Let me go to Baghdad and be punished.' "
Upon her return, she kept a lower political profile and spent years working on family and civil law. That is how she knows that the image some have ascribed to the Baath Party - that of socialist institution that gave equal rights to women - was little more than myth: A woman who kills her husband in a fit of jealous rage will get the death penalty; a man in the same situation will be exonerated for an "honor killing." A woman cannot gain custody of her children in a divorce, she says - and Hussein's regime passed laws allowing a man to beat his wife.
When she left Iraq seven years ago, Hakki points out, she had to have her son to accompany her - she would not have been able to travel alone. "As if I am handicapped and need a guardian," snaps Hakki, who covers her head with a loose and gauzy black scarf. "If I have a PhD and he is an illiterate man, then I still need to bring him."
Hakki carries around a stack of position papers she's written, in English, outlining what a new government should look like. She wants to see a federal system of Iraq's north, central, and south regions, a balance of power between different branches of government, and a Supreme Court. But federalism seems to appeal more to Kurds than anyone else, and it's unclear whether the US favors a decentralization of power. "I'm not here because I'm a Kurd, I'm here because I'm an Iraqi," she says. "I thank the people who discriminated against me, because it made me struggle for equality."
Donald Campbell, a Superior Court judge from New Jersey and adviser here to the Ministry of Justice, says Hakki carries unusual authority as an Iraqi coming from America - but one who didn't spend most of her life in contented exile. "There's some resistance on part of Iraqis who stayed to Iraqis from the US coming to taking an active role. But she's got tremendous credibility ... and she is more or less a legend, because of her political activities as a graduate of the judicial system here," he says. "She has lived in the US and she can explain to [Iraqis] what it is that we bring. Zakia brings the experience of having lived under both regimes."
Though life is dangerous now, Hakki says it would be still more dangerous to sit on the sidelines and watch everyone lose the peace. She vividly remembers when the Baath party came to power in a 1968. Several dozen people were hanged in a central Baghdad square. "No one said, 'What was their crime? Where were their trials?' To me, that means that we were the ones who created this tyrant, Saddam, because we kept silent."
The rising politician
Lena Aboud is not the quiet type. It's easy to think otherwise: Soft-spoken, in her tailored, short-sleeved dress, she appears to have more of the poise of a young Jackie O. than the prowess of an up-and-coming politician.
But just a month after the war ended, Ms. Aboud helped organize the first demonstration of women demanding the US do more to improve security in Baghdad. Paul Bremer, the top US official in Iraq, later met with some of the leaders of the protest. Among them, say officials working with Mr. Bremer in the Coalition Provisional Authority, Aboud has emerged as one of the most eloquent and energetic. She was considered a candidate for Iraq's governing council, appointed this week, though she did not make it. Only three women sit on the council, a disappointment for Voices of the Women of Iraq, who had pressed for 30 percent female representation in political bodies.
"We've been trying to widen our meetings to include women, and last time a few were there, but she [Aboud] really stood out as one of the ones who was very articulate," says Charles Heatly, a spokesman for the CPA. "She was definitely not a wallflower."
These days, it's best to catch Aboud in that slice of time after she comes home from a long day at work and before the start of curfew at 11 p.m. When not struggling with postwar politics, Aboud is a physician who works at a clinic in one of the city's poorest areas and does emergency rounds at a hospital in another.
The young activist has clear ideas about how to move towards an Iraqi interim government. "It's difficult to arrange a government and just let it get going, because there is no agreement on how it should look. To put in a political council as a consultant body, for now it's a good step, as long as elections are held soon, within a year."
Aboud, who exudes a coolly intelligent calm, could be a bridge between Iraqis who say the occupying authorities must turn over power to Iraqis as soon as possible, and those who argue Iraq is not yet ready to rule itself. "Democracy is perhaps the most important thing, but it's not the only thing," says Aboud. "There are so many buildings destroyed. The economy is destroyed. We need to make real steps towards rebuilding those things first."
During her childhood, Aboud learned to keep a low profile because her family moved around a lot; in one year, they lived in five different places. Aboud's parents, opponents of Hussein's regime, kept moving to try to elude the harassment and arrest of the security police. "It was a horror. They were always following us," she recalls.
Now, Iraqis are living with a different kind of fear. It is taking its greatest toll on women, rolling back freedoms to do simple things on one's own, she says. "The key thing is to bring back security, and to make the world hear Iraqi women who are from the inside, not just the outside," she says, referring to Iraqis who have been living abroad.
Crime and anticoalition violence have made many men insist that women stay home. Baghdad neighborhoods buzz with rumors of rapes, Iraqis say. Aboud had to agree to have her brother or father escort her to work.
Aboud hopes to wield influence to improve life for poorer Iraqi women and to push for equal protection under the law. "Simple women in rural areas are really suffering. They are facing violence. There are simple things that we need - we don't have one center or shelter where women affected by violence can come for help," she says.
Under Hussein's regime, there was little room for leadership outside the Baath Party. "Now," Aboud says, "I feel I can do something for Iraqi women, and for my country." Should she step into the political ring, she expects challenges. "For our society, it's difficult because they see you and think, maybe you could be a family doctor, but they don't believe you could be an open-heart surgeon. They don't believe a woman can do it," she says.
Aboud is optimistic pressures to veil and wear conservative clothing will pass. "These are coming up because the regime kept religion bottled up. It's temporary," she says, with a nod of confidence. "It will be changed."
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