By IPS Correspondents
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 16 2005 (IPS)

Zainab Salbi was 11 years old when her father was handpicked to serve as Saddam Hussein’s personal pilot, regularly ferrying the former Iraqi president from Baghdad to his hometown of Tikrit.

She recalls growing up in a climate of fear, with state-sponsored violence against women a commonplace occurrence, and tensions high from the stalemated 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

In her new memoir, “Between Two Worlds: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam” (Gotham Books, 2005), Salbi says she and her family found their lives under the Iraqi dictator’s total control. Her mother eventually sent her to the United States at age 20 for an arranged marriage to spare her from Hussein’s growing interest, but the marriage became another nightmare.

In 1993, Salbi founded Women for Women International, a non-profit that helps women in war-torn regions rebuild their lives. Its most successful programme is a sponsorship network linking women in 33 countries with sister survivors of wars. Each month, participants exchange letters and a modest amount of money.

At a recent appearance in New York to promote her book, Salbi talked about “the mass rape of Shiite women as they were deported to the border of Iraq”. She described how rape was used as a form of punishment under the regime, as well as to blackmail women into joining the secret service and spying on family members.

“We had a ‘People’s Day’ in which people could go to him (Hussein) and ask him to solve their own problems,” Salbi said. “And if he liked women in these sessions, they were taken to other rooms and they were raped.”

“Professional, working, outspoken women have been assassinated and I know about 20 women who have been assassinated,” she said. “On a daily basis, we are seeing women’s bodies on the shores of the Tigris and Euphrates.”

“We have hair salons in Iraq that have been targeted for bombing,” she said. “We have female college students who are being targeted for kidnapping and rape.”

According to a report issued in February by Amnesty International, Iraqi women continue to live with violence and fear. “The lawlessness and increased killings, abductions and rapes that followed the overthrow of the government of Saddam Hussein have restricted women’s freedom of movement and their ability to go to school or to work,” according to the report.

It says that female genital mutilation, honour crimes and domestic violence have also increased in the context of general violence and lawlessness.

Salbi strongly believes that the world needs to pay more attention to what women are saying, especially in post-conflict areas. “They are about 60 percent of the population in post-conflict areas and they cannot be marginalised from the decision-making power in terms of the discussion of about nation-building,” she said.

If not for the courage of Bosnian and Rwandan women who talked about what happened in terms of the mass rape in their countries, “We would not have changed international laws and the Geneva agreement and we wouldn’t have prosecuted rape as a crime of genocide,” she noted.

In spite of the current situation in Iraq, a survey done by Women for Women International found that 90 percent of women there are “very optimistic about the future”. In Salbi’s opinion “this is a very important finding” and “we should not dismiss it.”

The survey also found that 94 percent of the women are “adamant” that their legal rights have to be protected.

“Although the constitutional discussion is still going on, we have to protect women’s legal rights, not only for women’s sake but for the country’s sake,” she said. “If we don’t achieve that, we could lose them to more fundamentalist forces.”

On the other hand, she also thinks that it is critical to use Saddam Hussein’s trial to “go through a process of telling our truth, documenting our past in Iraq”. She fears that “he is being indicted only for a handful of crimes” and insisted on the opportunity to include his crimes against women.

“This is a very important point in terms of setting up precedents for other future governments of Iraq, and for the society at large, that violence against women is not to be tolerated,” she said. “This trial is an historical opportunity.”

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