India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 01 :: Jan. 02 - 15, 1999

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COVER STORY

Sanctions and women

STEPHEN KINZER

A DECADE ago, Iman Mohammed was a schoolteacher in Baghdad who earned the equivalent of $400 a month and spent a fair amount of it keeping herself smartly dressed and pretty in the hope of attracting the best possible husband.

Today Iman Mohammed still teaches fifth-graders, but inflation has reduced the value of her monthly salary to just $2. She lives at home with her widowed mother and five brothers and sisters, and has all but given up hope of starting a family of her own.

"My two brothers support the family, but they have no money to get married," she said during a break between classes. "Other young men are in the same situation. I am ready to marry anyone who asks, but who can do it in these conditions?"

MURAD SEZER / AP
The Koran in hand, an Iraqi woman weeps during prayer at a Baghdad mosque on December 24. The sanctions are exacting a high social cost, and women bear the brunt of it.

Depressed, unable to contribute substantially to her family and facing the prospect of living her life without a husband, Iman Mohammed, 36, is typical of her generation of Iraqi women. Although eight years of economic sanctions on Iraq have devastated the entire society, women have suffered most acutely.

"The sanctions have changed many things for women," Iman Mohammed said. "There is no work, so men do not get married. Women can barely afford food or medicine, and the idea of having anything nice is just a dream. When I was young, I was middle-class and happy. Now my adulthood is being denied to me. Boys and men can adjust more easily to this situation. They can go everywhere they like. They can have jobs, even if they are bad ones. We are much more limited. We cannot even go out for a picnic. It causes us great psychological problems."

Millions of Iraqi women like Iman Mohammed work in public jobs, and nearly all earn about what she earns. They avoid starvation largely because of monthly food rations supplied by the United Nations and paid for with money the Government is allowed to earn by selling oil.

The sanctions imposed by the United Nations forbid almost all foreign trade and have reduced the Iraqi economy to ruins.

Women like Iman Mohammed do not work mainly for income, like people in the rest of the world. Without jobs they would have no alternative but to sit at home, so they work to occupy their minds and maintain contact with the outside world.

There are no reliable statistics about marriage rates here, but anecdotal evidence suggests that they have plummeted. One Iraqi newspaper recently estimated that 70 per cent of Iraqis between the ages of 18 and 40 are unmarried. In recent interviews, women of all social classes said they knew of almost no young people who have married in the last eight years or are preparing to marry. It is a phenomenon that could have widespread social effects.

New York Times Service