Riverbend blogged in February concerning a woman who came forward to say she was raped when US-trained Iraqi forces arrested her. Sabrine Al Janabe has again been arrested and accused of making it up to undermine security. Riverbend's take on it:
No Iraqi woman under the circumstances- under any circumstances- would publicly, falsely claim she was raped. There are just too many risks. There is the risk of being shunned socially. There is the risk of beginning an endless chain of retaliations and revenge killings between tribes. There is the shame of coming out publicly and talking about a subject so taboo, she and her husband are not only risking their reputations by telling this story, they are risking their lives.
And the accusations came:
Sabrine Janabi’s rape case has polarised Iraq’s Sunni and Shia communities at a moment when the country is already enmeshed in a low-level civil war. Shia officials have accused her of being a proxy for Sunni militants who want to sabotage a security plan for Baghdad, while Sunni politicians have pointed to her story as proof of the sectarian nature of Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Government.
[source]
Riverbend:
No one would lie about something like this simply to undermine the Baghdad security operation. That can be done simply by calculating the dozens of dead this last week. Or by writing about the mass detentions of innocents, or how people are once again burying their valuables so that Iraqi and American troops don't steal them (Riverbend's blog).
I have lived in an east African Arabic region, and like Riverbend I can not imagine anyone trying to fake rape charges in an Islamic social context. A woman who lied about rape could count on death for it, and maybe just for coming forward about a rape that really happened.
Again, Riverbend:
She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever. Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but this is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name. Hearing her tell her story physically makes my heart ache. Some people will call her a liar. Others (including pro-war Iraqis) will call her a prostitute- shame on you in advance.
And of course Sabrine was arrested and accused of lying:
Her story earned a fiery rebuttal from the Shia Prime Minister, who praised the policemen and promised to promote them. His office released a medical report allegedly taken from a US military combat hospital that said the woman had been beaten but showed no signs of sexual penetration. [source]
And accused as Riverbend said she would be:
Although initial reports described Janabi as a 20-year-old Sunni Turkman, the officials said that she was actually a Shia woman, who worked as a prostitute and had been paid by the Islamic Party, the largest Sunni faction in parliament, to come forward with the charges. Janabi was a pseudonym she invented for her job.
"She is in Iraqi custody. She was arrested a few days after you heard about her. She lied," one of the officials told The Times.
"She was interrogated by a doctor and expert in rape cases." The Government had initially planned to release her videotaped confession this week, but delayed it, the official said. [source]
Right, a woman in Arabic society sees her reasonable exit strategy as making herself into a Tawana Brawley? Anyone who thinks so is deluded about the nature of an Islamic society. And if US observers would lend more credence to Maliki than Sabrine, their misprision is a sure index of the hallucinatory degree of US misunderstanding fueling the evil being perpetrated upon Iraq in our names. People imagine Iraq as being like a USA, an illusion which dims public awareness.
If she really is a prostitute, which I don’t believe for an instant, she would have been immediately killed. In old societies where neighbors have known and intermarried one another for centuries, people recognize one another on the street (we live in Mexico now, which is that way). They are not a collection of recently displaced strangers such as we find in the suburbs of the US The public outcry would have arisen from Sabrine’s nearest neighbors before the interview was through. Her neighborhood would have seen right through her. But somehow only Maliki and his brutal henchmen need to sound the objection. Hmm..
More accusations:
Before her arrest, Janabi had already been detained briefly by police for living in a displaced person’s house, where she was suspected of working in a medical clinic for insurgents, the official said. She will most likely be prosecuted on these charges, he said.
Salim Abdullah, a spokesman for the Islamic Party, told The Times that the Government was trying to cover up Janabi’s rape. "An arrest warrant was issued against Sabrine al-Janabi so as to prevent her from talking anymore to the media," Abdullah said.
[source]
Helping out with medical needs of insurgents. Say, who on the streets of Baghdad is not being accused of being an insurgent?
Riverbend:
It was less than 14 hours between Sabrine's claims and Maliki's rewarding the people she accused. In 14 hours, Maliki not only established their innocence, but turned them into his own personal heroes. I wonder if Maliki would entrust the safety his own wife and daughter to these men.
How Sabrine’s case looks to those on the street. From Riverbend:
I wonder what excuse they used when they took her. It’s most likely she’s one of the thousands of people they round up under the general headline of 'terrorist suspect’. She might have been one of those subtitles you read on CNN or BBC or Arabiya, "13 insurgents captured by Iraqi security forces." The men who raped her are those same security forces Bush and Condi are so proud of- you know- the ones the Americans trained...
...They abducted her from her house in an area in southern Baghdad called Hai Al Amil. No- it wasn’t a gang. It was Iraqi peace keeping or security forces- the ones trained by Americans? You know them. She was brutally gang-raped and is now telling the story. Half her face is covered for security reasons or reasons of privacy. I translated what she said below... (please refer to Riverbend's blog for the photos, the ugly details of Sabrine's interview on Aljazeera)
Riverbend is claiming that the forces trained by the US behave as gangs, rather than peacekeepers:
Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.
Should we get the chance, I would hope to encourage support for Sabrine here. If she can be found.
Assuming Sabrine is even yet alive, that is...