Another Casualty of the War: LGBT Rights in Iraq
Tue Dec 18, 2007 at 08:03:15 AM PDT
An article in today's New York Times talks about the impact of the invasion of Iraq on the country's LGBT community.
One of the most disturbing results of our invasion of Iraq is that rather than leading to a government that supports greater freedoms and more civil rights for minorities, the war has given ever-greater power to religious zealots and extremists.
Before the Gulf wars (things started to go south after the 1991 war, but it's the current war that's really made things bad), Iraq had one of the most permissive and progressive societies in the Middle East for both Woman's rights and Gay rights. Follow me over the jump for a picture of being gay in Iraq, then and now.
Before the first Gulf war, Iraq was on its way to becoming something of a gay mecca among Arabic nations:
For a brief, exhilarating time, from the mid-1980s until the early 1990s, they say, gay night life flourished in Iraq. Whereas neighboring Iran turned inward after its Islamic revolution in 1979, Baghdad allowed a measure of liberation after the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
Abu Nawas Boulevard, which hugs the Tigris River opposite what is now the Green Zone, became a promenade known for cruising. Discos opened in the city’s best hotels, the Ishtar Sheraton, the Palestine and Saddam Hussein’s prized Al-Rasheed Hotel, becoming magnets for gay men. Young men with rouged cheeks and glossed lips paraded the streets of Mansour, an affluent neighborhood in Baghdad.
"There were so many guys, from Kuwait, from Saudi Arabia, guys in the street with makeup," said Mr. Hili, who left Iraq in 2000. "Up until 1991, there was sexual freedom. It was a revolutionary time."
I think that last paragraph is particularly telling to many in the LGBT community in America; when a city begins attracting the more overtly gay members of neighboring communities, we know it's taken its first steps to becoming a gay mecca. People leave more repressive cities and states to move to places where they feel safe to be who they are, and Baghdad was in the process of becoming such a place not just for Iraq, but for more repressive neighboring countries as well.
After 1991, that began to change, as Hussein tightended the reins on his country and, for example, shut down all the night clubs. But the LGBT community still felt safe. For the most part,
Homosexuality seemed accepted, as long as it was practiced in private. And even when it was not tolerated, prison time could be evaded with a well-placed bribe.
Fast forward to the Iraq of today.
In January, a United Nations report described the increased persecution, torture and extrajudicial killing of Iraqi lesbians and gay men. In 2005, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for gay men and lesbians to be killed in the "worst, most severe way."
He lifted it a year later, but neither that nor the recent ebb in violence has made Mohammed or his friends feel safe.
From gay mecca to gay hunting ground. From quiet tolerance to active persecution.
Baghdad was a city where those in the LGBT community used to be able to live safe and largely open lives. Now?
They described an underground existence, eked out behind drawn curtains in a dingy safe house in southwestern Baghdad. Five people share the apartment — four gay men and one woman, who says she is bisexual. They have moved six times in the last three years, just ahead, they say, of neighborhood raids by Shiite and Sunni death squads. Even seemingly benign neighborhood gossip can scare them enough to move.
"We seem suspicious because we look like a cell of terrorists," said Mohammed, nervously fingering the lapel of his shirt. "But we can’t tell people what we really are. A cell, yes, but of gays."
If you want to see the sad extent of the transformation of Iraq, I invite you to take a look at the front page and archives of Iraqi LGBT, a UK-based human rights group tracking the travails of the LGBT community in Iraq. Read about the safe houses the LGBT community in Iraq have to hide in now, like terrorist cells. Read about the persecution, the beatings, the attacks, the indifference of both the Iraqi and the US government to their plight.
And if you feel so inclined while you are there (I know I did), leave a small donation to help keep more safe houses open for the LGBT community in Iraq. It's a drop in the ocean, but it's a small thing we can do for this minority.
Before we invaded their country, they were safe. Not truly accepted, but a widely ignored and tolerated minority. Now, they are actively persecuted, forced to run from safe house to safe house, forced to hide who they are.
LGBT rights in Iraq: just another casuality of this sad war. And the worst part is that even if this damn war ever ends, who knows how long it will be before the LGBT community in Iraq has the same rights and safety that they had under one of the worst dictators of the twentieth century? If that's not a sad commentary on how badly this war has failed to affect positive change in Iraq, I'm not sure what is.
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