‘Constitution will do nothing for terrorised Iraqi women’

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http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/focusoniraq/2005/August/focusoniraq_August99.xml§ion=focusoniraq&col=

LONDON - A Constitution shaped by powerful Islamist interest groups would do nothing to improve the rights of terrorised Iraqi women whose protection is a low priority for police and United States-led occupation forces, an Iraqi feminist said on Tuesday.

“This Constitution is going to change nothing basically in the dark reality that is going on in Iraq at the moment,” Houzan Mahmoud, a spokeswoman for the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, told BBC public radio.

“And if they introduce sharia law or make Islam as a source of legislation-making in Iraq it would be a disaster for women in particular, but in general of the whole of society,” said Mahmoud, the group’s representative in Britain. snip

Mahmoud said Islamic political groups had seized power in parliament and women were being terrorised by Islamists of the ”so-called resistance”.

“They are using occupation (by United States-led military forces) as a pretext actually to terrorise society, to terrorise women, to behead them, to kill them, to veil them forcibly, it is going on already in Iraq,” she said.

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1. Here is a report from yesterday that seems to prove this story is correct

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L17481879.htm

In the Sadr City area of Baghdad, militiamen pulled a man from the trunk of a car and shot him and two women, saying they were running a prostitution ring, witnesses said on Wednesday.