Fern Holland's War

[Rose Siding]

This is a very long piece- I really skipped around with these snips. I remember reading about this women's rights worker months ago but never knew her story

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It was an exciting time. Visions were grand. Cash was flowing by the truckload from Baghdad. Because it was confiscated money from Saddam's coffers that the U.S. was distributing and not official American funds, there were almost no regulations on how it was spent. As Rachel Roe, a reservist and lawyer who was rebuilding the legal system in Najaf, told me: ''Fern showed up in the palace in Baghdad looking for the head of democracy and human rights to see what's the plan and found some 21-year-old political appointee who had no idea what was going on. Someone would just say, 'O.K., take this cash, put it in a backpack and build democracy centers.' It was insane. I was looking for guidance on Iraqi law and was met by a 22-year-old American in charge of the Ministry of Justice who said, 'Don't worry about that, I'm pretty sure we're going to rewrite that constitution anyway.' This is a country of 23 million people, and we're there with no plan for what we're going to do. So we just started figuring it out ourselves.''
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On Oct. 4 of last year, L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the C.P.A., choppered in and told the women that the Heartland Conference was one of the most exciting events he'd been to. He made a tour of Holland's women's center. Photos were snapped. What Bremer didn't stick around to see were the angry men outside threatening to bomb the place or the slogans that went up overnight on the university campus: ''C.P.A., Americans, British don't intervene in Iraqi affairs.'' And: ''These strange women are here to spread knowledge that doesn't belong to our culture.'' The elite, secular Iraqi women who had recently returned from exile were unnerved by the backlash. Conservative women from the holy city of Najaf, just half an hour away, resented the conference and its dubious teachings. Each group of women shouted down the speakers of the other groups. When Zainab Al-Suwaij, an Iraqi who was brought up by her grandfather, a revered ayatollah, gave a talk about the need for separation of church and state, even she was heckled, despite her Islamic credentials.
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By February of this year, Holland was busy getting a women's center up and running in Karbala, 12 miles northwest of Hilla, despite strong local opposition. It was not just a matter of struggling with local religious conservatives, though that would have been enough in a city built around the tomb of the Shiite martyr Hussein. Just across the street, Karbala's policemen worked in a blighted station house while Holland and Oumashi unloaded new computers and other fancy goods for the sole benefit of Karbala's women. The police were not even being paid any longer; the interior ministry had stopped sending money to the provinces, despite the desperate need for security. Why were the Americans spending their money in this way? In Friday sermons, clerics loyal to the young militant Moktada al-Sadr spread rumors: ''You know what the Americans are doing in these centers, my brothers? They are offering free abortions. You know what these Internet centers are doing? They are offering free porn to the students of the Hawza .''
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''Fern had been driving,'' Mamouri said, ''and most of the bullets targeted her. The man was shot in the head, but the bullets were fired 360 degrees around the car. Probably 30 or more.''.......

Although the Shiite insurgency, the battles in Falluja, the kidnappings and the beheadings would not begin for another month, the us-versus-them atmosphere had already begun to take over the Shiite world. Women began receiving increasingly graphic death threats. ''Fern changed my life,'' said Sausam al Barak, a chemical engineer and board member at the Hilla center. ''She was the best face of America.'' But when I met her in May, Barak was holed up home with several armed guards posted outside. Women at the various centers read the March 9 murders as a clear augury of their own future. Iraqis who danced with the infidels would die like the infidels.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/magazine/19WOMENL.html?pagewanted=7

[SharonAnn]

1. Wow! What a great article. Thanks for posting it.