Prostitutes Are Easy Prey in Iraq By Hélène Despic-Popovic Liberation
Tuesday 17 February 2004
Mothers of families and procurers’ victims are stuck in the business and harassed by the police.
Victims of misery and violence, Hoda, Sabrine, Feyrouz and Racha wait quietly in the Al-Sadoon police station for the rigors of the law to crash down on them. They’ve sold their bodies to survive; a sin for Islam; an offense for the law. Now autonomous, the new Iraqi police, which was unshackled in December from the presence of American soldiers in every station, has decided to see that the law is respected as it should be. Rounding up prostitutes, moreover, proves to be an easier and much less risky task than running down “resistance fighters” and the terrorists who harry police stations.
"When we went after prostitutes, the Americans said it wasn’t a crime and let them go, so the brothels multiplied, and now we’ve decided to crack down," explains Lieutenant-Colonel Nouri al-Massoud, Assistant Police Chief for Al-Sadoon, the station located in Baghdad’s red light district, El-Bataoui. From the outside, these houses cannot be recognized. “In general, they’re pointed out from a cart pushed by a very young vendor, who slides up to prospective clients, generally young men 17 to 25 years old, in passing, and suggests he knows where they can take their pleasure,” he explains.
At the end of January, in the first action of this kind, the station’s police invaded a brothel and arrested 16 women and 15 clients, all Iraqi. The clients will act as witnesses before the court. Iraqi law dating from Saddam Hussein’s regime provides a three month prison sentence for prostitution. Pimps risk a severe sentence, including the possibility of the death penalty. The country still remembers the period when, as a gesture towards Islam, Saddam’s son had prostitutes and pimps beheaded in Baghdad’s streets by his feddayin.
A Pauper’s Profession
Three days after their arrest, the two Muslims, Hoda and Sabrine, the Christian, Feyrouz, and Racha, the gypsy, had still not been called before a judge. With the exception of Racha, they all wear the veil and a long black dress. With the exception of Feyrouz, they all are mothers: between the three of them, they leave twelve children at home.
Sabrine, 34 years old, a long energetic woman with very dark skin, is the only one to deny that she’s a prostitute. “My husband, a taxi driver, was killed at the end of the war, leaving me alone with six children. Neither my brother, nor my sister, nor my uncles wanted to help me. So I started up a little cooking business. I’m the one who brought food to the brothel. That’s where I was arrested. I don’t understand why. If society doesn’t want women to be prostitutes, it has to provide them with work or an unemployment allowance.”
At two Euros a time, a quarter of which goes into the woman’s pocket, prostitution is a pauper’s profession. The arrival of occupation troops hasn’t changed that; soldiers remain confined in their barracks because of attacks. Hoda, 31 years old, couldn’t even pay for lodgings, with what she earned. Also a widow since the war, this sad little brunette with three children lives with her sister. “One of my friends, who was also in need, explained to me that she had become a prostitute and invited me to join her. That’s how I found myself in that madam’s brothel.” At 27, Feyrouz, has been a prostitute for many years. “I was kidnapped five years ago and forced into the trade. Three years later, the police discovered me and condemned my kidnappers to death. But I didn’t want to go home. My family would have killed me. They would never have understood that I am a victim. So I kept on, going from brothel to brothel.”
"He’ll sell me to someone else."
For Racha, the twenty-two year-old gypsy, married and mother to three children, violence is her fate. “Among us, it’s the law. From age fifteen, an unmarried girl sings and dances for men. Once she’s married, she turns tricks. My father-in-law paid two million dinars to my family to pay for my education. I have to reimburse him. When I’ve finished, he could let me have what I earn, or he’ll sell me to someone else. It’s not all right, but it is the tradition, and I have to follow it if I want to keep my children.”
Being the mother of a one month old infant hasn’t spared Racha from the torments of imprisonment. Slave though she is, she is the one who is punished. The police will not go arrest her husband or her father-in-law. “If she doesn’t file a complaint, I can’t help her,” Colonel Al-Massoud contends. “As far as we’re concerned, she’s just a woman we arrested in a brothel.” Watching the smiles and the bawdy eye rolling the least question about prostitution arouses in police stations, it will be a long time before Iraq gets a grip on a problem as serious as women’s slavery.
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Mitayo Potosi
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