Analysis Of United Nations Sanctions On Iraq Through Feminist Lenses
Introduction
The 2003 Iraq war can be considered as a continuation of one of the major wars that has severely impacted Iraq, this conflict is known as the First Gulf War (1990-1991). Before talking about this latter, it is important to shed light first on the regime that was present at that moment. The Ba’th Party came into power and it was mainly because of the revolution that happened on July 17 of the same year. At that time, Saddam Hussein was the president of Iraq, as well as the leader of the Ba’th party, and he had a strong belief in Arab nationalism as well as a socialist-oriented transformation of the society. During Saddam’s presidency, there was one main event that will always be remembered, which is the First Gulf War. This war came after the eight years conflict with the neighboring Iran, when Saddam Hussein gave order to Iraqi troops to invade and conquer Kuwait in August 1990. This war resulted in many casualties, as well as the devastation and the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructures. In addition to that, The United Nations announced that this invasion is illegal, and as a result they used military force to get Iraq out from Kuwait. Furthermore, throughout the 1990s, the UN imposed economic sanctions on Iraq which are considered as “one of the history’s longest and most strict economic sanctions regimes”.
The repressive regime of Saddam Hussein and the economic sanctions enforced against Iraq in August 1990 made it so hard for Iraqis to pursue their normal lives. However, as a result to these sanctions, “women and gender relations have been particularly hard-hit by economic sanctions”. Accordingly, this paper will mainly focus on the gender dimension of the economic sanctions, and it will view them through feminist lenses. I decided to use feminism as a theory to analyze the UN sanctions since there are not much researches or studies that have tackled sanctions from a gendered perspective. In other words, this paper will explore the fact that “sanctions, which have long been debated and analyzed in ways that are either gender-blind or gender-neutral, do in fact have gendered effects”.
Feminist Perspective
Feminism started to become visible in the discipline of IR lately in 1980s. IR feminists “challenged the discipline to think about how the other theories might be reformulated and how its understandings of global politics might be improved if attention was paid to women’s experiences”. In other words, this movement came as a way to protect women from discrimination, ensure their security and safety and enhance their presence in the national as well as the international level. In addition to that, feminists alleged that only by “introducing gender analysis could the differential impact of the state system and the global economy on the lives of women and men be fully understood”. The gendered lenses help reach a quite different understanding of international politics, they help figure out the discriminations that women are suffering from and how they can be part of the polity, economy and society. Another important notion that needs to be taken into consideration is that IR feminists draw too much attention to gender equality or what can also be called ‘gender emancipation’.
the Un Sanctions Through Feminist Lenses
On August 2, 1990, when Saddam Hussein ordered the Iraqi troops to invade Kuwait, there was an immediate response by the United Nations and this was shown through the enforcement of the economic sanctions by the Security Council on August 6, 1990. The SC created the “Sanctions Committee” which “passed Resolution 661, an order for comprehensive trade, financial and military embargo of Iraq with the exception of certain limited humanitarian provisions”.
“Sanctions froze Iraqi financial assets abroad and banned all imports and exports, except for medical supplies and,’ in humanitarian circumstances, foodstuffs’… air travel was banned; sea lanes were blocked; no goods were allowed to be send in or out of Iraq. ”
There is no doubt that the embargo had unforgettable and deleterious impacts on the Iraqi people as well as the welfare system of Iraq. However, it has largely affected its main beneficiaries, and by this I mean women. Accordingly, it is very important to examine the gendered perspective of these economic sanctions, and demonstrate the extent to which these latter had intensely gender-specific effects and impacts. To demonstrate this, two main arguments will be provided, that are seen through the IR feminists lenses: The first one is physical/structural violence and gender subordination, and the second one is the “gendered logic of the policy choice”.
For the first argument, and by using gender as a category of analysis, IR feminists pay a very good attention to physical and structural violence, as they constituted the economic sanctions against Iraq, and they see the embargo as a “war on Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens women and children”. Firstly, by physical violence, I mean the bombings, destruction that the Iraqi women suffered and the casualties that resulted from these latter. These bombings were used as way for the United Nations to threaten Iraq and show its unhappiness with Iraq’s non-conformity and non-compliance. One of the main events that can illustrate this physical violence is the ‘Operation Desert Storm’, which is considered as “a six week long bombing that involved cruise missiles, cluster bombs. Around 10 per cent of the 85,000 tons of bombs dropped in the air campaign were so-called smart bombs. Yet they were not smart enough to avoid killing thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians”. Secondly, for structural violence, it is a form of violence where the basic needs of women, children and other Iraq’s poorest citizens were not met. The embargo made women pay the highest price in all aspects of their lives, and one of the hardest parts that IR feminists faced is to describe the suffering endured by women since it is impossible to site them in few short pages. It is important to mention that women’s health deteriorated during the whole period of sanctions: “Up to 95% of all pregnant women in Iraq suffer from anemia and thus will give birth to weak, malnourished infants. Most of these infants will either die before reaching the age of five due to lack of food and basic medicines or will be permanently scarred, either physically or mentally. In addition to that, unemployment can be considered as one of the main problems that women suffered from at that period. It is important to stress here that there was a sort of decrease in formal employment which led directly to an increase in the informal sector, in order for women to remain active economically. Accordingly, women started “sewing clothes, cooking food, baking cakes and pastries, cleaning houses, raising chickens, ‘reading’ coffee cups and concocting potions and love spells, or even getting involved in prostitution. They had to be very creative and resourceful in order to supplement the monthly food rations and meager salaries of those employed”. Furthermore there were more side effects of the embargo since there was a spread of epidemic diseases, as well as different forms of cancers. Women also were very much affected because of the “deterioration in basic infrastructure (water, sanitation, sewage, electricity) that severely reduced the quality of life”. All of this led to the deterioration of women’s situation in Iraq, since they gave priority to their children to be fed first and they forgot about themselves: “women would be fed last and fed least”. One last issue related to the structural violence and which affected women mostly, is education. There was decline in the percentage of girls and women who had access to school, which directly led to a huge increase in the percentage of illiteracy: “There has also been a sharp decrease in access to all sectors of education for girls and young women because many families have not been able to afford sending all children to school. Illiteracy drastically grew between 1985 and 1995 from 8% to 45%”. Not being able to go to school might have a huge negative impact on these women’s and girls’ lives later on in the future, since they will mainly be able to gain money from informal economy. Therefore, this can clearly demonstrate how the economic sanctions changed every woman’s life, since “Iraqi women were among the most educated in the whole region, and they were part of the labor force, visible and active on almost all levels of state institutions and bureaucracy”.
For the second argument which is gender subordination, it is believed that IR feminists are very much interested in gender emancipation, and they see that the main reason behind subordination is the socially constructed gender hierarchies. This latter was very much clear during the period of economic sanctions since women were the ones responsible for household duties, even though their husbands were not able to keep their jobs because of the collapse of economy. In other words, “Men were freed from the need to deal with the day-to-day deprivations caused by sanctions, because of the widespread belief that household work is ‘a degradation of manhood’”. In addition to that, the economic sanctions have caused a sort of inequality between men and women by expunging the idealized and modernist image of the ‘good Iraqi women’, that was spread in 1970s, who became during the sanctions’ period “the housewife and mother, who should stay away from degrading work and mixing with the opposite sex”.
As for the third and last argument, it is the relation between policy choice and gender. By this I mean that the antagonistic nature of international politics gives more value to masculine characteristics (force- pride- strength) than the feminine ones (coexistence and compromise). In other words, feminist criticize the fact that men who are normally considered as powerful people claim to know what is best for subordinate and marginalized people – like women –, most of IR feminists refer to this as ‘hegemonic masculinity’. This was very visible in the Iraq sanctions case, especially with the spread of the ‘honor killings’ which was used by Saddam Hussein at that time “in an attempt to maintain legitimacy after the Gulf War by appeasing conservative patriarchal constituencies. He brought in anti-woman legislation, such as the ‘1990 presidential decree’ granting immunity to men who had committed honor crimes”. Accordingly, males in a specific family had the total right to torture or even kill female members, admitting that they know what’s the best for them since they ‘violated’ the honor of the family and males need to restore it.
To conclude, I think that scholars and researchers should pay more attention to other theories apart from the traditional ones, and one of them is feminism since it is not much used as a theory of analysis in IR – as it was already discussed-. Feminists try to tackle hidden issues and try to give a voice to the voiceless, and by this I mean the marginalized parts of the society – women. The UN sanctions against Iraq clearly demonstrate, how the security policies that was taken by the actors to make things better, turned out to be the reason behind their sufferings and pain, especially for women. This was made clear only by analyzing these economic sanctions through feminist lenses which helps focus more on the gender relationships, gender subordination and different types of violence – in this case structural and physical violence-. However, there are always limitations to each theory used in IR. In the case of feminism, I see that the analysis of gendered effects of sanctions help essentialize certain roles. By this I mean that it makes women stuck on the fact that they are victims and they will always need protection, which makes men always remain more powerful. This, for example, can be explained more by the “Womenandchild” issue that was described by Enloe which makes “women typically visible as a symbols, victims, or dependents”. I feel that another theory might also be able to explain the sanction regime, which is ‘constructivism’, since it emphasizes on “the social dimensions of international relations, and it has demonstrated the importance of norms, rules and language”. This makes constructivism in a way very similar to feminism since they both focus on the individuals and the type of discourse used. Furthermore, I believe that other traditional theories might also be able to analyze the sanctions in a very structural way such as the realism and liberalism. However, I still find feminism as the best theory that can really help shed lights on many hidden areas of the sanctions and the most important one id gender, and this is because “gender relationships are everywhere in global politics; whenever they are not recognized, the silence is loud.
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