November 13, 2009

The Iraq Solidarity Campaign would like to applaud the recent statements of Sharon Allen of the British based People’s Charter movement, who speaking at the Communist University in London stated that activists should seek to broaden out the campaigns for women’s rights, beyond the confines of the British Trade Union movement and reach out to women in the wider community.

Ms. Allen stated that the pressing need for equality went further than just addressing the pay gap, which still exists between men and women in the United Kingdom but by recognising and taking action on the fact that you "cannot have social justice without addressing the injustices suffered by more than "half the population."

Although many political activists may feel that Sharon Allen’s argument may represent a marginalised perspective, the reality that exists for the majority of women goes beyond the borders of the British political sphere, with parallels for the need of wider politicised women’s movement becoming increasingly clear, from the examples being shown to us from all around the world.

Through the failure to adopt a grass roots perspective, in relation to the daily struggles endured by women, this has led to an increasing block on the advancement in the cause of womens liberation and has allowed the rise of the superficial view of "empowerment", through the glorified prostitution of womanhood by the media and political elites.

But to move the question of womens rights forward, we must base our discussion on the various realities which women are facing and engage with them, in an international campaign of unity which seeks to mobilise people in defence of womens liberation and towards the total emancipation of women, irrespective of their national boundaries.

For us, in relation to both Iraq and the wider Middle East, the questions that need to be addressed by the womens movement globally include:

The fact that only silence has fallen from the mouths of those who talk about freedom, in relation to the millions of women whose lives are being taken up in the profession of caring for the elderly, disabled, the sick and wounded as a direct result of the on-going wars and occupations.

Barley nothing is being written about the women, whose bodies have become the only commodity that she posses, in the routine struggle of evading starvation and through whose degradation is the only means to purchase the necessities of survival.

Justice itself is forgetting the women who are languishing in the prison systems of colonialism, and justice too is mocking those victims of kidnapping, honour killings, rape as an accepted practice of war, and those whose bodies are producing the consequences of capitalisms experimental weapons like Depleted Uranium.

As women roam the earth, in pursuit of finding sanctity in a homeland, nothing compounds the brutality of war more than the hardened faces of those whose existence is that of a refugee camp. Where the question of basic sanitation, clean water, medicine and the stability of a tent is not even dignified with a question in parliament or a column in a newspaper.

For far to long, womens rights have been viewed as something that is not worthy of an honest political debate, even though women, whilst making up half of the worlds population, also make up half of the earths work force and in turn, whose labour power is creating half of the worlds wealth.

All a person has to do, is walk down the street of any country and they will see that there is something inherently wrong with the social order under which we are living and if our intentions are correct, like those of Sharon Allen and the People’s Charter, then we must re-orientate our movements and start by looking at how we treat our women, so that we can ultimately right the wrongs which have been made .