Tim from Road to Surfdom points out this informative Reuters article about the status of gays in newly-liberated Iraq. “You probably aren’t surprised to learn that homosexuality was a crime in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” writes Tim. “Changing that doesn’t seem to have been a high priority of the new government.”
Saddam Hussein’s government outlawed homosexual acts in 2001, the Reuters article explains, along with prostitution, incest and rape, all of them punishable by death, presumably to appease Islamic conservatives. That law is still on the books, and while Iraq’s new constitution has protections against discrimination based on “a variety of grounds, including sex, religion, belief, opinion and social and economic status, [it] fails to explicitly mention homosexuality.”
Like Tim, I’m hardly surprised that the flowering of freedom and democracy in Iraq doesn’t go so far as to protect Iraqi gays, and I share his alarm at the account in the Reuters article of so-called ‘honour killings’, under which relatives of gays (or those supposed to be gay) are free to carry out the ultimate sentence themselves:
Article 111 of the Iraqi Penal Code exempts from prosecution and punishment men who kill other men or female relatives in defence of their family’s honour.
“He who discovers his wife, one of his female relatives committing adultery or a male relative engaged in sodomy and kills, wounds or injures one of them, is exempted from any penalty,” the law states.
The article includes an interview with a man who killed his own son, by hanging him in front of his own house, and spent a month in prison.
“Iraqis are showing their courage every day, and we are proud to be their allies in the cause of freedom,” said George Bush in the State of the Union address this year. Freedom. Democracy. Liberty. Justice. Do they even mean anything at all?
I still remember the sanctimonious musings of do-gooders like Adam Carr during the war talking about how Gays should support the war because Saddam’s regime persecutes homosexuals.
What a crock.
It was quite obvious that Saddam (a secular leader) had to try and appease the islamists to cover his power base because the christian west was persisting with their sanctions for a decade with little/no justification (no WMDs) thus turning Iraq (one of the west’s best friends in the region til 1990) against the west.
Oh, and Kuwait was horizontally drilling Iraqi oil. And the Kuwaiti regime was no better than Saddam’s and not worth saving. The west only got involved in Kuwait because christian extremists made up news stories about the Iraqis taking medical equipment away from Kuwaiti hospitals, taking babies out of their humidicribs and leaving them on hospital floors and the like.
If you think back far that far, the actions taken in and around Iraq from the end of the 80s onwards points to a desire by Christian extremists to take actions that hand power to Muslim extremists. Ending the war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, then making an enemy out of Saddam. I wonder if they are both playing us like fools while trying to turn their little apocolyptic fantasies into reality.