This is something that we’ve seen precious little reporting on, the 10% of Iraq’s (and every society’s) gay population and how they are faring. It’s not pretty. From the BBC:
“I don’t want to be gay anymore. When I go out to buy bread, I’m afraid. When the doorbell rings, I think that they have come for me.”That is the fear that haunts Hussein, and other gay men in Iraq.
They say that since the US-led invasion, gay people are being killed because of their sexual orientation.
Islam considers homosexuality sinful. A website published in the Iranian city of Qom in the name of Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq’s most revered Shia cleric, says: “Those who commit sodomy must be killed in the harshest way”.The statement appears in Arabic section of the website, in a section dealing with questions of morality, but not in the English-language equivalent.
I recommend using the link to read the article as it’s just about the only one you’ll find on the plight of gays in Iraq. Even Amnesty International doesn’t have their ears to the ground here.
Ahmed is a 31-year-old interior decorator who used to live in Baghdad with his boyfriend, Mazin.Ahmed fled to Jordan nine months ago after Mazin was murdered outside a gym.
After his partner was shot dead, Ahmed hid in the gym toilets then slipped away and later flew to Amman, the Jordanian capital.He says it was well known that they were a couple and Mazin was targeted because of his sexuality.”I fled from Iraq because of the threat to my life, because I was a gay man,” he told the BBC.
Ahmed also said that, before the gym shooting, he and a gay friend had survived a grenade attack and he still had fragments of shrapnel in his face.The friend was killed a week later by gunmen who raided his house, he added.”Saddam was a tyrant, but at least we had more freedom then,” said Hussein. “Nowadays, gay men are just killed for no reason.”
That last quote says it all.
I just got in after posting this during the morning hours.
Thanks so much for the Rec’s. It just seems bizarre no one has anything to say about the diary, but thanks regardless.
Well, I was just thinking of what to say, actually. I read this this morning, and then went off and did other stuff, and came back and read it again… and it’s still as harrowing as the first time.
I’m just not sure what to say or do anymore, though… so much destruction of lives and culture and, as in Afghanistan, the abandonment of women and gays and other marginalised people (not to mention the populace at large) by the US and the international community (or much of it) and you just wonder… I don’t know. I have no words.
Thanks for articulating this Nanette.
What do we all do except keep readomg, typing, voting, donating and volunteering? In the remaining time we just try to educate and make sense of the senseless.
oops, i meant ‘reading’… preview, preview preview!
Thanks for bringing this to our attention (typos and all! ;).
That’s the thing tho… all the reading and typing and voting… even if (when) we get a different administration, or change the congress, it’s too late for these people. We’ve unleashed hell on them, and I don’t see how we can put it back. I can just imagine how long it took and what sacrifices for gays to gain a measure of acceptance in the first place – now, they are being hunted down and prosecuted or killed.
It’s just tragic, because I don’t think it’s very easy to get out of Iraq, and it’s also not easy (especially these days) getting asylum somewhere else because of fear for your life, even if you are not gay.
So, I don’t know what to say. Beyond everything else going on, sadly, these people are going to have to live with the consequences of our actions for many years to come.
I agree Nanette.
How do I help these people when even in New York City we don’t even have the rights of those in Boston?
I just wake up every day and refuse to be mowed under by the Neo’s and corporate America, who both want my hide on their wall like a deer antler. Unacceptable, pure and simple.
Yes, exactly. That’s one reason why I am so adamant for full equal rights for gays and lesbians, reproductive rights for women and so on – beyond for their own sake… like it or not, we (the US) set ourselves up as sort of moral arbiters of the world, and when we have second class citizens it sends a message to others that “these people don’t matter as much”. And gives even further license to harm them.
There are other countries that are wayyyyy farther ahead than we are on all this, of course, and if there was more of a balance of power no doubt things would be different.
When put together with this, it is almost enough to make me lose it. I am tired of feeling powerless to stop this.
as a compliment – there is simply nothing to add except “holy!” and “!@#$%&” and “what a great diary!” and recommends are so much more economical.
; )
There are times that I don’t know what to say after reading a diary and this is one of them. But, I did recommend.
Nothing I could say would be coherent or printable. Urgh. Thanks for posting.
On certain diaries like this it is easier to just hit recommend because writing anything seems a bit futile.
To use one of bush’s favorite words-who thought I’d be quoting bush-these killings are being done by ‘evildoers’ and definitely are real terrorists. I coulda said sick fucken bastards but I won’t.
Thanks for writing this. I don’t know what to say. I’ve read about this before. People just being executed. This “freedom” in the new Iraq is horseshit. Something was front paged the other day at dkos about how sex trafficing is happening in Iraq, which didn’t happen under Saddam. Lots of women are just missing.
It really makes me want a Nuremberg trial for Bush. I want him and the rest of the administration to be forced to sit there and listen to their victims condemning them, face to face. Hour after hour, one person after another stepping up and saying “your war did THIS to me/my boyfriend/my girlfriend/my spouse/my brother/my daughter/etc.”
Yes. That would be good. I suspect Bush is so cossetted in his little White House bubble that he would have about as much chance of knowing what is happening to gays in Iraq as the average American would have of finding it out from the TV news… I suspect he is insulated from most bad news and also knows nothing of the concerns of everyday Americans, let alone Iraqis.