Three years’ worth of unbaked clay pieces have piled up in Hanna Milla’s darkened office at Iraq’s National Museum of Modern Art: vases, masks, a lumpy hawk on its post, all shaped by the hands of young students and all waiting to be fired in kilns that have sat cold for months.Teachers in the museum’s warren of classrooms and halls last ran the kilns in January 2003, as students and instructors prepared for what would be their last exhibition before war closed in. At the exhibition that night, the instructors—almost all female—mingled with students and artists, sipped drinks and eyed the displays. For the women, it would be the last late evening for years. “We stayed until 1 or 2 in the morning,” Milla recalled, sounding the nostalgic note heard often now in Iraq.As in all wars, Iraqi women have largely retired to the dark corners, forced to yield the centre to men waving guns. Saturday’s vote will not improve their lives, Milla and her colleagues say; at this point, they cannot imagine anything that would. They just hope it won’t make things any worse.As the constitution was being drafted, women were never treated as more than a side issue, even with US President George W. Bush depiction of women’s rights as one of the reasons Americans are fighting in Iraq.The draft going before voters Saturday specifies equality regardless of gender and reserves 25 per cent of the seats in the National Assembly for women. But it also gives each Iraqi household the option of using religious law to decide family issues such as inheritance, divorce and alimony. Rights advocates have said they fear women will be coerced by male relatives into accepting the least favour-able interpretations of religious law.The constitution also sets aside seats for Muslim clerics on the Supreme Court, which will weigh the constitutionality of all laws. In a country where an Iranian-influenced Shi’ite religious party holds the balance of power, that alarms proponents of women’s rights.“They call this constitution a tent, but they pulled Iraqi women out of this tent,'' said Zakiya Khalifa Zaidi (73), a well-known actress, now an activist. “The constitution was written in a very tense atmosphere,” she said. “That’s why we lost many of our rights amid the chaos.” —LAT-WP
