IT WAS BAN SARAF'S TURN TO SPEAK, but the man on the other side of the room kept interrupting her. The man had appointed himself chairman of the local council's committee on women and children because, he said, he found none of the female candidates "capable." Repeatedly, he insisted on keeping the title, even though other committee members complained that he never showed up at the weekly citywide planning meetings. Saraf, a consultant working on behalf of the U.S.-led occupation to help set up a new postwar democratic government in Iraq, had not come for a fight.
It was August 2003 and one of those stifling hot desert days. They were in a makeshift conference room on a makeshift military base trying to set up a makeshift council. Saraf felt claustrophobic and tired, but she made another effort to win the man over. She took a deep breath, put on her prettiest smile, straightened herself to her full 5-foot-4 height and reiterated that whoever was in charge of the committee needed to perform his or her duties. "Otherwise," she told him, "your district is going to lose out."
Ban Sarah, center, discusses democracy with women in Baghdad last year.
(Photograph by Ban Saraf)
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The man, cleanshaven and wearing an expensive suit, needled her. He accused Saraf of imposing her values and the occupation's values on the Iraqi people. Bringing women's issues into politics is your goal, he said, not ours.
"You are trying to come in and set up your own agenda," he said, before jerking his head away, ending the conversation.
Looking back, Saraf says she felt not only humiliated, but sad. "It was very personal," she remembers. A 42-year-old computer entrepreneur, she had left her family, her friends and her fledgling business in Falls Church to come halfway around the world to help people who at that moment, she felt, did not want to be helped. She had been working 15- and 18-hour days trying to prove to Iraqis that the occupation would bring them freedom and democracy. She hoped the people she worked with saw her as their guide, their organizer, not as another dictator.
Since the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, its most high-stakes reconstruction project has been democracy-building. The goal is to educate Iraqis in baby steps in preparation for the national elections scheduled for next month, and one of those small steps has been to set up the pseudo-democratic local government system that Saraf worked on. There was trouble almost from the start. Some Iraqis complained that the structure of the councils was drafted by American officials, with little input from Iraqis. Instead of by open elections, the council members have been chosen by "selections": either limited elections or appointments by military commanders or civilians working for the occupation. But perhaps the most divisive issue has been the effort to empower women in the process.
The status of women in the new Iraq was a special interest of L. Paul Bremer, who was the top civilian administrator under the occupation until interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi was sworn in this past June. Early on, Bremer ordered that each of the city councils adhere to a quota -- that about 20 percent of its members be women.
But all that made no difference that stifling August day. Saraf tried to keep calm. "I request this for the record," she said deliberately, in Arabic. "I am not here to further an agenda. I am here strictly to organize." She thanked the council for its time and sat down. No one -- not even the two women on the council who were present -- said anything. The council members moved on to the next item on their agenda, without even glancing at her.
When she finally stumbled out of the meeting, she says, she felt she'd been defeated. And she was right.
SARAF HAD ARRIVED IN IRAQ ABOUT THREE MONTHS EARLIER, joining the tens of thousands of government officials and contractors who staffed the occupation. She had been recruited by a company called RTI International, a wonkish nonprofit that had a contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development. But Saraf was different from most of the others because she had been born in Iraq; her family had fled Saddam Hussein's regime more than three decades ago.
When Saraf was born in the early 1960s, Hussein's Baath Party was coming into power. She grew up during an era of prosperity -- patrons spilled out of the restaurants lining the Tigris River in Baghdad until late at night, the gold-domed shrines of the holy cities sparkled, the shops were full of the most luxurious imports. Her parents were among the well-educated, upper-middle-class elite, relatively liberal in their ways. They were Muslim but preferred to send their children to private, secular schools. Saraf doesn't remember ever having to wear a head scarf. Her parents, she says, showed no favoritism toward her brothers.
Iraqi women historically have enjoyed a freedom rare in the Middle East, and during Saraf's childhood they were politicians, doctors, schoolteachers. Saraf remembers watching, fascinated, from across the street as women covered in the flowing black robes known as abayas stood around chatting and smoking thin cigarettes on lazy summer days. Westerners, she says, might have seen their coverings as oppressive. But to young Ban, the women were exercising their right to wear the garment or to not wear the garment. "I remember thinking, 'They are empowered,' " she says.
When she was 8 years old, her father took the family out of the country to Beirut for a vacation. They never went back. He had been a successful banker, and the Baathists were trying to nationalize all the companies; she thinks her father, who died in 2000, felt there was no place for capitalists anymore. There had been pockets of violent unrest. And so Saraf, her 11 siblings and her parents became nomads of sorts.
As Saraf grew older, her views on women and equality began to change. When, as a preteen in Lebanon, she looked up from browsing the comic books in the stores, she'd notice that everyone around her was a boy. While she was running around on the softball field, her female classmates would be cooking. While she was always fiddling with photo equipment and other gadgets, other girls feared touching them. She remembers being upset when she noticed that the girls at her Lebanese elementary school had to wear uniform tunics, but the boys could wear whatever they wanted. "It's unfair," she would say to anyone who would listen. Her teachers just smiled.
