Iraq's female candidates raise voices before vote

NAJAF, Iraq -- Her full, traditional veil, which stands out even here in the religious capital of the socially conservative Shi'ite south, makes it hard for Anwar Uboud-Ali to see on the campaign trail.

Anwar's entirely covered face and the tightly pinned, full-length abbayas worn by her colleagues might evoke political repression, but when she speaks, Anwar sounds like the natural politician she is, selling the Da'wa Party platform of economic development and special aid for the poverty-stricken Iraqi south.

In fact, the women's discussion at the Najaf Human Rights Center yesterday included a more freewheeling and substantive debate than most events in the anemic campaign season leading up to Sunday's nationwide elections.

With four other Da'wa candidates -- the party name means ''Islamic Way" -- Anwar was pitching a comparatively secular vision of the Iraqi government at a forum organized by US Embassy officials. Da'wa's provincial leaders are focused on reviving the country's economically moribund Shi'ite areas while staving off security threats believed to stem from unstable Sunni areas.

In the other corner was a group of four women candidates from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, who broke with the party's position of publicly downplaying its Islamist credentials.

''Iraq is a Muslim country. It does not hurt that we will depend on the Koran to write the constitution," said candidate Nasran al-Fatlawi.

All the candidates, however, agreed that Iraq's new constitution had to enshrine women's rights.

''It is our first opportunity for women to represent ourselves and have our voices heard," said Nasran, who also works as a spokeswoman for a charitable foundation run by SCIRI.

Her Da'wa rival Anwar, her voice ringing out loudly, if muffled, through the veil, put it another way: ''It is time to improve the political and economic condition of women in our provinces."

By order of the interim constitution designed by the former US occupation authority, one-third of all candidates for political office must be women.

But the presence of Nasran and Anwar on a major party's candidate list in a contested election also represents a remarkable change. Less than a year ago, in nearby Hillah, an Iraqi women's activist and her American colleague were murdered, many suspect because of their efforts to empower women through education and job training.

Religious leaders are nearly omnipotent in Najaf, the spiritual center of Shi'a Islam and home to the Hawza, the religious leadership and academies whose fatwas, or edicts, are supposed to govern the conduct of all devout Shi'ites in Iraq.

Some of those clerics have discouraged women from taking an active role in society.

The female candidates of Najaf, however, share a common nuts-and-bolts approach to ''women's issues" -- classes in computers, languages, and job skills.

Nasran runs a women's affairs office for SCIRI that offers such courses. ''Under Saddam, the Shi'a women, especially the Najafis, were marginalized," she said.

The women are also entering political life in the shadow of a particularly brutal history in Najaf, historically the site of countless murders of Shi'ite leaders.

In the 1970s, Saddam Hussein banned Shi'ites from making the annual pilgrimage to Karbala on foot, a ritual at the center of their sect. Hussein singled out Shi'ites for special prosecution, seeing the organized clerics in Najaf as a unique threat to his leadership.

Tens of thousands of Shi'ites were killed or imprisoned, especially in massive crackdowns in 1982 and during the Shi'ite uprising that followed the Gulf War in 1991.

One legacy are the hundreds of widows and orphans of the regime.

By way of introducing their electoral credentials yesterday, the candidates rattled off their name, age, profession, and number of victims in their immediate family.

''I lost two of my brothers, executed by the previous regime," Nawal Abdel Rida said. ''They charged me for the price of the bullet."

''My father and three of brothers were executed by the previous regime," Faliha Kathem Hassan said.

The candidates in Najaf want seats on provincial councils with limited power, which will be elected Sunday at the same time as the Transitional National Assembly, which will choose the new national government and write Iraq's constitution.

The women openly confronted one of the quandaries facing the Islamic parties: Almost all of them are united in a single coalition on the national ballot, but are competing with one another for power at the provincial level.

''We must begin every conversation by explaining the qualities of the national list," Nasran said. ''Only then can we explain the positives of our individual party platform."

And like the mostly male leaders who campaign at the national level in Baghdad, they first belted out platitudes when asked to describe their party differences.

''Our list contains the most honest people who have sacrificed a lot," Nasran said.

But the conversation took a turn when Nasran's fellow candidate Nawal al-Ibrahim, 34, launched into a spirited defense of Islamic law in writing the new Iraqi constitution.

''Why not take the positive aspects of the Iranian model and apply them to Iraq?" Nawal asked. ''Almost all our clerics are politicians. They can lead the country better than anyone else."

However, she said, she hopes to hold a prominent position in the provincial government herself once the votes are tallied. ''When women will be represented in the councils, that will be a success," she said.

Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.