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Iraqi women start talk radio shows
The two radio hosts, Majda and Majid, a chattering woman-and-man team, said the subject for the next hour would be childbearing and motherhood, from the first flush of pregnancy to the tribulations of labor.So Majda opened the show with a poem, dedicating it to the "mother of Baghdad": "You are my darling, you are the flower of my table, you are my drink." Then the talk turned as heated as an Iraqi summer. "Most of our operating rooms for giving birth aren't clean," Majid said. "It's not healthy," Majda said. "There are no standards of cleanliness in these hospitals." Majid said: "How can we receive the baby, a flower, a gift, in a dirty place? If the baby is born in an unhealthy place, the mother also won't be healthy." The rest of the recent talk show, called "Cup of Tea," went much like that, with the two hosts trading barbed insights. The station broadcasting it, Radio Al Mahaba, on 96 FM here in central Iraq, could well be the only one in the Arab world devoted to women's issues, its founders say. Started with United Nations financing by an American woman and an Iraqi refugee from western New York, it falls between National Public Radio and "The Oprah Winfrey Show." The station broadcasts programs about marriage, divorce, careers, religion, the constitution, physical abuse and dress codes, all from the perspective of women. The shows are especially sharp-edged in a country where Shiite militiamen in the south harass women without head scarves and religious leaders in Baghdad have pushed for a greater role for Islam - and, consequently, a potential rollback of women's rights - in the new constitution. "We want to affirm women's rights," said Ruwaida Kamal, 30, a producer at the station. "We're in a dangerous period. There are many movements, many groups that aren't taking women's rights seriously. Women are being marginalized." With its slogan "The Voice of Iraqi Woman," Radio Al Mahaba is an example of how, amid the cacophony of violence, the American experiment has prompted some Iraqis to try to build an open, democratic civil society. With newspapers, radio networks and satellite television channels popping up, the media are flourishing in ways they were never permitted to under Saddam Hussein. The aim of Radio Al Mahaba is aligned with one of the Bush administration's main goals in Iraq - to spread secular, American-style interpretations of equality and justice in the Middle East. Whether the station will succeed is far from certain, given the rise of fundamentalism here. But its 33 workers, half of them women, remain optimistic. "This is unique in the Middle East and all the Arab nations," said the station's director, Ali Abbas Hamoudi. "Now that we're facing a new government, a new nation, we're trying to help expose the voice of the Iraqi woman to the new officials." Radio Al Mahaba, which means "love" in Arabic, went on the air on April 1 with four hours of programming and now broadcasts from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. It has a 120-mile reach from central Baghdad, though there is no measure of how many people listen. Sprinkled among talk shows are blocks of Middle Eastern and Western music, including the Lebanese singer Fairuz, Mariah Carey and Kurdish folk singers. The station is in an office building overlooking Firdos Square, where American marines and Iraqis toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003, signaling the fall of Baghdad. It has the rough-and-tumble feel of a college radio station, with a small recording studio, a kitchen alcove and cramped offices. Black-and-white photographs of famous female Iraqi singers from decades ago hang on the walls of the main hallway above the faded brown carpeting. The women here do not wear head scarves, a sight rare enough these days to elicit a gasp of delight from a visiting female interpreter. On a recent afternoon, a Kurdish producer spliced together a debate show, "Two Viewpoints, One Issue," while a Jennifer Lopez song was played on the air. Across the hall, Ms. Kamal edited an interview for a weekly show called "Details About Women." "This story is about disabled women," Ms. Kamal said, sunglasses perched atop her head, earphones around her neck. "This woman is paralyzed; she can't walk because she was shot in her back. She was 4 years old when this happened, during the Iraq-Iran war in 1982. She's in a wheelchair, but she's also a sportswoman, a tennis player." Radio Al Mahaba was founded by Deborah Bowers, an American from the Buffalo area, and Kamal Jabar, an Iraqi refugee whom Ms. Bowers met in upstate New York in 1992. Ms. Bowers became intensely interested in Iraq after befriending Mr. Jabar, and the two traveled to Iraq after the American-led invasion. Mr. Jabar proposed the idea of the radio station. Ms. Bowers applied for a grant from the United Nations Development Fund for Women and got approval in January 2005 for $500,000. "We saw radio as an educational tool; there would be programming that would empower women to be part of the rebuilding of civil society and to encourage women to think about democracy," Ms. Bowers said in a telephone interview. "A lot of it is just the freedom to voice opinions or hear other opinions." Because of relatively low literacy among Iraqi women - about 24 percent in a 2003 estimate - she saw radio as the best way to spread the feminist message. Ms. Bowers said her group had received $350,000 of the United Nations grant. The United States Institute for Peace, a research group created by Congress, recently agreed to give some financing for more programs on the Iraqi constitution. Ms. Bowers declined to give the exact figure because she said highlighting American support could endanger the station and its employees. Majda al-Jubouri, 41, who is the host of "Cup of Tea" along with Majid Hussein, exemplifies the type of progressive woman the station promotes. Ms. Jubouri grew up on a farm south of Baghdad. Her family belonged to the Communist Party, she said, and she was imprisoned for five years at age 14. She worked on the farm until after the fall of the old government, when she moved to Baghdad with her boyfriend, a journalist for a Communist newspaper. She also began writing for the paper. They married last year. Then came Radio Al Mahaba. "Because of war since the 1980's, Iraqi people have been slipping backward, and now it's getting worse," she said. "We just hope that in the future, society will respect the rights of women, and women won't be alone in the Iraqi street." Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-09-05 |
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