<An ambassador, but no diplomat
It is tempting to hail the appointment of Rend Rahim Franke as Iraq’s ambassador to the United States as a victory for women. Only two months ago, Franke herself lamented the “meager” participation of women in the rehabilitation of post-Saddam Iraq. “The Governing Council has only three women out of 25,” she said. “There is only one woman minister in the newly appointed Cabinet. And there are no women in the preparatory committee for the constitution. In a country where women probably form 60 percent of the population, and where women have been earning university degrees and joining the workforce since the 1940s, this is a huge setback.”
Tempting, yes, but terribly partial, for Franke’s appointment should please many, not only supporters of women’s rights. This includes those who are dismayed by US management of post-war Iraq and feel, in her words, that “the US has lurched from one blunder to the next”; those who want an Iraq which is not built on ethnic, sectarian or tribal identity; those who want political organizations that reject “exclusivity and intrigue” in favor of accountability and inclusiveness; and those who believe that talk of freedom is empty without concern for human dignity.
For some Iraqis, admittedly, Franke is beyond the pale she is an emigre with US citizenship who was not only instrumental in convincing Washington of the need to remove the former president, Saddam Hussein, by force (all and everyone else having failed), she was also among the first Iraqis to meet US President George W. Bush in the countdown to war. For her Iraqi enemies, Franke symbolizes a group they believe is terminally out of touch with Iraq’s reality; further proof that Americans have the power in Iraq and that Iraqis are powerless.
There is no getting away from the fact that Franke has spent most of her 54 years outside Iraq. Had she stayed in her country, she would certainly have been tortured, killed, or both. She could not have been a passive observer of Saddam’s atrocities, since passivity is not one of her characteristics.
Of mixed Sunni-Shiite parentage, Franke went to boarding school in England and studied English at Cambridge University’s Newnham College, before going on to the Sorbonne. She worked as a banker and currency trader in Lebanon, Bahrain and London, before emigrating to the United States in 1981. In 1991, she founded the Iraq Foundation to promote democracy and human rights after then-President George Bush fought a war to liberate Kuwait, “destroying” Iraq but “preserving” Saddam and his regime. All Iraqi exiles have intimate ties to their homeland, yet Franke’s work at the Iraq Foundation arguably exposed her to a wider range of Iraqi experiences than most of her countrymen living under Saddam would have dared to explore.
Affiliated to no political group and fiercely independent within what she calls the democratic center, Franke has been tireless in documenting human rights abuses, helping forge a democratic vision for post-Saddam Iraq and assisting the more than 30,000 political refugees who arrived in the US after 1991 to adjust and find mutual support through the Iraq Foundation’s Iraqi Community Organizing Project.
She has also been tireless in criticizing Washington’s pre- and post-war planning. Before the war, she warned that the administration’s “extraordinary reluctance to endorse a transitional authority for the day Saddam falls or before” threatened to condemn Iraq to a “complete breakdown of law and order.” After the war, shuttling between Iraq and Washington, she accused the US of failing to “squarely and forcefully” address the deteriorating security situation, of appearing to withhold executive or decision-making power, of lacking “transparency and accountability” in awarding reconstruction contracts, and of reneging on its commitment to foster democracy.
“In spite of the stated US policy to promote … democracy in Iraq, only trifling amounts of money have been allocated and spent to foster democratization,” she wrote in September in the first of a series of papers entitled Democracy Watch. “Very little funds have been given to strengthen Iraqi NGOs and civil society institutions, and none to building monitoring and reporting groups that are essential to the promotion of good governance, the protection of rights. No money whatsoever has been allocated to democracy education and civic education, at a time when people are expected to vote for a constitution in a referendum.”
The behavior of representatives of the occupying power, she went on, often demeaned Iraqis. “In Baghdad, members of the dissolved Iraqi army must line up from 7am until 7pm at the abandoned, unsheltered site of the old Muthanna airport (to receive their meager pensions) … Elderly women must line up for hours at defunct ministries. Iraqis find such disregard demeaning.” For those who try to meet the Americans, she continued, “access is difficult, tedious and selective, and in any case requires long waits in the sun and multiple searches. It is not a pleasant experience. Most Iraqis avoid the humiliation.”
But some of Franke’s harshest criticism has been reserved for her partners in what was the Iraqi opposition. So critical has she been of many of the groups now represented in the Governing Council that it is impossible not to observe, as US President Lyndon Johnson famously did of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, that they perhaps appointed her not because she knows the corridors of power in Washington like the back of her hand, but because it might be better to have her in the power structure criticizing others rather than criticizing from outside.
“The major Iraqi political groups today retain the sense of siege that characterized politics in the mid-century,” she said on the eve of war, warning that adoption of the principle of sectarian and ethnic representation “undermines the hope of forging a common Iraqi citizenship” and “puts Iraq well on the road to Lebanonization.” These groups, she said, “maneuver warily and in secrecy. Their leaderships exercise centralized control. Their structures, decision-making processes and objectives are opaque not only to other political groups, but also to their own constituencies.”
What Iraq needed, she insisted, was inclusion and transparency. “After the demise of Saddam Hussein and his regime, Iraqis may tolerate the politics of personality and cliques for a while, but they will not be won over by old political models.”
Julie Flint is a veteran journalist based in Beirut and London. She wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR
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