A human rights activist and development professional, Khanim Latif was born in Halabja in northeastern Iraq, an area that only two decades later would be devastated by chemical attacks as part of Saddam Hussein’s campaign against Iraqi Kurds. Looking back, Khanim recalls the injustice that she and her female peers suffered despairingly as girls - subject to abuse and denied many of the freedoms granted to their male counterparts.
In 1980, Khanim and her family left their home for the city of Sulaimaniyeh, and it was there that she was awakened to the emerging Iraqi women’s rights movement that had begun to gain momentum under Hussein’s earlier policies towards modernization. That same year, Iraqi women were granted suffrage, and works by Arab women’s rights activists were circulating through the hands of Iraqi women and girls. Although there were no formal women’s rights organizations in Sulaimaniyeh at the time, women had begun gathering in loose networks and associations, primarily affiliated with political parties. In this context, Khanim first became captivated by the writings of Nawal el-Saadawi, an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician, and psychiatrist, inspiring her interest in women’s and human rights.
In 1995, the Kurdish region was shook by the widely publicized case of Kajal Khidir, a Kurdish woman whose nose was cut off or violating her family’s honor, and Khanim was compelled to action. Beginning as a participant in activities and campaigns organized by local human rights activists, she went on to work with Kurdish branches of Amnesty International and Human Rights defenders, working on a variety of human rights issues. She continued this work with a number of other NGOs and international organizations, most notably the UNDP and the Swedish NGO Qandil.
In 2001, Khanim was offered a position at ASUDA, and the following year she helped to establish the ASUDA women’s shelter – the first of its kind in the Kurdish region. The ASUDA shelter is one of the only shelters in Iraq that will accept “untouchable” cases, those dealing with women who have been accused of violating “family honor.” ASUDA openly helps young teenage girls caught having premarital sex, rape victims, and women accused of adultery, and moreover, is the only shelter in the Kurdish region open to all women regardless of ethnicity or religion. Despite isolated incidents of opposition to the shelter - most notably through a gun-fire attack in 2008 – the shelter continues to provide a safe haven to women across the country, and under Khanim’s leadership, ASUDA remains one of the leading women’s organizations in Iraq today.
ASUDA’s success is grounded on the organization’s commitment to achieving reconciliation between women and their families whenever possible. In Khanim’s words, as published in Barefoot in Baghdad, a 2010 memoir by Manal Omar, “Honor killings happen, and they happen more than we would like to admit. However, they often happen because our communities have not learned to mediate around such a sensitive topic. No father wants to kill his daughter. Give him an excuse to maintain his honor in front of his tribe, and he will grab on to it.” Khanim and her team work extensively with religious and tribal leaders to encourage families to find alternative solutions other than killings and that, in best cases, will allow women to retain ties with relatives and prospects for the future.
In addition to providing legal, counseling, and refugee services, ASUDA also has a department dedicated to research and documentation of abuse against women, which provides an integral resource for confronting the public on issues of women’s rights. Khanim has developed strategic alliances with the Kurdish regional government, the peshmarga (the Kurdish police), and hospitals that not only help to solve individual cases, but also to obtain these records. The ASUDA office holds stacks of albums of photos of battered women – beaten, burned, shot – which Khanim uses boldly to silence any high-level official who might deny the occurrence of honor killings.
Independently and as a representative of ASUDA, Khanim has made has made numerous important contributions to the rights of women in Iraqi Kurdistan and across the country. She frequently speaks out against honor killings and female genital mutilation, and was involved in a campaign to create a 25% quote for women in the Iraqi National Assembly. She has participated in a number of international conferences on women's rights, and has authored a number of publications on women’s issues and translations of international conventions into the Kurdish language, including the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). In 2005, she was selected as a candidate for Iraqi national assembly elections as an independent candidate. Khanim is frequently consulted by policy makers, media, and citizen groups in the US and worldwide for her expertise in Iraqi women’s issues. She most recently traveled to the US in December 2010, where she held a series of talks with State Department officials, the United States Institute for Peace, women’s rights organizations, university students and faculty, and radio journalists in Vermont and Washington DC.
