[Saddam denounces the court as being run by Americans and says he and his seven co-defendants will reject any lawyers appointed by the court.]
Saddam Hussein: "Anyone appointed by you we reject them. This is my right, to give up my right to an attorney. [pointing at the court appointed lawyers] If you stay here you are evil people. This is my right, don't force me."
Judge Rahman: "I am not forcing you."
Saddam Hussein: "I respect you as an Iraqi, unless you have given up your Iraqi nationality."
Saddam Hussein: "I want to leave the court."
Judge Rahman: "You do not leave, I allow you to leave when I want to."
[Judge Rahman orders him to leave]
Saddam Hussein: "You are an Iraqi, you cannot order me like that. I led you for 35 years."
Judge Rahman: "I have practised law for the last 35 years. I am the judge and you are the defendant, you have to obey me."
Saddam Hussein: "I understand my rights and the rights of the others. The defendant is innocent until proven guilty, that's what we learned in the law while we were students."
Saddam Hussein: "Down with traitors! Down with America!"
[Saddam is led from the court]
30 January 2006
Jordan Times
Women bear brunt of poverty in post-invasion Iraq
By Ahmad Fadam and Nafia Abdul Jabbar
Agence France-Presse
BAGHDAD — Umm Ziyad, her husband, two sons and granddaughter were just making ends meet in a one-room hovel in Baghdad when a suicide bomber decided the best way to attack a police station was to drive through the carwash where her husband worked.
“We didn't used to need anyone. He worked and we could make do, but now it's obvious that we are in need,” said the widow, swathed in black and looking much older than her 46 years.
But one year after she applied for government assistance, she has heard nothing and her eldest son, Ziyad, has dropped out of high school to support the family with occasional work.
Poverty has exploded across Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion.
A recent study by the United Nations Development Programme and International Monetary Fund shows that 20 per cent of the population has fallen below the international poverty line $1 per day a person.
The numbers of families registering for assistance with the labour and social affairs ministry has more than tripled since the war to 171,000 and even that, according to Leila Kazem, a director general at the ministry, is a “drop in the ocean.”
“After the war, a new dangerous issue arose in Iraqi society — poverty, which is clear to everyone,” she said, blaming unemployment and violence which has been killing off the main bread-winners, something “which is happening every hour of every day.”
The families, however, do not receive any special treatment at the ministry. “We don't have a separate category for victims of terrorism, we just talk about needy families,” she said.
Violence is hitting families, already weakened by decades of war and international sanctions under the regime of Saddam Hussein, who were just surviving and now have lost their sole means of income.
“We were afraid a war would come and then it happened and our father is gone now,” Umm Ziyad said, referring to her husband.
As she tells her story, the electricity cuts out and her other son Ali, who is still in school, steps out into the twilight to finish his homework.
The family, which lives in the northern Baghdad neighbourhood of Qahira, is being helped by Umm Murad, who works with the social programmes of the Iraqi Turkmen Front.
“I know over 80 families in a perilous economic state and I am helping about 20 of them,” she told AFP.
“You can see them for yourself, any place you go just ask, there are hundreds of them — no one knows the exact number... Most families who have six sons maybe only one or two are working, usually as policeman or soldiers.”
She promised to help Umm Ziyad negotiate the massive lines of applicants at the swamped labour ministry where hundreds try to register for assistance and suggests she feigns an injury to get additional money.
Female heads of household under a certain age receive limited assistance if they are deemed able-bodied enough to work.
For many willing to go out to work, there is simply no job.
“I tried after my husband was gone to be the father and the mother at the same time for my children,” said Atiyaf Mohammed, who lost her husband when he was caught in crossfire between insurgents and US soldiers.
“I graduated from the faculty of chemistry, so I went to the education ministry, knowing there are job opportunities,” said the mother of four, who graduated in 1994.
At 30, there are still hints of the beautiful, young university graduate with flowing brown hair whose picture is pinned in the living room of the crumbling house where she lives with her husband's parents in the Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya.
“They said, `where have you been for the last 10 years' and they didn't give me a job,” she said, her dark eyes flashing with anger. “Now I am on the same level as the ignorant and uneducated.”
“The Iraqi government is taking care neither of the Iraqi people, nor of the orphans, widows or elderly,” she charged.
Mohammed has survived so far by cobbling together donations from various social and religious charitable institutions and scoffs at the low level of government assistance.
“What's the good of 50,000 dinars [$35] every three months from the social affairs ministry, it's not enough,” she said.
The ministry acknowledges that the level of assistance, which it says is more like 50,000 dinars a month, is insufficient and a new law will raise the monthly family assistance to between 70,000 and 120,000 dinars ($50 to $85) depending on family size.
Friday-Saturday, January 27-28, 2006
By Ahmad Fadam and Nafia Abdul Jabbar
Agence France-Presse
BAGHDAD — Umm Ziyad, her husband, two sons and granddaughter were just making ends meet in a one-room hovel in Baghdad when a suicide bomber decided the best way to attack a police station was to drive through the carwash where her husband worked.
“We didn't used to need anyone. He worked and we could make do, but now it's obvious that we are in need,” said the widow, swathed in black and looking much older than her 46 years.
But one year after she applied for government assistance, she has heard nothing and her eldest son, Ziyad, has dropped out of high school to support the family with occasional work.
Poverty has exploded across Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion.
A recent study by the United Nations Development Programme and International Monetary Fund shows that 20 per cent of the population has fallen below the international poverty line $1 per day a person.
The numbers of families registering for assistance with the labour and social affairs ministry has more than tripled since the war to 171,000 and even that, according to Leila Kazem, a director general at the ministry, is a “drop in the ocean.”
“After the war, a new dangerous issue arose in Iraqi society — poverty, which is clear to everyone,” she said, blaming unemployment and violence which has been killing off the main bread-winners, something “which is happening every hour of every day.”
The families, however, do not receive any special treatment at the ministry. “We don't have a separate category for victims of terrorism, we just talk about needy families,” she said.
Violence is hitting families, already weakened by decades of war and international sanctions under the regime of Saddam Hussein, who were just surviving and now have lost their sole means of income.
“We were afraid a war would come and then it happened and our father is gone now,” Umm Ziyad said, referring to her husband.
As she tells her story, the electricity cuts out and her other son Ali, who is still in school, steps out into the twilight to finish his homework.
The family, which lives in the northern Baghdad neighbourhood of Qahira, is being helped by Umm Murad, who works with the social programmes of the Iraqi Turkmen Front.
“I know over 80 families in a perilous economic state and I am helping about 20 of them,” she told AFP.
“You can see them for yourself, any place you go just ask, there are hundreds of them — no one knows the exact number... Most families who have six sons maybe only one or two are working, usually as policeman or soldiers.”
She promised to help Umm Ziyad negotiate the massive lines of applicants at the swamped labour ministry where hundreds try to register for assistance and suggests she feigns an injury to get additional money.
Female heads of household under a certain age receive limited assistance if they are deemed able-bodied enough to work.
For many willing to go out to work, there is simply no job.
“I tried after my husband was gone to be the father and the mother at the same time for my children,” said Atiyaf Mohammed, who lost her husband when he was caught in crossfire between insurgents and US soldiers.
“I graduated from the faculty of chemistry, so I went to the education ministry, knowing there are job opportunities,” said the mother of four, who graduated in 1994.
At 30, there are still hints of the beautiful, young university graduate with flowing brown hair whose picture is pinned in the living room of the crumbling house where she lives with her husband's parents in the Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya.
“They said, `where have you been for the last 10 years' and they didn't give me a job,” she said, her dark eyes flashing with anger. “Now I am on the same level as the ignorant and uneducated.”
“The Iraqi government is taking care neither of the Iraqi people, nor of the orphans, widows or elderly,” she charged.
Mohammed has survived so far by cobbling together donations from various social and religious charitable institutions and scoffs at the low level of government assistance.
“What's the good of 50,000 dinars [$35] every three months from the social affairs ministry, it's not enough,” she said.
The ministry acknowledges that the level of assistance, which it says is more like 50,000 dinars a month, is insufficient and a new law will raise the monthly family assistance to between 70,000 and 120,000 dinars ($50 to $85) depending on family size.
Friday-Saturday, January 27-28, 2006
28 January 2006
I Am Sullied
December 6, 2005
"I Am Sullied"
Suicide Before Dishonor in Occupied Iraq
By GARY LEUPP
I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse, and liars. I am sullied. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more.
Having written a last note, and placed it by his bed in his trailer on a U.S. military base near Baghdad, on the afternoon of June 5, 2005 Colonel Ted S. Westhusing put his 9-mm. service pistol to his head and blew his brains out. He was 44, survived by a wife and three young children.
Â
Quite a number of U.S. troops have committed suicide in Iraq, or upon return home. According to the Washington Times, 24 soldiers' deaths in Iraq were ruled suicides in 2003, nine in 2004. But the Washington Post reports that "Thirty-one Marines committed suicide in 2004, all of them enlisted men, not commissioned officers. The majority were younger than 25 and took their lives with gunshot wounds, according to Marine statistics."
Â
How many committed suicide in Iraq it does not say. But war experience is surely linked to the incidence of suicides by veterans who bring the war back with them. Between March 2004 and August 2005 three Special Forces Iraq veterans took their lives after their homecomings.There were a rash of reports about this issue in late 2003-early 2004, but it tapered off and I find no cumulative 2005 statistics about military suicides on line.
In any case. the level has caused official concern and consternation.
Â
According to the Post (Feb. 25, 2005):
Military psychiatrists are puzzled by the suicide rate in Iraq, saying that it makes little sense in comparison with those in past conflicts. The accepted wisdom in military psychiatry is that the level of suicides--- far from increasing during wars --- drops as the survival instinct kicks in among the personnel in the conflict zone. Just two suicides were recorded among US personnel during the entire Gulf war in the Nineties. What is also unusual about the rate in Iraq, in comparison with Vietnam, Korea and the Second World War, is that everyone serving in the all-volunteer forces has already been screened for their psychological suitability. They have also been briefed on combat stress and trained to counter any suicidal feelings, following a rash of military suicides which embarrassed the Pentagon in the late Nineties.
Puzzling indeed, then, that an officer pretty much removed from the combat zone, an enthusiastic career man and devout Catholic, would off himself as he apparently did last June.
Â
Or maybe not so puzzling. What's special about this case is that Westhusing was a specialist on ethics, a West Point graduate who had taken seriously its code that "a cadet will not lie, cheat or steal - or tolerate those who do," who had received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University for a dissertation on the meaning of honor, and returned to West Point to teach philosophy and English. He didn't kill himself because of battle stress or feelings of guilt following his role in a specific firefight. Looks like he put a bullet through his head because he felt the mission itself-the war---was dishonorable.
I don't mean to idealize him. Anyone receiving special forces training, serving in Honduras in the 1980s, and becoming a division operations officer for the 82nd Airborne, based at Ft. Bragg, N.C., has to have some major ethical baggage as far as I'm concerned. I think he should have realized before volunteering for duty in Iraq in the fall of 2004 that the mission involved corruption, human rights abuses and lying. On the other hand one must admire his capacity for moral indignation once he saw for himself what was going on.
Â
Westhusing's assignment in Iraq was to oversee the Virginia-based USIS, a contracted security company paid $79 million to train Iraqi police in special operations. He became aware of charges that USIS had cheated on its contract, providing fewer trainers than agreed upon to enhance its profit margin. It had, he was informed, covered up the killings of two Iraqi civilians and the illegal involvement of USIS personnel in the assault on Fallujah. He reported these charges, but felt troubled both by his friendly relations with the USIS management (although he wrote to his family that he "disliked" them and felt "they were paid too much money by the government") and the failure of investigators to find fault with them.
Â
T. Christian Miller, who has researched this story for the Los Angeles Times, and has had access to Westhusing's emails to his family, described the officer's mindset at the time of his death to NPR:
What worries him most, clearly, is his feeling that profit has overtaken military values like duty honor and county in Iraq. In the final note he leaves in these emails home and these conversations with his friends, he talks about "I didn't come here to be surrounded by greedy contractors. I didn't come her to be a part of a mission that's being corrupted by concerns of money." Things like that.
Miller adds:
For me in some ways it becomes a metaphor for the way that the Iraq War has been fought, which is to outsource a lot of what's been done to private companies so that rather than having idealistic soldiers or young bureaucrats or whatever doing the work in Iraq, you have people doing them for motives that aren't altruistic and pure but for the bottom line.
That is to say, the colonel was just too pure to deal with this corrupt corporate world.
Â
In his LA Times piece Miller cites a military psychologist, Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach, who avers in Miller's paraphrase that "Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war." He quotes her directly: "Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited. He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."
Â
In other words, in the military shrink's best judgment, the deceased ought to have flexibly accepted the fact that "doing the right thing" should not be the sole motivator for business! He should not have been so bummed about the corporate corruption, abuses and lies that flourish so much in today's Iraq. He shouldn't have taken the academy code so seriously or had such a limited grasp of the importance of profit to the private sector in liberated Iraq. Surely that slipping grasp explains the psychological instability that led him---"despite his intelligence"---to take his life.
Â
Such explanations take the puzzling and pathologize it. But that seems unfair to the deceased. In his dissertation, Westhusing writes he was "born to be a warrior" which makes me think of the Japanese samurai whom I've studied in some detail. In Japanese martial society, up until the nineteenth century anyway, those born to be warriors maintained a long tradition of honorable suicide. A samurai would take his destiny into his hands and slit his belly for various reasons: to avoid capture, to follow his lord in death, to force an erring superior to reflect and change his ways. Samurai who had committed all but the most egregious crimes were allowed to honorably disembowel themselves rather than face the executioner's axe, crucifixion or other vulgar punishments. Or the samurai shuffled off this mortal coil, usually unbidden, to wipe out a defiling stain on his (or her, there being female samurai) honor. There was nothing nuts about it; it was perfectly rational. When one couldn't go on with honor, one honorably dispatched oneself, buoyed into the beyond by the belief that one's progeny would understand and take pride in the purification.
Â
"I am sullied. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more."
Â
Warrior and scholar, tenured professor, loving husband and father, too honorable a man to carry on in his defiling assignment. Maybe not despite his intelligence, as Breitenbach suggests, but because of it.
Â
May I suggest we honor Col. Westhusing by redoubling our efforts to oppose the lying, cheating and stealing which is the Iraq War? And support the honorable troops dishonorably dispatched to Iraq by urging them to refuse to kill on behalf of that private sector whose morality he came to doubt? And hope that they'll live, looking forward to another world which is really possible---in which profit doesn't overtake duty and honor?
Â
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
Â
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
Â
Source: www.counterpunch.org
"I Am Sullied"
Suicide Before Dishonor in Occupied Iraq
By GARY LEUPP
I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse, and liars. I am sullied. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more.
Having written a last note, and placed it by his bed in his trailer on a U.S. military base near Baghdad, on the afternoon of June 5, 2005 Colonel Ted S. Westhusing put his 9-mm. service pistol to his head and blew his brains out. He was 44, survived by a wife and three young children.
Â
Quite a number of U.S. troops have committed suicide in Iraq, or upon return home. According to the Washington Times, 24 soldiers' deaths in Iraq were ruled suicides in 2003, nine in 2004. But the Washington Post reports that "Thirty-one Marines committed suicide in 2004, all of them enlisted men, not commissioned officers. The majority were younger than 25 and took their lives with gunshot wounds, according to Marine statistics."
Â
How many committed suicide in Iraq it does not say. But war experience is surely linked to the incidence of suicides by veterans who bring the war back with them. Between March 2004 and August 2005 three Special Forces Iraq veterans took their lives after their homecomings.There were a rash of reports about this issue in late 2003-early 2004, but it tapered off and I find no cumulative 2005 statistics about military suicides on line.
In any case. the level has caused official concern and consternation.
Â
According to the Post (Feb. 25, 2005):
Military psychiatrists are puzzled by the suicide rate in Iraq, saying that it makes little sense in comparison with those in past conflicts. The accepted wisdom in military psychiatry is that the level of suicides--- far from increasing during wars --- drops as the survival instinct kicks in among the personnel in the conflict zone. Just two suicides were recorded among US personnel during the entire Gulf war in the Nineties. What is also unusual about the rate in Iraq, in comparison with Vietnam, Korea and the Second World War, is that everyone serving in the all-volunteer forces has already been screened for their psychological suitability. They have also been briefed on combat stress and trained to counter any suicidal feelings, following a rash of military suicides which embarrassed the Pentagon in the late Nineties.
Puzzling indeed, then, that an officer pretty much removed from the combat zone, an enthusiastic career man and devout Catholic, would off himself as he apparently did last June.
Â
Or maybe not so puzzling. What's special about this case is that Westhusing was a specialist on ethics, a West Point graduate who had taken seriously its code that "a cadet will not lie, cheat or steal - or tolerate those who do," who had received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University for a dissertation on the meaning of honor, and returned to West Point to teach philosophy and English. He didn't kill himself because of battle stress or feelings of guilt following his role in a specific firefight. Looks like he put a bullet through his head because he felt the mission itself-the war---was dishonorable.
I don't mean to idealize him. Anyone receiving special forces training, serving in Honduras in the 1980s, and becoming a division operations officer for the 82nd Airborne, based at Ft. Bragg, N.C., has to have some major ethical baggage as far as I'm concerned. I think he should have realized before volunteering for duty in Iraq in the fall of 2004 that the mission involved corruption, human rights abuses and lying. On the other hand one must admire his capacity for moral indignation once he saw for himself what was going on.
Â
Westhusing's assignment in Iraq was to oversee the Virginia-based USIS, a contracted security company paid $79 million to train Iraqi police in special operations. He became aware of charges that USIS had cheated on its contract, providing fewer trainers than agreed upon to enhance its profit margin. It had, he was informed, covered up the killings of two Iraqi civilians and the illegal involvement of USIS personnel in the assault on Fallujah. He reported these charges, but felt troubled both by his friendly relations with the USIS management (although he wrote to his family that he "disliked" them and felt "they were paid too much money by the government") and the failure of investigators to find fault with them.
Â
T. Christian Miller, who has researched this story for the Los Angeles Times, and has had access to Westhusing's emails to his family, described the officer's mindset at the time of his death to NPR:
What worries him most, clearly, is his feeling that profit has overtaken military values like duty honor and county in Iraq. In the final note he leaves in these emails home and these conversations with his friends, he talks about "I didn't come here to be surrounded by greedy contractors. I didn't come her to be a part of a mission that's being corrupted by concerns of money." Things like that.
Miller adds:
For me in some ways it becomes a metaphor for the way that the Iraq War has been fought, which is to outsource a lot of what's been done to private companies so that rather than having idealistic soldiers or young bureaucrats or whatever doing the work in Iraq, you have people doing them for motives that aren't altruistic and pure but for the bottom line.
That is to say, the colonel was just too pure to deal with this corrupt corporate world.
Â
In his LA Times piece Miller cites a military psychologist, Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach, who avers in Miller's paraphrase that "Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war." He quotes her directly: "Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited. He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."
Â
In other words, in the military shrink's best judgment, the deceased ought to have flexibly accepted the fact that "doing the right thing" should not be the sole motivator for business! He should not have been so bummed about the corporate corruption, abuses and lies that flourish so much in today's Iraq. He shouldn't have taken the academy code so seriously or had such a limited grasp of the importance of profit to the private sector in liberated Iraq. Surely that slipping grasp explains the psychological instability that led him---"despite his intelligence"---to take his life.
Â
Such explanations take the puzzling and pathologize it. But that seems unfair to the deceased. In his dissertation, Westhusing writes he was "born to be a warrior" which makes me think of the Japanese samurai whom I've studied in some detail. In Japanese martial society, up until the nineteenth century anyway, those born to be warriors maintained a long tradition of honorable suicide. A samurai would take his destiny into his hands and slit his belly for various reasons: to avoid capture, to follow his lord in death, to force an erring superior to reflect and change his ways. Samurai who had committed all but the most egregious crimes were allowed to honorably disembowel themselves rather than face the executioner's axe, crucifixion or other vulgar punishments. Or the samurai shuffled off this mortal coil, usually unbidden, to wipe out a defiling stain on his (or her, there being female samurai) honor. There was nothing nuts about it; it was perfectly rational. When one couldn't go on with honor, one honorably dispatched oneself, buoyed into the beyond by the belief that one's progeny would understand and take pride in the purification.
Â
"I am sullied. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more."
Â
Warrior and scholar, tenured professor, loving husband and father, too honorable a man to carry on in his defiling assignment. Maybe not despite his intelligence, as Breitenbach suggests, but because of it.
Â
May I suggest we honor Col. Westhusing by redoubling our efforts to oppose the lying, cheating and stealing which is the Iraq War? And support the honorable troops dishonorably dispatched to Iraq by urging them to refuse to kill on behalf of that private sector whose morality he came to doubt? And hope that they'll live, looking forward to another world which is really possible---in which profit doesn't overtake duty and honor?
Â
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
Â
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
Â
Source: www.counterpunch.org
24 January 2006
Free By Sami Yusuf
What goes thru your mind as you sit there looking at me
Well, I can tell from your looks that you think that Im so oppressed
But I don't need, oh no, for you to liberate me
My head is nothing and you can't see my covered hair
So you sit there and you stare and you judge me with your glare
You are sure that I'm in despair
But are you not aware under the scarf that I wear I have feelings
And I don't care
So don't you see that I'm truly free
This piece of scarf on me I wear so proudly
To preserve my dignity,
My modesty,
My integrity
So don't judge me
Open your eyes and see
Why can't you just accept me she says
Why can't I just be me she says
Time and time again
You speak of democracy, yet you wrote me off my liberty
And all I wanted was equality
Why can't you just let me be free
For you I sing this song
My sister may you always be strong
From you I've learned so much
While you've suffered so much
May you forgive those who laugh at you
You walk with no fear
Through the insults you hear
You wish so sincere that they'd understand you
But before you walk away its time you turn and say
But don't you see that I'm truly free
This piece of scarf on me I wear so proudly
To preserve my dignity,
My modesty,
My integrity,
So let me be
She says with a smile
I'm the one who's free
Well, I can tell from your looks that you think that Im so oppressed
But I don't need, oh no, for you to liberate me
My head is nothing and you can't see my covered hair
So you sit there and you stare and you judge me with your glare
You are sure that I'm in despair
But are you not aware under the scarf that I wear I have feelings
And I don't care
So don't you see that I'm truly free
This piece of scarf on me I wear so proudly
To preserve my dignity,
My modesty,
My integrity
So don't judge me
Open your eyes and see
Why can't you just accept me she says
Why can't I just be me she says
Time and time again
You speak of democracy, yet you wrote me off my liberty
And all I wanted was equality
Why can't you just let me be free
For you I sing this song
My sister may you always be strong
From you I've learned so much
While you've suffered so much
May you forgive those who laugh at you
You walk with no fear
Through the insults you hear
You wish so sincere that they'd understand you
But before you walk away its time you turn and say
But don't you see that I'm truly free
This piece of scarf on me I wear so proudly
To preserve my dignity,
My modesty,
My integrity,
So let me be
She says with a smile
I'm the one who's free
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