One woman's brave sacrifice for democracy in Iraq
Fern Holland was killed in Iraq while trying to promote human rights
By Joseph P. Duggan
Greensboro News & Record
Greensboro, North Carolina
Sunday, March 21, 2004
Fern Holland is the latest of hundreds of Americans - most of them military servicemen - who have paid with their lives to establish freedom and justice in Iraq. Holland will be remembered as the first civilian woman in the American provisional administration in Iraq to be killed under fire. She deserves to be remembered as a woman of incomparable spirit and courage, as a splendid example of the best that America represents in the world.
Only 33, Holland was brutally gunned down with another courageous American aid worker, Robert Zangas, and Selwa Ourmashe, their Iraqi interpreter, on March 9 in the vicinity of Hilla, a town about 60 miles south of Baghdad.
Last November, at a Ramadan dinner in Washington organized by the pro-democracy Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, I had the privilege of meeting Holland. She was just about to return for her second tour of duty as a human rights and democracy worker in Iraq.
In a long career in international humanitarian and human rights policy, I have met many generous and heroic people. But in just one encounter, Holland made a deep impression on me. She exuded an energy for doing good that was nothing less than angelic.
Others who knew Holland better have similar recollections. Radwan Masmoudi, the president of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, said his devastation at Holland's death is as great as if he had lost a sister. "She was powerfully motivated by the love of others," he recalled.
Without weapons, Holland was a warrior in what President Bush calls America's "armies of compassion" - women and men who give of their time and talent in voluntary service for needy people who hunger for food or for freedom. Helping the poor and the oppressed was an irresistible passion for her.
In 1999, she left a successful and secure position in a law firm in her native Oklahoma to answer the call to service in the Peace Corps. For the next two years, she worked as an American volunteer building schools in Namibia.
After practicing law again in the United States, this time with a labor law firm in Washington, she soon returned to Africa, operating a legal clinic for victims of sexual violence in Guinea. After coalition forces drove Saddam Hussein and his barbaric regime from power, Holland brought her passion for justice to Iraq, working as a paid member of the U.S. Agency for International Development's team promoting democracy and human rights.
Her contributions to the well-being of the Iraqi people were extraordinary. In town after town, she moved about fearlessly, establishing centers for women's rights in environments where women's rights had been an alien concept.
Her brother, James Holland, said his sister told him the conditions of women under Saddam were deplorable. "Her comment was that even if they never find any weapons of mass destruction, there was enough there to justify the United States coming in."
Women had very limited participation in government and civil society under Saddam. Worse, they were targeted for sexual abuse by a regime that enforced its power through internal terror. "Saddam's henchmen, "according to Amnesty International, "would gang-rape women as punishment or to enforce the dictator's authority."
Under Saddam's regime, women were afraid to speak out, according to Maha Al-Sagban, a board member of the Diwaniyah Women's Rights Center that Holland helped establish. "But that is changing, she said. "First we have to rebuild women's self-confidence and return their lost pride."
Hilla, the town near which Holland was killed, is the site of Iraq's largest mass graves, where an estimated 15,000 Iraqis, including thousands of women, were killed by Saddam's regime. Today Hilla is home to one of the women's rights centers organized by Holland. Muna Khder, who works at the center, said: "During the last regime, our only priority was how to survive. Now we are talking. I hope to get the Iraqi woman's voice to the world."
During what were to be the last few weeks of her life, Holland performed a vital role in drafting language protecting women's rights, adopted by Iraqi leaders for their country's new constitution. These women's rights provisions are by far the most enlightened in the Arab world.
Radwan Masmoudi said that Holland wrote to him every week from Iraq, always projecting determination and optimism for the cause of freedom and human rights. "She was ambitious for democracy, urging us to open an office in Baghdad as soon as possible," he said.
Fern Holland was young, feminine, pretty, petite - almost a pixie. Her appearance certainly did not evoke images of Winston Churchill. Still, as America learns about and mourns this courageous woman, Churchill's defiance against evil seems apposite.
In 1941, Churchill expressed his resolve against Hitler: "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
The fight to consolidate freedom and democracy in Iraq is a struggle for universal civilization. The lesson of Holland's generous life, and her sacrifice of that life, is that Americans must persevere in the long battle to bring peace, development and human rights to Iraq and the entire Middle East. She never gave in. Neither must we.
Joseph P. Duggan works with Volunteers for Prosperity, a new international program of President Bush's USA Freedom Corps (