The party spirit fades because of a misused democracy

Iraq Letter: A year ago I attended the inaugural meeting of a women's movement launched by Iraq's Independent Democrats, a secular middle-class party led by former foreign minister Adnan Pachachi.

At the gathering there were few headscarves and no chadors, the all-enveloping black cloak worn by conservative Shia women.

The educationalists, professionals, diplomats, writers and businesswomen who participated complained that since the fall of the Baathist regime their freedoms had been curtailed.

Few drove their cars for fear of kidnap, some had quit their jobs because of pressure from clerics, many feared being attacked if they did not don the chador when they left their homes.

The person who headed the movement was Maysoon Damlouji, then and now deputy minister of culture. Today Mysoon, who had invited me, is leading the almost certainly futile female charge against Islamic Sharia as the main source of law in Iraq's new constitution. Its adoption would legitimise what the clerics are already doing to the women of Iraq: depriving them of the equal rights with men enshrined in the 1959 constitution.

Under Sharia women can be married off and divorced without their agreement, are entitled to half the share of men in inheritance and are counted as half-men when appearing in court cases.

Raised and educated in Britain, Maysoon is defending rights she enjoyed there. But women who remained in Iraq are determined to maintain the lifestyle they enjoyed after Britain occupied the country in the 1920s.

My Iraqi women friends and their mothers were the freest in the Arab world. They dressed in short-sleeved frocks, never wore the headscarf, enjoyed healthy, uncomplicated relations with men, received good educations and pursued careers.

As youngsters they used to swim in a fashionable hotel pool, go to mixed picnics and dance and dine with male friends - although they generally went round in groups because sexual relations were not as free as they were in the west during the swinging Sixties and Seventies.

In the bar of the Orient Palace hotel where I used to stay in Baghdad's upmarket Karrada district, one wall is covered with a display of photos of Iraq from the past 75 years.

The earliest images are of boatmen ferrying people across the Tigris before the bridges were built, tribal chiefs receiving guests in tents in the desert, women weaving baskets and bakers arranging rounds of raw dough on wooden paddles before thrusting them into hot ovens.

But the photos I liked best were from the 1940s and 1950s. They were of popular Iraqi singers, women as well as men, and of well-dressed couples dining at fish restaurants on the bank of the Tigris, waiters in black tie hovering in the background.

Hotel guests and Iraqis from the neighbourhood would gather there every evening to drink beer, scotch or wine and listen to a pianist playing a medley of songs from the 1950s and 1960s. One table of Iraqi regulars would in one session sink a bottle of Black Label, the favourite Iraqi tipple, drinking Iraqi pegs measured by two fingers standing vertically rather than lying horizontal.

Today alcohol and music are banned in Basra, Iraq's second city, by Shia clerics whose thugs enforce the prohibition. Insecurity and kill-joy clerics have closed the little bar in the Orient Palace, most of the restaurants on the riverside and the exclusive Alwiya Club, founded by the British in 1927, where I had lunch with Iraqi male friends last summer.

On my last night in Baghdad, Karin, the German journalist who shared her flat with me, and I invited friends to a party. We bought a case of beer and two bottles of Lebanese wine from a furtive vendor in a hole-in-the-wall shop and ordered food from a caterer. One guest contributed a bottle of arak; another brought a bouquet from her garden.

The party began early because it was unsafe to drive round the city late at night. Nevertheless we broke up at 11pm. How long will it be before mixed gatherings are raided by morals police or militiamen attached to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq?

Only last week the minister of interior - who belongs to this party - closed down the duty-free shop at Baghdad's international airport, which had a rather good selection of whiskys and wines from France, and banned the sale of alcohol. It's a pity that booze should be a test of tolerance and modernity.

Iraq is regressing rapidly. Since the parliamentary election in January, its new rulers have been misusing democracy to impose conservative social and cultural prohibitions on the society in violation of the Koranic verse which states: "There is no compulsion in religion." (Surah II, verse 256).