By Lisa Burgess, Stars and Stripes European edition, Friday, December 13, 2002

ARLINGTON, Va. — American military commanders are now forbidden by law from requiring female military personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia to wear the head-to-toe black garment known as an abaya.

The abaya provision, an amendment to the fiscal 2003 defense budget authorization signed into law by President Bush on Dec. 2, says that commanders or others in positions of authority may not “require or encourage” any U.S. servicemember to “to wear the abaya garment or any part of the abaya garment while the member is in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

The law also says that commanders must give all servicemembers both oral and written instruction on the abaya rule within 48 hours of their arrival in Saudi Arabia, including a full reading of the defense act’s text on the subject.

Finally, the legislation prohibits the use of federal funds for the procurement of abayas.

The amendment addresses an issue that has distressed U.S. servicewomen who have served tours in Saudi Arabia since the 1990-91 Gulf War, when military commanders first began requiring female servicewomen to don the shroudlike garment while off military installations.

The Defense Department was the only U.S. agency to post such a requirement for its personnel. The State Department, which has many employees in Saudi Arabia, has never asked its female employees to wear abayas.

Nor does the government of Saudi Arabia require that foreign females wear the abaya.

Last December, the Air Force’s highest-ranking female fighter pilot, Lt. Col. Martha McSally, filed suit against Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in federal court in Washington after her complaints to superiors failed to change the policy.

On Jan. 23, the U.S. Central Command — which oversees the U.S. military in the region — announced a new policy that said the abaya “is not mandatory but is strongly encouraged.”

But McNally pressed ahead with her lawsuit, and this spring both the House and Senate unanimously passed the no-abayas amendment that is now law.

On Thursday, Pentagon spokeswoman Air Force Maj. Sandy Trouber told Stripes, “We’ll do whatever it says in the National Defense Authorization Act.”

Trouber said that Rumsfeld would implement the abaya law “by sending a memorandum to the commander of U.S. Central Command and other affected commanders, instructing them to comply.” Trouber said she did not know whether Rumsfeld has sent such a memo.

But Rutherford Institute President John Whitehead, one of McSally’s attorneys, said, “We have heard service people are getting read the law when they get to Saudi, so they [CENTCOM] appear to be in compliance, and that’s good.”

The Rutherford Institute is a Charlottesville, Va., nonprofit civil-liberties organization that is representing McSally in her lawsuit, which is now on hold both because of the new law and because McSally has been deployed to Saudi Arabia again as of November, Whitehead said Thursday.

“She wanted to go back,” Whitehead said. “She’s a real patriot.”

-- Anonymous, December 13, 2002