Authors: Sally Armstrong
Tostan’s lessons about rights and responsibilities are far-reaching. In Senegal, more than 40 percent of the children don’t have birth certificates and are therefore not registered as citizens. Birth registration is part of the Tostan program, as is vaccination. Lessons about the right to a clean environment have resulted in
garbage cleanup, tree planting and villagers adopting a more efficient stove that uses two-thirds less wood for cooking.
The cost of the Tostan program is about $100 per woman, or $5000 per village. Melching figures she needs $5 million to finish the job she started in 1992. The program has spread beyond the borders of Senegal into 23 villages in Burkina Faso, 5 in Mali, 5 in Sudan and 120 in Guinea, so she believes that if Tostan finds the funds, FGM and early marriage will soon be history everywhere.
I watched her for a morning sending fax messages and calling donors. I’m stunned that the woman who has found the formula for success in stopping cultural traditions that are damaging to women and girls can’t get the budget to finish the job. When I talked to UNICEF in New York, I discovered that the power players hadn’t held the meeting to establish costs and timelines; they simply hadn’t made it a priority. Maria Gabriella De Vita, director of Child Protection at UNICEF, says the Tostan program works. “We know what to do, the strategy is there, but the international community has not created an agenda or set dates to reach the objectives.” The bureaucracy was winning as the girls were waiting.
That’s what was on Melching’s mind when we turned off the single highway that forms a ribbon around the Fouta and negotiated the muddy flats on the way into Polel Diawbe, where I hoped to meet Khadia. Across the riverbed, the villagers gathered to greet their hero, Molly, with enormous applause. They wanted to show her the drama they had prepared for the upcoming ceremony to formally end FGM and early marriage. Before the play, we sat on the sandy ground, ten of us sharing a bowl of food, eating the spiced rice, glazed onions and chicken portions with our hands. There was a delicious taste of victory in Polel Diawbe.
Khadia, the child I’d travelled such a long way to see, wasn’t there. Her friends told me she was visiting relatives in Dakar and wouldn’t be back until school began again. Dando Gise, a classmate who had marched that fateful day in the village, said with all the solemnity a little girl can muster, “A tradition that harms is not one we should keep.” Then she dashed off to join the other girls from Khadia’s class, who were laughing, teasing, playing—acting their age.
The introductory speeches were loud, full of weighty proclamations about the future. The pageantry of the evening performance began in the fiery red glow of sunset and concluded in the soft mauve of dusk. The dancing, singing, drama and storytelling spoke of a deep-rooted culture in Senegal that is still thriving despite the eradication of harmful customs once seen as crucial.
When I checked in with Molly again in the spring of 2012, she had a message for me from Maimuna Traore, one of the leaders in Malicounda Bambara. Traore wanted me to know this: “In the beginning, I was often called a traitor to my culture. However, I now consider myself more Bambara than ever before. Our deepest values are those of well-being, peace and good health. That is why we abandoned this social practice that brought only pain and suffering into our community. We are proud to change those practices, which we learned are a violation of our deepest values.”
Melching added, “When the history of the abandonment of FGM in Senegal is written, it will highlight the villagers themselves who travelled from community to community to promote human rights and better health for the girls and women of their family.”
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The change is not complete, but it is still an immense turning point for women and girls. In other countries where women suffer from so-called cultural practices, systemic change is well under way. “It’s time for people, especially women, but men as well in Muslim society, to break the taboos about discussing the issue of sexuality,” says Farida Shaheed. “In many ways sexuality is at the root of women’s oppression. There have been huge attempts by men to control women’s sexuality both in terms of how they dress and how they behave and in terms of their reproductive power. In our parts of the world, there’s been a silence about that—it needs to be broken.”
That silence is being broken. In Iran, for example, by women like the human rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, who says, “Men who come from a patriarchal cultural background do not agree with full and complete equality for women and men, and the reason for it is that equality weakens their power. Those men exist in the government of Iran.” And in Afghanistan, where Sima Samar, chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, is also breaking the taboo against speaking up: “If a woman wears a short skirt, the men cannot control themselves. And that’s not our mistake. If they don’t have enough confidence to not be disturbed by the tap-tap of a woman’s footstep [the Taliban forbade high-heeled shoes, as they didn’t want to hear the sound of a woman approaching] or her hair showing or short clothes, it’s their problem, not ours. They are the ones who are always shouting and using culture and religion to oppress us. The men who have confidence don’t have problems with women’s equality rights.”
I can’t resist adding a story about the temerity of some men who simply don’t get the issue of human rights. In Newfoundland,
in 2007, an Iranian student doing a PhD in engineering at Memorial University in St. John’s was arrested for kissing a woman on her breast while the two—strangers to each other—were sharing an elevator in a building on the campus. The student, twenty-five-year-old Farhood Azarsina, told the court that he didn’t realize the seriousness of the offence in Canada. “You can’t expect all males to control themselves when the breasts are out,” he said in his defence. The young man, obviously intelligent enough to be doing a PhD in engineering, felt that blaming the victim was appropriate and accepted, and he expressed no remorse. The judge sentenced him to two months in jail.
Figuring out how people arrive at such bizarre notions is one aspect of the story of change. But another aspect is exploring why men are so afraid of women. Many have speculated about the answer, including Louise Arbour, the former high commissioner of Human Rights at the United Nations and now the president and CEO of the International Crisis Group. Arbour once said, “The natural response is that women give birth. They can control the future.” Farida Shaheed touches on a similar theme: “In 1939, when Mulana Muduicky, a conservative scholar, was addressing men as to why women should not be educated, should not be allowed to do X, Y and Z, he said, ‘If women really try and strive against their nature, they can do anything. Men can never reproduce, cannot have a child, cannot do what women do.’ ” Shaheed says it’s all about controlling women.
In 2000, a thirteen-year-old Nigerian girl named Bariya who was raped and became pregnant was sentenced in a Zina trial first to a hundred lashes with a cane on her bare back for fornication and then to eighty more lashes for slander: she was unable to prove which of the three men who raped her had fathered her
child. The story quickly spread around the world, and the reaction of women was swift and direct. For all the so-called cultural respect that has in the recent past muted criticism of such barbarism, the outcry over Bariya’s sentence quashed the presumption that the world would remain silent. Women lawyers gathered to prepare a defence. The child’s future was debated far and wide. Zina laws were exposed as duplicitous, deceitful and probably illegal. The world was talking. The fundamentalists were furious.
The reaction didn’t prevent her punishment—Bariya was indeed whipped a hundred times with a cane—but her case received so much publicity that the government was shamed into saying that a trial like hers would not happen again in Nigeria. So far it hasn’t.
FOUR
Herstory
It enriches a whole country to have the shackles of inequality removed from half its people.
— M
ARY
E
BERTS
,
human rights lawyer
T
here’s no shortage of stories about women with the moral courage and intellectual heft to alter previously unjust, unfair and often life-threatening customs. I have been lucky enough to meet them in villages and cities all over the world. Some of them, like Sima Samar from Afghanistan and Shirin Ibadi from Iran, are already international icons of change. Others, like Naomi Chazan from Israel and Mama Darlena from South Africa, are heroes in their own countries. But most women game-changers are best known in their own villages or to the women and girls they serve. They’re valiant and determined; they bide their time, watching for opportunities that will improve the status of women. They’re protective and brave, tenacious and daring. They’re also argumentative and occasionally vengeful. They aren’t beyond gossip, dishing about local big shots—sometimes deliciously. They have been known to overreact. In other words, they are not saints but warriors, and, like women we all know, they are people we can emulate. Their collective effort is what has brought women to the tipping point that we’re heading toward today.
In this chapter, I want to tell three stories: of the Israeli and Palestinian women who are trying to untangle the fractious file that is the Middle East; of Siphiwe Hlophe of Swaziland and her allies, who insisted that if the women in Africa didn’t speak up they’d all be dead from HIV/AIDS; and the story of Hangama Anwari, a human rights commissioner in Afghanistan, and her supporters who started the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation so that Afghan women will know what the laws actually say and which ones are the bogus imaginings of fundamentalists.
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The Middle East
When peace negotiations stall and, worse, collapse, when delaying tactics are employed as a means of staying in power, new actions are required, and it’s women who claim to have them: fresh ideas and the temerity to speak up and demand a seat at the decision-making table. The women I’ve met on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and in Israel, have been struggling with a plan to end the conflict in the Middle East for decades.
Their story begins with two organizations: the Women in Black, a worldwide anti-war movement led by women in Israel who want an end to the occupation of the Palestinian Territories, and the Jerusalem Centre for Women, which is the Palestinian counterpart. These women don’t have blood on their own hands, yet they pay a very high price for war. They are fed up with waiting for the men on both sides to do something about the conflict.
It was in 1988, during the First Intifada, that Women in Black decided to stand weekly vigil in public places, such as busy
intersections, to demonstrate their abhorrence of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Inspired by women who demonstrated in the streets of South Africa to end apartheid and in Argentina in search of the disappeared, the vigils became a constant in the lives of Israelis: every Friday, women dressed in black held up placards—a black hand with white lettering that read “End the Occupation”—and banners that said the same in Arabic and Hebrew. Some passersby heckled and abused them, yelling “whore” and “traitor,” but many others honked their car horns to show support.
While the Women in Black never shouted back since it was their policy to maintain silence and dignity, people who opposed them at regular Friday rallies that soon sprang up were not so restrained. On one trip I talked to Lizaz, sixteen, who belonged to the Kahane Party, which wanted to transfer all Arabs out of Israel to create a pure Jewish state. “Israel belongs to the Jews,” she told me. “We can’t live with the Arabs. This is our land. The Bible says that.” To underline her point she added, “Most people in Israel agree with me, but they can’t admit it because they think it’s too violent.” The man standing beside her, who refused to give me his name, said, “Destroy these Arabs. They’re human garbage.”
The Women in Black weren’t the first to speak on behalf of women for peace—the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, formed in 1915, holds that distinction. Women in Black became part of an extraordinary international call for action when they held a vigil attended by three thousand women at the United Nations World Conference in Beijing in 1995 and called for “a world safer for women.” In November 2000, the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace brought the Women in Black, the Jerusalem Center for Women and nine other Israeli and Palestinian women’s
peace organizations together to push ahead with the only peace agenda they thought would work: two states, an end to the occupation, a shared city of Jerusalem and a cessation of violence.
The idea of “fighting for peace” is contradictory to these women, who approach peace negotiations from a different angle. They use compromise and embrace persuasion. And over the years they’ve made some progress. In 1997, only 20 percent of Israelis felt that a Palestinian state was viable, and only 3 percent believed that Jerusalem must be shared. In 2002, partly due to the work the women had done, 80 percent of Israelis said that a Palestinian state was inevitable, and almost 30 percent agreed that Jerusalem had to be shared.
The women’s groups on both sides of the conflict soon attracted more than a hundred peace and anti-occupation initiatives from around the world that had mobilized in response to the insufferable situation in the region. One was Machsom Watch, a women’s human rights organization that monitored checkpoints to try to prevent Israeli soldiers from abusing Palestinians who needed or wanted to cross into Israel. I travelled with Ronnee Jaeger, one of the founders of Machsom Watch, to see conditions for myself. She said that when she was on duty she had witnessed more than twenty women who’d had to give birth while stopped at the checkpoints. At least four of the babies and two of the women had died because they were not permitted to get to a hospital. “Just by acting as observers we stop a lot of harassment,” she said. “But still we see people being lined up face to the wall and waiting as long as three hours for no apparent reason before going through the checkpoint.”